Perhaps it’s counterintuitive, but the “little green man” image of aliens in our collective mind isn’t an otherworldly manifestation, but a distinctly American phenomenon. In fact, according to Daniel Lavelle’s Chasing Aliens, it’s as American “as warm apple pie.” Lavelle, an Orwell Prize-winning British journalist, embarked on a road trip pursuing extraterrestrials through the UFO heartlands of the US.

The American government had been secretly investigating UFOs for some time, and released what ‘evidence’ it had after a disgruntled former employee alleged a cover-up of sorts. In the past decade, alien-curious civilians were treated to a collection of seemingly unexplained happenings: the infamous Tic Tac, Gimbal, and Go Fast videos of miscellaneous flying objects, beguiling incredulous American pilots.

In his book, Lavelle embeds with the cranks and in-the-knows of America’s alien scene, rubbing shoulders with government insiders and those claiming to be alien abductees. We spoke to Lavelle to find out more.

Is there something about America or Americans that makes them particularly susceptible to Ufology?

It’s just a giant slice of Americana. If you look at where this all started, it started in America, and then it spread across America, and then eventually overseas. UFOs took root in the American mind during the Red Scare, when, after the Second World War, America had just emerged as a world superpower. So they’ve got a massive target on their back. There’s all this fear of communism, of Russia potentially beating them in a nuclear war, of these communist insiders taking the country down from inside. So there’s this fear of the other that’s happening at the same time of Roswell, and then that’s reflected in movies and science fiction. Also, this idea of American exceptionalism as well – Americans are told from a young age that they live in the greatest country on Earth. So if aliens would go anywhere, they would go to America [they think]. 

I thought the section in the book where you discuss the interplay between faith, conspiracy, and belief in extraterrestrials in America was particularly powerful.

I arrived there by accident. Originally, I thought there was something to it, because these really serious people were talking about things in our skies that appeared to be defying the laws of physics. You had serious people like Barack Obama backing that up. You had uber-rationalists like Sam Harris saying we should maybe apologize to people who we’ve been ridiculing for years. So that’s what drew me to it, that it’s this migration from the fringe into the mainstream. And I thought, well, is there a fucking alien invasion going on under our noses then? Because it’s almost like a reframing of this topic. It’s only when I dug deeper than the surface that I realized there was just a lot of magical thinking going on, irrationality, just poor analysis.

This is the era of Trump, isn’t it? This story came out a year into his presidency. It’s sort of the era of unreality, of alternative facts. Then you just start asking more questions, like why is it taking hold? It can’t just be that the information landscape has changed. So what’s the deeper truth? And then you realize: a lot of people who believe in aliens, they either believe they’ll be these all-powerful, conquering, cosmic colonialists looking for the next planetary trophy. Or they’re something like sages descended from the mountain to kind of gift us with wisdom. And the latter one struck me as sort of a religious belief. It’s almost a replacement for God. Because what is God, if not an omnipotent force that can make everything better? In this materialist world where religion’s on the wane, and there’s this spirituality gap, maybe aliens fill that.

What do you think is the most compelling piece of evidence to suggest UFOs and aliens have visited Earth?

I think UFOs are definitely real. I think the problem is they’re mostly drones or, in a military context, adversaries that maybe have made technological leaps that the other side hasn’t. I think that’s perfectly reasonable. As far as aliens, there’s just no good reason to believe they’ve come whatsoever. None of it’s particularly compelling at all. It really isn’t it. Ultimately, it all boils down to the vast different distances in space, like the nearest planet to ours that could host life is called Proxima Centauri B, which is four light-years away, which means our fastest spaceship would get there in thousands of years, and it would have to use the entire energy output of Earth to do so. So no one’s gonna do that journey, are they? And then people say, ‘Well, it might be an artificial intelligence.’ I guess that’s possible. It’s just that there’s no evidence at all. I thought I was gonna have a Woodward and Bernstein moment. You know, some guy in a car park giving me an envelope? 

Is there anything that still perplexes you, though?

The Tic Tac still perplexes me because there’s not enough data there to reach any sort of conclusion. It’s a weird one. The Tic Tac was witnessed by David Fravor and Alexander Dietrich in 2004. They were doing flight exercises off the coast of San Diego, and then they were called by another battleship that wasn’t their own to investigate this weird shit that was happening on the ocean surface. And then when they got there, they say it was this Tic Tac-shaped object that had no clear means of propulsion that met them in midair and then sped off and was seen again on radar moments later, 60 miles away. That’s a compelling story, but without any evidence or data, you can’t really draw any conclusion. I don’t know what they saw, and I haven’t heard of any kind of optical illusion that’s been offered as a satisfactory answer. Mick West (American debunker) thinks it might have been like some sort of weather balloon on a tether, but that doesn’t really add up to me.

Multiple radar systems were showing this thing as well.

Yeah, that’s the interesting one. So, back to your other question, what was the most compelling? I suppose it’s that, but I don’t know if that gets us closer to aliens or just closer to some mad technology that the US has developed.

Is there anything else you want to say about this book, or anything we haven’t touched on?

For Playboy readers: there is a story about a guy getting shagged by a blue alien, if they want to read that. You’re probably not wanking off to this article, but then if you read the book, you might. Something in there for everyone.