AlienCon is not hilarious
By Elisabeth Eaves | July 23, 2018
The New York Times Sunday Styles section is usually an escape from hard news, the place we go to read stinging etiquette advice or learn about celebrities-turned-lifestyle-entrepreneurs.
The section’s Sunday cover story, though, was disturbing enough to qualify as hard news. As in hard-to-take. The story “E.T., We’re Here,” is about the television show “Ancient Aliens,” its fans, and a giant convention they attended in Pasadena, which may all sound harmless enough. It’s a nice piece of reporting, written in that breezy, sardonic tone that goes well with eggs and coffee. Look at this subculture! It has wacky stars! And grown-ups in costume!
But here’s the thing: It’s not entertaining when a celebrity or a hit show discredits science and pushes lies and speculation as fact. A public lack of trust in science leads directly to disease outbreaks, misplaced fear of life-saving technology, and humans’ inability (thus far) to stop man-made global warming. Gwyneth Paltrow peddling pseudo-science may seem hilarious. But it is very unfunny every time she convinces someone that “they”—doctors, scientists, rational people—are withholding the true secrets of healing out of stupidity or malevolence. AlienCon may look like a lark, but it is unfunny testimony to the disintegration of public trust in science.
I was alarmed to learn that:
-Ten thousand people paid to attend AlienCon, the Pasadena convention for people who “believe that aliens visited Earth before recorded history.”
-“Ancient Aliens” airs on the “History” Channel, where it is billed as a “documentary series.”
-This “documentary series” on the “History” Channel devoted a whole episode to how alien technology may have helped Hitler.
-The show, which is about to enter its 13thseason, was originally conceived of as a marketing tool for the entirely fictional 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Yet no one interviewed in the story seems to think “AlienCon” is short for “we made up some aliens to con you out of your money.”
Publication Name: The New York Times
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Keywords: AlienCon, extraterrestrials, science denial
Topics: Science Denial, What We’re Reading
Elisabeth Eaves
Eaves is a contributing editor for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Before joining the Bulletin as columns editor in 2013,... Read More
Dear Elizabeth, not everything is as it seems or as we have been told it is. In the coming months and years there will be many many more hard pills to swallow. Red pills. The most basic red pill I will leave you with is this: NASA is currently a PR firm, not a space program. This is why they cut the feeds (their live space cameras) almost every time something interesting and unexplained shows up. Most of the actual space programs are either privately owned, or owned by the military. I probably won’t be able to open your eyes,… Read more »
Believing that we may have been visited by advanced civilizations before recorded history isn’t really that far fetched. You do know how vast our universe is, right? Do you really believe that we’re the only “special” planet in the entire universe? You are aware that enough time has elapsed for our species to be thousands, if not millions of years behind another potential intelligent species in terms of technological advancements?
I just got my ticket for Aliencon 2023 and I’m super excited. This will be my first time attending.
for the sake of argument, I’m gonna “Isaac Asimov “there are two possibilities in the universe either we are alone or we are not, and both possibilities are equally terrifying”