This week, The Walrus published an essay from my bookBe Scared of Everything, about our relationship with horror media. It explores the questions: What is the value of dark and pessimistic art? How does horror help us understand society, mortality, culture, and mental illness?
Writing a book about horror, I found myself immersed in frightening and disturbing ideas. Real instances of cannibalism, traumatic personal memories of gun violence, vast quantities of blood that require new metrics for measurement. The essay, originally titled “The FBI’s Basement Office,” begins with a UFO close encounter my brother shared with me. Of all the anecdotes and true crime retellings in the book, this one still unsettles me the most. The other instances of paranormal-seeming
activity, like Ouija board sessions and ghost sightings, can be neutralized through rational thinking.
But UFOs are real. And that’s the problem here. It wasn’t always this way, but now, the most rational explanation for seeing unidentifiable lights in the sky is that you saw a UFO. Sure, sometimes it’s Venus. Sometimes it’s a weather balloon. But, as of 2017, “sometimes it’s a UFO” became a viable explanation because, that year, the New York Times reported on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a defunct secret US Department of Defense program once dedicated to studying UFOs. Subsequent reporting has only corroborated the existence of unknown skyborne objects, and it really seems like no one on earth knows what they are.
Thankfully, seeing evidence of a UFO wasn’t enough to send me spiralling into a personal epistemological dark age. But it stands as a reminder of the frailty of human society. The narrative order we depend on to go about our day-to-day lives is based on the trust that at least someone knows what the hell is going on. That’s the starting point of the essay, which delves way deeper into how our relationship to pop culture like The X-Files influences our ability to accept new realities, like the existence of UFOs.
