The unknown inside

Loeb bills his storefront as a "museum about mythology." His answering machine declares you'll find it "at the corner of extra perception and unreality," or "at the edge of reality, on the corner of disbelief and absurdity." The Portland Oregonian describes Loeb as a "perpetual candidate." He just lost a mayoral election, even though his platform included a ban on parking tickets and free admission to the zoo. "UFOs are made for the media," Loeb declares. "You've sort of picked up the bait."

The bait seems irresistible: after all, the world has been telling itself the UFO story for the last century or so. As bold as a tabloid headline or as subtle as a song title, tales about UFOs and their occupants, their motives and methods, and our reactions to them have worked their way into a tapestry that encompasses our deepest paranoid fears and our most transcendent desires. Whether UFOs are real or imagined or induced seems irrelevant; the conclusive fact is that in 1996 stories of UFO crashes, government cover-ups, aliens abducting humans for biological research, dire warnings from the stars about the ecological fate of the planet, and the evolution of consciousness itself all have taken center stage.

Michael T. Shoemaker, who monitors paranormal phenomena in mainstream advertising in his column for the paranormal-focused International Fortean Organization (INFO) Journal, has chronicled "sightings" of UFOs, aliens, and abductions in ads for K-Mart, Pepsi, Midas Muffler, Stovetop Stuffing, the New York Times, Isuzu automobiles, United Airlines, Kinko's, and even the American Advertising Federation, to name a few. And that's just since 1994.

So the aliens have invaded -- as art, metaphor, fashion icon, marketing tool, glib entertainment, pychodrama, and philosophical battleground. Their story is part of the fabric of daily life, coming at us in a steady stream of images from Hollywood, MTV, and daytime talk shows to the funny pages and the T-shirt on the kid next door. The tale could hardly be more real -- more a part of us -- if the saucers landed on the White House lawn (or blew it up) tomorrow.

In recent years, the UFO abduction movement has steadily gained credibility, buoyed by the support of sources from the Atlantic Monthly to Dr. John Mack, a Pulitzer-winning biographer and a Harvard University psychiatry professor acclaimed for his research on teen suicide. (He nearly lost his tenure after he championed the movement.) Before Mack there was Budd Hopkins, a New York painter and sculptor who began comparing abduction reports more than 20 years ago; he also put on the first exhibit of UFO-themed art in 1981, at the Queens Museum (it was the late Keith Haring's first museum show). Hopkins's two books, Missing Time and Intruders (the latter made into a television mini-series), established him as the guru of abductees -- a group so formidable they've even got their own PC name, "experiencers," and their own children's book, Leah Haley's Ceto's New Friends.

Common sense has it that sci-fi films, television dramas, and comic books fuel UFO reports -- i.e., the culture drives the mythology. Hopkins argues that though there are plenty of kooks who base abduction fantasies on '50s sci-fi, it's more common these days for sci-fi to mimic UFO reports. "In a very strange way, it has taken a long time for the actual reports to begin to somehow hold their own against fiction." For instance, he points out, when Steven Spielberg wanted "authentic" aliens for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he hired the well-known UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek as technical consultant.

Closer to home, The X-Files regularly mines classic UFO classics investigations like Kevin D. Randle's for plotlines. Abductions and our prototypical image of an alien -- the melon-foreheaded, teardrop-eyed "small grays" who have replaced the little green men of yore -- were virtually unknown before Intruders and Whitley Streiber's Communion (both of which came out in 1987). But in a few short years they've not only become the standard, they've become a cultural signifier more popular, and more easily recognizable, than any single movie alien has ever been.

"What's very strange is how quickly that material could be accepted into popular culture," says Hopkins. "When you think of other subject areas, like Freud's theories of the unconscious, it took a couple of decades before they became as commonly known as aliens are now."

They do seem to be everywhere. Airwalk uses a witty twist on abduction scenarios, complete with small grays, to sell sneakers. The video for Sonic Youth's "Little Trouble Girl" has a stylized, lost-looking small gray strolling around aimlessly. A Gen Xer mistakes a Hunter ceiling fan for a UFO in the company's TV campaign (slogan: "A sure sign of intelligent life"). In a Kodak commercial, a kid accidentally captures a UFO ("Or is it a pie pan?") on film, posts it on the Internet, receives a threatening phone call from a mysterious "Man in Black," and narrowly avoids a nasty run-in with the government when aliens abduct his assailants. All of which just begins to suggest the degree to which UFO iconography has been absorbed into the cultural lexicon.

