When I was a kid, I loved science fiction and this included alien abduction and UFO stories. I don’t think I really believed, even then. For a while, I even claimed to have seen one, though this was a lie. In this way, perhaps I better embodied the X-Files slogan “I want to believe” than the characters — I wanted to believe, but I simply didn’t.
Read MoreThe past thirty years has been quite a ride: in the 1990s, one of the biggest phenomena on television was the X-Files, which wrestled with the hidden weirdness of the 20th century (mostly in the form of aliens.) At the core of the UFO mythos was a nominally apolitical distrust of authority – the government was hiding something from us. They were hiding the truth. Of course, much of this distrust was coupled with (the publicly disavowed) white supremacist ideology. This gave us what could be called the Interbellum Consensus, sitting as it does between the Cold War and the War on Terror: the UFOlogical Weird and the Militiaman Hauntological.
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