WE ARE NOT ALONE!!!

REASONS TO BELIEVE

In the good old days, the arrival of UFOs on the front page of America's paper of record might have seemed like a loose-thread tear right through the fabric of reality — the closest that secular, space-race America could have gotten to a Second Coming. Two decades ago, or three, or six, we would've also felt we knew the script in advance, thanks to the endless variations pop culture had played for us already: civilizational conflicts to mirror the real-world ones Americans had been imagining in terror since the beginning of the Cold War.

But when, in December, the New York published an undisputed account of what might once have sounded like crackpot conspiracy theory — that the Pentagon had spent "unexplained aerial phenomena" — the response among the paper's mostly liberal readers, exhausted and beaten down by "recent events," was markedly different from the one in those movies. The news that , regularly and recently, didn't provoke terror about a coming space-opera conflict but something much more like the Evangelical dream of the Rapture the same liberals might have mocked as kooky right-wing escapism in the George W. Bush years. "The truth is out there," former senator Harry Reid , with a link to the story. Thank God, came the response through the Twitter vent. "Could extraterrestrials help us save the Earth?" went one typical reaction.

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Suddenly, aliens were an escapist fantasy — but also more credible (legitimized by the government!) than mere fantasy. That Pentagon report, which featured two gripping videos of aerial encounters, was just one beat in a recent search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (or SETI) drumroll: In October, an object passed through our solar system that looked an awful lot like a spaceship; astronomers spent much of 2016 arguing over whether the weird pulses of light coming from a distant star were actually evidence of an "alien megastructure." An army of Silicon Valley billionaires are racing to make first contact, and our new superpowered telescopes are discovering more conceivably habitable planets every year.

Then, in March, , featuring a Navy encounter off the East Coast in 2015, with the group that released it hinting at an additional trove. "Why doesn't the Pentagon care?" wondered a Washington op-ed — surely the first time the newspaper of Katharine Graham was raising a stink about aliens. The next week, President Trump seemed to announce he was creating an entirely new branch of the military: You could be forgiven for thinking you'd woken up in a science-fiction novel. At the very least, it is starting to seem non-crazy to believe. A recent study shows half the world already does.