A preface and caveat to this article:
      According to the judgment of this article this program is useless information, and sleep-inducing entertainment .  The people it is directed to are "animated by some kind of religious-ish impulse, some thirst for ultimates; or maybe some wish to be jolted out of their dulled senses....yearning to shock and be shocked." They are all "sad bored UFOers, their faces blank, their land-locked figures full-sail with heartland obesity, their eyes shining with their earth-centric, mundane, child's fantasy of a populated universe--the spatial, secular version of the religious, temporal dream of a populated eternity.
      And lastly this article classifies all UFO believers as "country bumpkins harboring a global death wish with the description that "these people are easy to laugh at,impulse to destroy everything except (them) and (their) local cornfield, or bowling alley."

Alien Nation - The New Republic
by Lee Siegel

America, come in, come in, wherever you are. It's not enough that we're being led by a heartless idiot and his team of obsequious solipsists and hustlers, that we're in a unnecessary war, that the federal government has withdrawn itself almost entirely from the business of promoting the social good. Oh no. Now we have this: A major network is producing a two-hour special--airing this Thursday--arguing that, as Peter Jennings, the show's host, gravely repeats over and over again, "we are not alone," that we get "visited" by aliens on a regular basis. Or at least since 1947, when someone obviously bored out of his mind and scared witless both by the specter of nuclear war with Russia and the infinite silence of rural America at night, looked up from his cornfield or something, saw a giant dinner plate soaring through the nocturnal sky, and called his local police department to report an imminent invasion from outer space.

You thought all we had to worry about was Al Qaeda lurking behind every iPod? Think again. If you only knew the cosmic dangers that lurk above us, the green, spindly, big-headed beings that nurture dreams somewhere in their caves, spread ou over billions of galaxies, of traipsing suddenly into our living rooms and, well, saying hello. And this is the least of it, only the beginning of a nightmare. What if they are not green? What if they are beige? What if they are (unreconstructed) liberals? What if they speak French? What if--please move your children away from the screen--they are sane?

Watching ABC present convincing dramatized accounts of UFOs flying over the country, listening to Jennings calmly make the case for a government perniciously indifferent to the threat from outer space, you have to wonder whether we are all as nuts as what we watch on TV. Or are the people who make television the true crazies? Or are they perhaps true cynics, whose desperate attempts to boost ratings, to be popular, to hold on to their jobs, transform their anxiety into a kind of madness, a psychotic-commercial complex that descends upon us in the form of useless information that we have to know, or sleep-inducing entertainment to which we have to turn?

For all its perfunctory nods to skeptics, this special makes a quiet case that extra-terrestrials are constantly circling our planet. Why they have never touched down to introduce themselves--landing only to abduct and then inexplicably to return people, thereby procuring for them speaking engagements, television appearances and book contracts--you never learn. Maybe they can't find long-term parking. Maybe they like to shop but not to buy, sampling an Earthling here, a Venutian there, etc. Maybe our beloved Earth is actually known throughout the universe as "Planet Rest Room," and aliens only stop here to pee. These mysteries are not answered by Jennings and ABC.

Rather, Jennings is very respectful to the "witnesses" who claim to have seen aliens flying over their barnyards, etc., or who insist that they've been abducted (they should be so lucky). There is something in Jennings's open attitude to all of this of the new deference to so-called religious people that suddenly seized the commentating classes after the election last November. These UFO true believers, after all, are animated by some kind of religious-ish impulse, some thirst for ultimates; or maybe some wish to be jolted out of their dulled senses. In that sense, they are also like generations of vanguard artists, yearning to shock and be shocked.

But there is something else in Jennings's preening solemn tones (his megalomania is extraterrestrial; so is his tendency to pronounce words like "project" two different ways). There is in Jennings's voice this surging American love for the absurd, and therefore contemptible person. From politics to reality shows, we seem to like to be surrounded by people ruled by greed, hampered by stupidity, blinkered by obsession. These sad bored UFOers, their faces blank, their land-locked figures full-sail with heartland obesity, their eyes shining with their earth-centric, mundane, child's fantasy of a populated universe--the spatial, secular version of the religious, temporal dream of a populated eternity--these people are easy to laugh at, and therefore easy to accommodate. In America, attention must be paid! Attention, that is, to everything freakish, inadequate, unthreatening, and thus usefully supportive of a shaky sense of worth, of identity. More and more, the spectacle of human inadequacy on television is like one long public stoning. Does not poor, war-ravaged, "dysfunctional" Iraq make us optimistic about America? Nowadays, American health navigates by foreign sickness.

It's easy to watch the special Thursday night and draw pretty conclusions. Americans are escaping from harsh realities; the culture's normalization of deceit is resulting in a conventionalization of fantasy; Bush's triumphal end-of-daysism has its correlative in the UFOers' belief that some momentous figure--in one sense, the aliens are ultimate celebrities--will appear and explain everything to us, etc. But the show's essential meaning lies in its recurrent assertion that "we are not alone." What an odd phrase--and how irresponsible of ABC not to examine it.

How could we be alone when the Earth currently holds over six billion of us? And who is this "we" anyway? Cross any border in the world and you either encounter or become an "alien," to one degree or another. There is something chilling about postulating the unknowable six billion as "we," and then wishing ardently to be astounded or shocked by company. Such mental sleight-of-hand implies the conceptual annihilation of everyone but you. If there's anything behind the UFO phenomenon at all, it's the human, all-too-human desire to be freed from humanity altogether. Maybe someday scientists will tell us why ABC is conferring prestige upon the buried impulse to destroy everything except you and your local cornfield, or bowling alley.