Some thoughts on the inhabited universe …
… and all the science-fiction tales I've loved before.
By Michael Nesset
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It's not surprising that, in this new Age of Anxiety, UFOs are once again in the news. Back in the 1950s, when I was growing up, our national anxieties about nuclear war, insidious creeping communism and the United States' new role as superpower and global policeman produced many sightings of, even interactions with, UFOs or "flying saucers," as in the age of Fiestaware they were known. The government, the military, the scientists all denied that these phenomena were of extraterrestrial origin, attributing them to weather balloons, the planet Venus, mass hallucination, and "shared delusion" in the case of one couple who claimed to be abducted and who corroborated one another's stories. Discredited, the flying saucer stories gave way to the assassinations, wars and moon shots of the 1960s.