Posthuman Blues

Can the mainstream media ever deal effectively with stories concerning esoteric subjects? The example below, while articulate in many respects, certainly offers serious room for doubt. Take, for example, the ridiculous headline:

Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers

This is, in case you haven't figured it out, yet another article about sleep paralysis and the popular infatuation with alien abduction.

So why the explicit reference to "Martians"?

The article is flatly devoid of any references to Mars or beings from Mars; the "M-word's" presence at the beginning of the article is designed to condescend just enough so that readers can feel free to duck behind the laughter curtain that's helped veil the UFO enigma since the late 1940s.

It's easy to snicker at references to "Martian kidnappers"; it's less easy to concede a potentially genuine unknown.

The article contains at least one other sentence that betrays a deliberate ignorance of the subject matter:

"Where, exactly, do the green figures with the wraparound eyes come from?"

Green figures? Surely everyone is familiar with the quintessential "Gray" alien by now. It's in movies, on television, emblazoned on T-shirts, sold as keyrings; it's no exaggeration to call the "Gray" alien a consumer icon. But describing alleged aliens as "green" brings to mind "B"-movie visions of "little green men," an archetype that has much less to do with what "abductees" describe and more with marginalizing a topic that has yet, for the most part, to attract the disciplined research it deserves.

The irony is that this article ultimately demeans both skeptical research (which suggests belief in alien visitation is an intriguing neurological aberration) as well as the general subject of extraterrestrial intelligence. The effect is subtle but nonetheless easily avoidable, and one would think the New York Times could avoid this silliness.

Unfortunately, it's exactly the publications with the resources to know better that freely mock this most portentous of enigmas, regardless what it represents.