But that still doesn't answer the big question: why? Well, for one thing, UFOs are cool. Frank Schumacher, who oversaw Kodak's commercial, calls the UFO hook "a hip mechanism to reach a target customer who's younger, more wired, and more technologically savvy. And the spot fits in a nomenclature that appeals to that audience."

Thanks in part to the Ohio-based company Alien Workshop -- which has been manufacturing skateboards and T-shirts featuring a distinctive white alien head logo since the late '80s -- aliens have become a fashion statement. Perhaps, as in the Sonic Youth video, it's because they represent the supreme outsider -- the ultimate alternative, so to speak. Take a look at the stunts some of the Workshop's skaters pull on the company's promotional videos (an early video features exclusive tracks by Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis, recently fingered as an abductee in Rolling Stone) and you'll notice that both aliens and skaters have the capacity to defy gravity.

At the Boston skateboard and clothing shop Hanger 18 (a pun on the bunker at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that allegedly holds the remains of a crashed saucer), the connection is a bit more direct. "I'm totally down with the alien thing," says co-owner Matt Landon. "It's something that I kinda believe in. I haven't seen anything myself, but I know people who have, even right around my house. Alien clothing is just a trendy thing. There's a lot of little kids who come in here and buy the shirts, and they probably don't even think about what it means. But at the same time there's tons of people who come in here and say, `Yeah, man -- that shit is real,' and tell me crazy stories and everything."

Even outside advertising and film, UFOs are big business. The alien-autopsy video that aired on Fox last year -- destined to go down as the last great hoax of the 20th century and one of the best-marketed hoaxes of all time -- could gross its owner, Ray Santilli, as much as $18 million. In Nevada, where UFO lore has been common currency for half a century and the supernatural tourism industry is booming, the state rechristened a stretch of desert road known for its UFO sightings as an official "Extraterrestrial Highway" at a ceremony attended by Governor Bob Miller, the cast of Independence Day, and a panel of UFO experts. And while Nevada UFO meccas are going Hollywood, Disney is going alien crazy. Walt Disney World, the enchanted palace of American mythology, is crowning its renovated Tomorrowland with an attraction called " The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter," created with help from George Lucas. Disney even produced a promotional TV special -- hosted by Robert Urich and directed by the guy who created Cops -- that allegedly proves the government is suppressing information on aliens and UFOs.

"I think the main fascination the topic holds for people is the thrill of the unknown," says Mike Dash, editor of England's Fortean Times, sort of a thinking man's Weekly World News. "A willing suspension of disbelief can open us up to a liberating sense of wonder, even if we feel a lot of the subject matter has a prosaic explanation."

Even so, he says, the changing face of the world is reflected in the evolution of UFO imagery. "Since the late '60s there's been a growing unwillingness to place faith in all authority, be it government, religion, or science. In the 1950s, when the majority view was one of optimism and progress and science was supposed to make everything better, the first `contactees' were meeting tall, blond, Aryan superbeings who conveyed a woolly philosophical message of hope and universal brotherhood. Nowadays, in a world where you have lived through Watergate and Vietnam, and where science has contrived to open up the ozone hole and build ICBMs and has failed to halt the spread of AIDS, aliens tend to be small, sinister, and either indifferent or hostile to humanity. As we approach the millennium, I'd expect to see more bizarre cults, religious visions, and the like. So fascination with UFOs may say that we are still seeking the comforting knowledge that someone is in charge and has the power to change things -- but we are searching for that authority in a new place."

Writing on the abduction phenomenon in the New Yorker last year (July 31), critic James Wolcott also eyed the millennium, but with a more cynical lens. Citing the work of historian Hillel Schwartz, Wolcott pointed out how the ends of centuries traditionally "let loose visions of damnation, salvation, natural disaster, chaos, and barbarians. Since we're coming to the end of not only a century but a millennium, no doubt even more daemons and phantoms are about to flood the portals."

Back at Rex Loeb's museum, the artifacts of our obsession continue to pile up in a clutter -- flying-saucer model kits, newspaper clippings about Elvis's being abducted by aliens, a statement signed by a bit player from The X-Files that reads "The Truth Is in Here." As the pre-millennial deluge of UFO paraphernalia mounts, the question remains whether it will continue to add up to the stuff of myth and metaphor, or just so many fake flowers left out in the trash.

Carly Carioli will host an America Online chat about infamous UFO crashes this Monday, July 8, from 9 to 10:30 p.m. AOL users go to keyword "Boston Chat" and click on "The Esplanade."