Further notes on aliens and the gothic

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A few weeks ago when I mulled over the taxonomy of UFO believers as laid out in a recent New Atlantis essay, I mentioned my pet theory that aliens had worked their way into a cranny in the cultural imagination formerly occupied by the gothic. I wrote:

Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

(I first propounded this theory a few months ago when I volunteered, very early one morning, to help my wife prepare bottles and medicine for the twins. She had not had her coffee yet and is grateful for your readership.)

I’m speaking very generally, of course, but a few of the specific, superficial things that suggest a parallel between the stories emerging from the gothic and the UFO phenomenon include:

  • Remote, lonely locations

  • Nighttime—ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and greys all apparently being nocturnal

  • Individuals or, perhaps, a small, intimate group being targeted

  • A sense that the otherworldly is fixated on or preying upon specific people

  • A psychological arc that grows from uneasiness to dread and often ends in paralyzing terror

  • Inexplicable phenomena and occult powers (occult in the sense of hidden or unknown)

  • Relatedly, unpredictable comings and goings

  • Ambiguous and minimal physical evidence

I could probably come up with a longer list, but these immediately suggest themselves. Again, all of the above are superficial general parallels and there are plenty of exceptions—about which more below—but if you were to construct either a gothic or alien story, it would probably have most or all of those traits. But there are deeper and more important qualities that both have in common:

  • Their intrusive quality, the way the uncanny or extraterrestrial is perceived as breaking in upon normal life from somewhere else

  • Their subsequent disruptive effect upon the normal

  • The dense secrecy surrounding them

This gets us really close to the semi-religious dimensions of both, the mysterious, scary, and disruptive being neighbors to awe.

To summarize, the alien story was able to supplant the gothic because both scratch the same itch: otherworldly, slightly or overtly scary, and with religious overtones.

Two caveats:

I think the rest of my superficial observations hold true, though: the widely-reported “Phoenix lights” were seen at night and Lonnie Zamora and Kenneth Arnold, to pick two daytime incidents, were individuals in out-of-the-way places. All three of the deeper similarities remain. I’d even say that the superficial things—individuals alone in remote places at night—are probably best explained as setting the necessary mood for the intrusion of the mysterious.

Note that I’m treating all of the UFO stuff as fictional, just like the gothic. Remember that I’m mostly a “disinformation non-enjoyer,” though I do enjoy the aesthetic, atmospheric side of all of it. I think the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings are sufficiently explained by terrestrial factors or simple fraud, though some—with unimpeachably honest people seeing something inexplicable, like Zamora and the others in the video linked above—remain tantalizingly unexplained.

I’m also interested in what UFOs say about culture, symptomatically. Why do these stories appeal? I think my “scratching the same itch” theory explains some of it, and yet this is where the most significant difference between the gothic and UFOs comes in:

  • The gothic is historically-oriented. When intrusion and disruption occurs, it is the forgotten past intruding on the present. Hence the roles of old houses, family secrets, and medieval monsters.

  • The UFO phenomenon is future-oriented. The intrusion and disruption are those of the future breaking into a less advanced past—our present. Hence the roles of laboratories and military facilities, government secrets, and monsters from outer space.

The shift from a delight in the spooky rooted in the past to a delight in the spooky giving us hints about the future is a significant one, and not easily summarized here. Food for thought.