An obsession for our media-saturated age

Stories of extraterrestrials have become the new American folklore during the past 60 years or so. Many people claim to have seen UFOs or, even worse, to have been abducted and experimented on by alien life forms.

In my hometown of Troy, just north of Dayton, Ohio, the stories of little green men are intensified by a well-known conspiracy theory. Those who believe in this theory think the extraterrestrial material recovered from the alleged incident in 1947 at Roswell, N.M., is now inside Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s Foreign Technology Division in nearby Fairborn, where I lived when I was younger and where my grandparents currently live.

Of course, alien lore has been beaten to death by pop culture in myriad ways.
There was the mid-1990s arcade shoot-’em-up “Area 51,” the objective of which was to shoot aliens while not shooting pretty white girls.

There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of movies about our human fascination with the possibility of life beyond Earth, the most classic being “Alien” and “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” and the most recent being “District 9.” There have been a number of songs on the subject, including Blink-182’s best song “Aliens Exist,” and Megadeth’s masterful “Hangar 18” and “Return to Hangar.” Even a popular roller coaster in Cincinnati’s Kings Island amusement park, the Flight of Fear, has an extraterrestrial theme.

I think this penetration into our entertainment industry says a lot about the importance of aliens in our culture. When folklore was strictly handed down by word-of-mouth, vampires, werewolves and ghosts were popular subjects, and some of these have fared better than others in making the transition to our modern, fast-paced culture.

But aliens are unique; our culture’s fascination with them is mostly confined to the information age. H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” is one notable exception, but he never describes the creatures themselves.

This stems from the fact that certain scientific advances have to be made for aliens to even be perceivable by humans. And being from Dayton, I appreciate the link between UFO folklore and community gossip, but whether aliens are real is not for me to say.

Still, as long as the possibility infiltrates our storytelling and our culture, that insatiable American curiosity will remain.