Why Do We Want to Believe?
The Giddying Search for Unknown Life
The following essay contains spoilers for the X-Files, The Three-Body Problem, and Arrival.
On its surface, the X-Files is a show about alien contact and government conspiracies. Its stars, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, are constantly thwarted by dark forces that extend much deeper and further than the agency they work for, the FBI. When Scully, the levelheaded skeptic, is tempted to turn a blind eye to supernatural happenings, Mulder’s feverish devotion to “the truth” ultimately prevails.
Mulder isn’t obsessed with the truth for its own sake, at least not entirely. His sister disappeared when they were both children, and he is convinced she was abducted by aliens. We see Mulder’s childlike obsession with extraterrestrials turn to horror when he realizes just what those aliens did to his sister and what they have planned for Earth.
Despite its faltering coda, the X-Files remains a cultural landmark in a sea of media that flirts with the alien, cryptic, and supernatural. The “Mulders” of these stories fascinate me. From Animal Planet’s 12 seasons of Finding Bigfoot to Blockbusters like Arrival to award-winning sci-fi novels, there are countless tales of the quest for unknown life told through a lens of devotion, hope, and desire, rather than horror. We want to believe. But why?
The possibility of previously undiscovered life, whether its been hiding on this planet for millennia or is merely visiting from another, is both interesting and terrifying. Would our fascination falter if a UFO really did descend from the heavens or a tentacled giant actually lumbered up onto a crowded beach? Probably. The staggering quantity of alien invasion, rampaging monster, and AI-driven doomsday media is a testament to our fears of a powerful, new “other” in the world. But I want to talk about the people and stories who look at this possibility with not fear, but desire.
Of course, humans can desire fear. As a horror writer, I am constantly chasing my own monsters down dark corridors, harvesting their terror and sewing it into my stories. I hunt fear.
Wanting to feel the thrill of fear may be part of this desire, but there’s more layers to it. People genuinely chasing proof of the unknown share a glassy-eyed devotion to an entity larger or more powerful than themselves. There is an understanding in that devotion that they may discover the new gods of our era—or our new monsters. It doesn’t really matter. The truth is out there. And we are called to uncover it.
The Death of Awe
We are surrounded by spectacle. Thanks to the internet, you can watch strangers having public freakouts, live war footage, countless reality shows, intimate celebrity drama, HD footage from the most remote corners of earth, and be only seconds away from sharing your thoughts on any one of millions of trending “topics” with the entire world. There’s been a backlash to the spectacle too—I find myself thinking of Jean Jacket from Jordan Peele’s Nope or humming “Welcome to the Internet” from Bo Burnam’s Inside quite a bit lately. Amidst all this spectacle, we’ve lost our sense of awe.
The people actually living through the worst events of our current moment—war, famine, poverty, plague, totalitarian governance—don’t have a choice in being part of the spectacle or not. Being distant enough to look at everything bad happening in the world without feeling its effects is a privilege. It may feel important to be plugged in, to know what’s going on, even if that awareness alone doesn’t tangibly benefit anyone else. And for spectacle that is good, or simply petty, well—why wouldn’t we watch?
The spectacle provides a quick rush of dopamine or adrenaline. It is addicting. But very little of what I encounter online, on my television, or in my day-to-day life leaves me with a feeling of awe. Travel does, but only to places that are significantly different from the area I currently live, or that I’ve never been to before. And travel costs money I rarely have.
Our brains crave the new and exciting. We live at an awkward moment in history where there isn’t much “new” to be had that isn’t a human invention. The prospect of a never-before-seen, or at least never-confirmed, species of megafauna or extraterrestrial suddenly appearing and interacting with us has become more thrilling than terrifying. Especially if this entity is one we’ve always hoped is out there.
Carl Sagan was an incredible writer and scientist, as well as a pivotal figure in the search for extraterrestrial life. He also felt that there was a deep connection between religion and science—two fields that seem diametrically opposed today. The awe we have at the unknown, and our desire to prove that this isn’t it, that there is more out there, is best encapsulated by this paragraph from Cosmos.
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. Skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. The Cosmos is rich beyond measure—in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe. The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes, or at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return. These aspirations are not, I think, irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be.”
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)
Very few of us alive today will leave this planet’s atmosphere. But that doesn’t stop us from lifting our heads up on dark, clear nights to try to see into what Sagan so aptly describes as the “subtle machinery of awe.” Sagan was involved in a number of SETI and NASA initiatives, such as overseeing the creation of the Golden Record. He was also vocally opposed to nuclear proliferation, and in presenting research on nuclear winter to the Soviets, he may have played a large role in ending the Cold War.
One of the few people to leave our atmosphere—albeit briefly—this century is William Shatner. You have likely read his viral Variety exclusive, an excerpt from his new book, but if you haven’t, do so now. Here’s where he describes the “Overview Effect”:
“. . . When I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her. Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.”
-William Shatner, Variety / Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (2022)
Where Sagan sees a cosmic ocean, Shatner sees death, but their perspectives are more alike than different; both juxtapose the vastness of space against the miraculous existence of our Earth. It is perhaps the most awe-filled perspective a human can have. But, like many of the world’s richest experiences, awe has become a luxury commodity. Unless you are a billionaire or a celebrity, you are unlikely to ever see Earth from this angle. Which is so tragic when you see how experiencing this profound awe can fundamentally change a person. Is it any wonder our hearts stir at the possibility of something truly awe-inspiring happening on this little lonely planet?
