America's alien freakout

This obsession with space is ridiculously adolescent. It is also vicious and inhumane.

Aliens.
(Image credit: iStock)

Forgive me for not being markedly enthusiastic about the news that the Pentagon has spent at least $22 million over the last decade studying unidentified flying objects. Contra Mulder, the truth is not out there.

"Space" has become a mania, a cult, a crypto-ontology that undergirds all our assumptions about creation in ways we barely understand. The gleaming prospect of orange nebulae looms on dedicated Twitter accounts and in BuzzFeed listicles while the planet we have now, the one we are all quietly busy destroying in our thousand necessary ways, decays into irrelevance.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.