Aliens Exist?

A new book examines UFO culture and its latest obsessions.

On May 16, 1999, Fox aired the sixth-season finale of The X-Files, Chris Carter’s TV show about a fictional FBI division investigating unexplained phenomena, including possible extraterrestrial life on Earth. The show regularly had around 15 million viewers per week, sometimes nearing twice that. Its most famous catchphrases, “The truth is out there” and “I want to believe,” permeated pop culture. Just a few weeks after the sixth-season finale, the pop-punk band Blink-182 released its album Enema of the State. With loud and catchy power chords, quick tempos, and playful yet moody lyrics about young adulthood, it quickly became a touchstone of the genre, selling millions and earning the band worldwide fame.

These paragons of late-’90s culture shared more than mere chronological proximity. One of the lesser-known songs on an album whose hits — “What’s My Age Again,” “Adam’s Song,” “All the Small Things” — quickly became the background music to summer pool visits, high-school dances, and late-night drives for teenagers nationwide was called “Aliens Exist.” It sure sounds like a Blink-182 song, if you just listen to the music. But the lyrics, as sung in a famously nasally tone by lead vocalist Tom DeLonge, aren’t exactly in keeping with the rest of the album. DeLonge frets about “the creatures from above,” wonders “What if people knew that these were real?” and says “I wish someone would tell me what was right.” The punks and skaters who played Enema of the State until their CDs started skipping may or may not have known it at the time, but DeLonge was already deep into the conspiratorial world that shows such as The X-Files also explored. In an interview around then, bandmate Mark Hoppus said that DeLonge was “pretty straightforward. . . . He hangs out with his girlfriend, and he believes in aliens.”

Plenty of celebrities have weird beliefs, of course. But time proved that DeLonge’s interest in UFOs was more than just a weird, passing phase. During the 2016 presidential campaign, when WikiLeaks released the emails of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, her campaign’s chairman, DeLonge’s name emerged among the latter’s correspondence. He was apparently hoping to work with Podesta, also a longtime UFO enthusiast, on efforts to force the government to disclose what it supposedly knew about UFO activity. About a year later, the New York Times made public the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an apparent government effort to investigate sightings of mysterious “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Simultaneous to the Times report, a new UFO-disclosure enterprise spearheaded by DeLonge called “To the Stars Academy” released some almost-incredible videos seeming to show Navy pilots encountering craft lightyears more advanced than anything known to earthlings. Last September, the Pentagon confirmed that the videos were legitimate, without touching on their content. In late April, it officially released them itself. And in a Rolling Stone interview on May 7, DeLonge claimed credit for the disclosures. “They’re like, ‘Alright it’s time to start talking about it because Tom and his rascals are putting our feet to the fire,’ you know?” he said.

It’s a lot to take in. But one person who might not find it all that surprising — at least, not anymore — is Sarah Scoles. As a reporter for several mainstream science publications, Scoles has also closely followed the gradual emergence of the latest wave of UFO disclosures in all of its strange turns. Her new book, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, benefits from and adds to the work she has already done on the topic. It is a surprisingly personal work, sometimes in ways that help her narrative and sometimes in ways that do not. And it boldly attempts to answer some broader questions about the UFO phenomenon, though in a manner that inevitably proves somewhat unsatisfactory.

Scoles’s book is an excellent crash course both for those seeking to understand recent happenings in the strange world of UFOlogy and for those wondering where this surprisingly prominent subculture came from in the first place. Reporting on recent UFO news for Wired, she found herself drawn into the subject, somewhat against her better judgment, because she was “intrigued” by “the people obsessed with UFOs,” who “spent so much time on a phenomenon that they weren’t even sure was a phenomenon.” She ends up writing on a fascinating and diverse cast of characters across the country. Some of them are famous: DeLonge features prominently — lyrics to “Aliens Exist” are the book’s epigraph — and former senator Harry Reid pops up as the primary political force behind the once-secret government program investigating UFOs. But there are also less-famous figures: residents of remote southwestern towns whose economies depend on UFO tourism, attendees of alien-themed conventions, everyday folk somewhat sheepishly admitting to their own UFO sightings. Theirs is a disparate group united by just one thing: aliens.