Now is the Time of Monsters
Things are bad. Objectively. What’s subjective is what and why, but those are questions for another essay. We are at a turning point in history, and the full reality of it is likely scarier than the thought of little green men beaming down or Mothman waltzing into a random West Virginia diner. Those ideas seem laughable right now. Almost, good? They would be unknown players, chaos to disrupt a machine that’s racing us towards global catastrophe.
In Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, a secret initiative called Red Coast searches for extraterrestrial life via radio waves. An astrophysicist named Ye Wenjie sends and receives the organization’s first interstellar message. It is from an alien who identifies as a “pacifist” and urges her to cease all radio messages, warning that her planet will be invaded if she contacts the alien’s society again.
The warning is quite generous. It should create a simple choice for Ye; stay quiet, avoid a planet-wide disaster. But Ye has been through the worst of the Cultural Revolution. After watching her father’s brutal death at the hands of Red Guards, finding herself betrayed by her own family and friends, and being bounced between labor brigades and prison, she has lost all hope in humanity. She invites the aliens to come, truly believing that with their advanced society, they can manage the Earth better than its humans had. Even if it means death for the human race.
“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.”
-Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem (2008)
Ye is an interestingly-written character. While the book opens with her experiences in the Cultural Revolution, the story largely follows another character, a nanotechnology researcher named Wang Miao. Wang is horrified by both Ye’s secret society and by the messages he eventually uncovers from the approaching alien invaders. The way the book’s final revelations play against the initial sympathy you feel for Ye mirrors her own betrayal within the text. Ye has condemned all of humanity. Even you. Dare you blame her?
Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve and adapted from Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” by Eric Heisserer, features the arrival of twelve massive, foreboding spacecraft across the Earth. There’s a cautious military response, and linguist Louise Banks is recruited to try and discern the aliens’ intentions. As Banks works amidst rising tensions between different militaries and extremist factions, she begins to drift up and down her own timeline. Using these visions, she finishes her translations and averts a catastrophic war. The aliens peacefully leave, having accomplished their goal; they needed to teach humanity their language, giving them the gift of a non-linear perception of time, so that humans would be equipped to help these aliens in another 3,000 years.
It’s a mind-bending plot that strains credulity at points. Banks regards the aliens with a Mulderesque fascination; she resists the temptation to read any of their actions as hostile, stressing how easy it would be to misinterpret a being whose biology, culture, and perception is entirely different from your own. And ultimately it is Banks—with the gift of time-shifting language—who brings about world peace, not the aliens.
Our saviors may not arrive one day from the stars. But anything that forces us to shift our perspective from our daily, insular lives, to every event across the span of our lifetime, would naturally make us more measured and cautious in our actions. If you could actually see and feel the effects of nuclear war or climate change, as bad as they will be in 30, 40 years, wouldn’t you act a little differently today?
Deus Ex Machina
Speaking of salvation—we are currently seeking new gods. According to Gallup, as of 2021, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults have no religious affiliation. That number has increased tremendously over the past 50 years; in 1971, only 4% of the population had no religious preference. Is anything filling the worship gap?
In 2021, Vox covered “a new kind of religion forming on the internet"—a blend of Christian, New Age, and non-Western ideas spread largely via TikTok. QAnon is . . . something. And then there’s the cults. Heaven’s Gate was a tragic example of a cult built around alien salvation, and it’s not the only one. The idea of a powerful, advanced entity swooping in and solving all our problems is comforting in chaotic times, even if the entity is more monstrous than god-like.
“Some scholars theorize that levels of religiosity and cultic affiliation tend to rise in proportion to the perceived uncertainty of an environment. The less control we feel we have over our circumstances, the more likely we are to entrust our fates to a higher power . . . This propensity has been offered as an explanation for why cults proliferated during the social and political tumult of the nineteen-sixties, and why levels of religiosity have remained higher in America than in other industrialized countries. Americans, it is argued, experience significantly more economic precarity than people in nations with stronger social safety nets and consequently are more inclined to seek alternative sources of comfort.”
-Zoë Heller, “What Makes a Cult a Cult?" (2021)
The country is ripe for a spiritual movement of some sort, and these are just a few of the contenders. The recent buzz around AI deserves its own essay, but in short, I will say that I see strong parallels in how people view powerful, benevolent aliens, and how people think of promising AI. I can’t speak to how realistic it would be for an advanced supercomputer to math us out of all of society’s problems. I just know we’re not there yet.
Conclusion: We Hope We Aren’t Alone
Believing in something outside yourself—bigger than yourself—means something, even if you never see any proof. If you do finally find proof, you get to have the thrill of being right, the comfort that your beliefs were correct, and this whole new, awe-inspiring entity to contend with. And if you’re wrong? You’ll probably never know.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to definitively disprove the existence of sea monsters or cryptids or aliens. Some are biologically and statistically unlikely, but the world is full of surprises. I started on this strange journey all because I learned about a species of deep sea shark I never knew existed (thanks to this excellent Jacob Geller video). The megamouth shark was discovered for the first time, by accident, in 1976. Maybe there’s something else out there just as weird and wonderful.
Thank you for reading Every Nook Uncanny. If you liked this essay, please let me know, and I will alternate more nonfiction with my uncanny tales. The audio version of this essay will be available this Friday. You can follow Mae on Twitter.