Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…That’s very high. [laughs] That’s actually high. I’m going to lose all credibility, so I should go a little lower. But I think there are two things going on with UFOs. One, there is a historical continuity that I find very persuasive between human stories of fairy encounters from the Middle Ages and the pre-modern period and stories of alien abductions, where you have similar depictions of the creatures involved, similar emphasis on trickery and people playing games with human beings, similar emphasis on sex and quasi-medical experimentation, all of these kinds of things. What that suggests to me is, on the one hand, that you should assign some probability to the possibility that there are supernatural beings who like to mess with us, who are neither angelic nor demonic. But leaving that aside, there is some kind of human experience that we don’t fully understand that is not just made up, that is maybe some sort of union, unconscious thing that gets interpreted as aliens in one age and as fairies in another, but it’s real and interesting even if the fairies themselves aren’t real. That’s one area. Then you have the UFOs that we pick up on video, that we now actually have published in my own newspaper — pretty compelling videographic evidence. It could be that that’s one more example — if the fairies are real — that this is just one more way they mess with us. I think I would assign a slightly higher probability to the weird-advanced-military-technology explanation for those, that they seem a little different from the UFO abduction stories. Put it this way: There are unidentified flying objects that we can see on videos, that pilots have seen, that are presumably not a hallucination and therefore must represent, one, the supernatural, two, advanced military technology, or three, visitors from another planet. Right? Yes. Three final questions —…

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