Comedian and political commentator Bill Maher devoted an entire segment of his HBO show to a topic he would have frowned upon ten years ago: UFOs.
But now it seems Maher, who identifies as agnostic and in 2008 produced the anti-religion documentary Religulous, is a believer of alien beings coming to our planet in highly advanced spacecraft. A skeptic turned into a Disclosure convert, who would’ve thunk it?
What I find funny about the segment is that Maher spent a lot of time mocking the old supermarket tabloid stereotype of UFO witnesses (illiterate blue-collar civilians claiming to have had direct interaction with otherworldly intelligences) who have now been replaced in our new post-2017 era of ‘Disclosure’ by highly-trained military officials, reporting objects that still seem to defy the known laws of physics (deference to authority, the kind of ‘straw-man’ tactics the old-guard skeptics used to criticize when UFO believers invoked it). I wonder if Maher is aware that several of these new spokespersons in the Disclosure movement have too claimed to have had direct encounters with entities (.e.g Jim Semivan) just like the country bumpkins Maher despises so much because they keep voting Republican.
But Maher’s producers should have been more careful when preparing the segment, and alert him that some of the military videos he presented as evidence have already been debunked: like the FLIR video of a Patriot missile hitting an unknown object without seemingly causing any significant damage to it, which in the opinion of two former military pilots (one of them Ryan Graves, a pro-UFO activist) is more than likely an ordinary balloon. Same thing with the ‘Go-Fast’ video (which is still anomalous, but parallax makes the object look as if it’s moving much faster than it appears) and the ‘triangular’ UFO leaked by Jeremy Corbell, which is the result of a ‘bokeh’ illusion produced by the camera’s infrared lens.
What is interesting to notice is that, while left-wing progressive pundits like Maher are still stuck with the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) when they contemplate the possibility of non-human intelligences interacting with mankind, right-wing demagogues like J.D. Vance prefer to view UFOs though a Judeo-Christian perspective and conclude they are demonic manifestations.
What Maher doesn’t seem to realize, is that he too is interpreting UFOs through a religious perspective—only in his case, the religion is scientific materialism.
Angels or demons, benevolent visitors or malevolent aliens, Maher and Vance are still falling in the trap of applying a binary logic to the high complexity of the UFO problem. Perhaps what it is needed, as Meredith Spearman suggests in her excellent Substack ‘The Maze to Metanoia’ is apply a more nuanced perspective similar to the ‘daimonic’ philosophy of pre-Christian western philosophers: to acknowledge that Reality is weirder, more crowded, and more permeable than what our current scientific paradigm is comfortable to admitting, but also that our previous religious ideologies may be too limited to help us navigate the bridge between the old dying world, and the new one opening before us.
