“People have a need to feel like their lives are meaningful, and these beliefs might suggest that there’s something bigger out there there’s something more important going on,” Abeyta says Abeyta explains that belief in aliens is akin to religiosity: unfounded beliefs in unfalsifiable ideas, which require a leap of faith. Fast forward to 1961, when Barney and Betty Hill told the world’s first alien abduction story.Īndrew Abeyta, professor of psychology at Rutgers University, co-authored We Are Not Alone, a study into why some of us want to believe in aliens. Conspiracy theorists confused the balloon for a UFO the US government did a lousy job debunking those claims, and they quickly captured the public’s imagination. If the US military has been quietly and seriously investigating UFOs (or, as the Pentagon would have it, UAPs) since 2007, and if the Pentagon’s official report cannot rule out the existence of extraterrestrials, is it time we looked again at claims of close encounters and the people who have made them? The US government says some UFOs pose 'a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to US national security'Įnthusiasm for UFOs and ETs has permeated popular culture ever since a US air force balloon crashed near Roswell in 1947. It’s that “other” bin that has arrested the attention of stargazers and conspiracy theorists. The report offered five typically mundane possible explanations for the UFOs and, crucially, one catch-all “other” bin. They just don’t appear to be helping matters much.The unclassified version of the report (there was also a classified version seen only by US lawmakers) found “no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation” for the sightings. dig out of the Great Depression, largely because it generated jobs and exports.īut the way most people seem to feel these days, aliens have been in Washington for some time. The war was the single biggest factor in finally helping the U.S. did during World War II when tax rates were astronomical. While Krugman is obviously using the idea as a provocative thought experiment, there’s a serious argument behind it, which boils down to the government gaining the incentive to raise taxes so it could build war-fighting materials, much like the U.S. “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months,” Krugman says, referencing an episode of The Twilight Show in which an alien threat was manufactured to bring about world peace. ( MORE: Why It Pays to Ignore the Financial News) While talking off the cuff on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program (Zakaria is also a TIME Magazine contributor), Krugman conjectured about what would happen if aliens landed on earth and attacked us. So maybe that’s why Krugman has aliens on the brain. Paul Krugman probably feels like an alien himself these days, considering Washington is completely ignoring his unwavering arguments for more fiscal stimulus as President Obama and Congressional Republicans try to out-deficit-reduce each other. Follow to the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize laureate, you know what would end the economic slump in 18 months? Aliens.
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