Why We Want to Believe in Aliens and Why We Still Haven't Found Them

UFOs were once the stuff of tabloids and conspiracy theories. Today they're the subject of congressional hearings, Pentagon investigations, mainstream news coverage, and a new wave of claims about government cover-ups and alien technology. Adam Kirsch, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters, joins Michael Shermer to ask what changed—and why the idea of extraterrestrial visitors has such a powerful hold on us.

They discuss Roswell, UFO "disclosure," eyewitness testimony, government secrecy, alien abductions, Carl Sagan and Contact, the religious impulse behind UFO belief, and the difference between testimony and scientific evidence. The conversation also turns to the serious scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence: the Fermi paradox, why decades of SETI have found nothing, how rare intelligent life might be, and whether our ideas about aliens ultimately tell us more about ourselves than about anything actually out there.

Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism and a senior editor at The Atlantic. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch has written for publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and Tablet. His new book is We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters.

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