CARL SAGAN'S ALIEN NIGHTMARE

PBS — DECEMBER 1980 — Carl Sagan is walking down a road, talking about alien life  — again.  How many billions and billions of stars are out there.  How many probably have their own planets.  How intelligent life must exist beyond earth.  Sagan wraps up another episode of “Cosmos.”  The letters begin pouring in.

Letters from across America tell Sagan to wise up.  Doesn’t he know?  Aliens are already among us.  They have kidnapped hundreds — no thousands!  The government knows all about this, of course, but they’re hiding the truth.  Afraid we’ll panic.  The Deep State is real!  No, it’s true.  A friend of a friend told me.

Sagan does not write back but when confronted with this nonsense face-to-face, he has a few questions.  First, where is the proof — not blurry photos and “artists’ renderings” but solid evidence?  Next, he says, when you establish “contact” again, ask the aliens this:   “Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.”  But more letters come.  And more.  Sagan sighs.

Next Friday, Stephen Spielberg’s latest summer blockbuster hits theaters around the universe.  “Disclosure Day” panders to the growing movement of UFO buffs now convinced that A) aliens are among us; B) the federal government is hiding tons of evidence; and C) there will come a “Disclosure Day” when the feds reveal Top Secret files proving frequent contact with aliens over the last eight decades.

President after president, the movement predicted, would be “the disclosure president.”  We’re still waiting.  Even the new pope was predicted to be “the disclosure pope.”  I am not making this up.

Carl Sagan, somehow finding time from his astronomy professorship at Cornell, spent the last three decades of his life battling bullshit.  A founding member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), Sagan became a champion of science as a way of thinking.  And in a dumbing down America, he saw thinking as endangered.

“The tools of skepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society,” Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World:  Science as a Candle in the Dark.  “Our politics, economics, advertising, and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity.”

Sagan died in 1996.  CSI and other debunkers have soldiered on, but the BS just keeps flowing.  Fake moon landings.  Chem trails.  The Myth of Voter Fraud.  Anti-vaxx drivel.  And especially. . .  Aliens.

In “Disclosure Day,” no doubt a fine film guaranteed to be seen by millions, the massive government conspiracy to keep alien contacts under wraps begins to unravel.  A whistleblower races to reveal the Truth while government flacks, mostly square-jawed meanies driving dark cars, invade “the real America” to keep their Deep State deep.

There are crop circles, long since shown to be a hoax.  There are lights, flickering, flashing.  And there is a Deep State:  “The human race cannot accept what we know,” one flack says.

Here’s what Carl Sagan knew.  The chance of finding intelligent life beyond earth is probably greater than the chance of finding intelligent life on earth these days.  The billions and billions. . .  The probabilities. . .  The common conditions creating. . .  BUT!

IF aliens are among us, Sagan reasoned, how did they get here?  The nearest star is four light years away and most other worlds would require light-speed travel for millennia to reach us.  Finding our “pale blue dot” in a vacuous universe would be like hurling a pebble on a beach, aiming for a specific grain of sand. And if entire government agencies know all about this, why not a single leak?

But okay, say the aliens traveled at Warp Speed, got lucky and got here.  Why wouldn’t they say hello?  Why just abduct people?  Why not take over a TV network?  Start a website?  Teach at Harvard?

Even before “Cosmos” made him a household name, Sagan joined the U.S. AIr Force Scientific Advisory Board that investigated existing reports of UFOs.  “What was in those files wasn’t worth much,” he said.  Further investigations taught him that “the reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable.”  “Extraordinary claims,” he often said, “require extraordinary evidence.”

But that was then.  In the three decades since Sagan’s death, the Internet has thumbed its nose at reliable evidence.  And a confused, info-sated public keeps lapping up the latest fact-free theory.  Nearly a third of Americans now believe UFOs are flown by aliens.  A quarter say they’ve seen one.  And two-thirds, some 200 million Americans, believe "the US government knows more about UFOs than it is telling."

Enter Stephen Spielberg.  E.T., no need to phone home.  You’re home among us.  Close encounters are closer than ever.  “I don’t know any more than any of you do,” Spielberg said about his new film, “but I have a very strong suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now.  I made a movie about that.”

Oh, but it’s just a movie, right?  No one could seriously believe — wait, are you still saying THAT?

So here we go, into the summer of “Disclosure Day.”  Sagan understood the appeal. “Which sells more newspapers and books, which garners higher ratings, which is more fun to believe, which is more resonant with the torments of our time. . . extraterrestrials of immense powers toying with the human species, or such claims deriving from human weakness and imperfection?”

But it’s not too late.  We can still use the “baloney detection kit” Sagan described in The Demon-Haunted World.  The kit’s tools include healthy skepticism and demands for concrete evidence from multiple sources.  Plus a little reason, caution, and above all, a comfort in NOT  believing.  There’s little riding on this, Sagan said, other than our democracy.

“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.”

And there’s a truth that needs no disclosure.