Published on Wired.com, June 1998

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead held that some things actually “undergo the formality of occurring.” For instance, in this actual phenomenological world, people either are, or are not, being abducted by space aliens. People either are, or are not, being subjected to sexual abuse by satanic cults. Lee Harvey Oswald either did, or did not, assassinate JFK.

It’s not clear if Jodi Dean, author of Aliens In America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Cornell University Press, 1998), would agree. What is clear is that Dean is far more interested in deconstructing the context of our extraterrestrial- and conspiracy theory-obsessed culture than in adding her thoughts to the extraterrestrial-question mix.