Idiots in the Desert

One day, I was browsing different episodes of a podcast I had just started listening to. It was about two people named Ross and Carrie. Ross and Carrie are journalists who research the most ridiculous and insane topics such as “straightening out” gay people, anti-vaccers, or UFO’s, and talk about them on their podcasts. The podcast was named “Oh No Ross and Carrie”, and as I was scrolling through the feed, I saw an episode named “Ross and Carrie make Contact (Part 7): Reptilian Edition.” This caught my eye, so I found Part 1, and hit play. As Ross and Carrie started talking, I started falling down a rabbit hole. A rabbit hole leading me to a UFO convention named “Contact in the Desert”. I fell down a rabbit hole to space.

Thousands of UFO enthusiasts, theorists, and hobbyists gather at one point on the earth. A single weekend-long convention hosts several panels, each with a few of the whopping 53 “experts”. Each convention-goer has to pay at least 215 dollars for a single pass, not including the extra cost of every workshop and panel that makes up the actual convention, which you have to pay extra for. In all honesty, Contact in the desert first seemed like a cesspool of nutjobs and morons. This “convention” promises things that cannot be promised, like UFO sighting expeditions that are guaranteed to spot UFOs. How could anyone be so detached from reality that they will pay upwards of $250 - not including traveling and lodging expenses - to go to some UFO conference hoping they will be delivered the lies they were promised? How is anyone so far from sanity that they will invest in a trip to a convention that financially benefits from lying to its customers? Do they think that the people behind this convention aren’t going to point out planes flying across the sky so that the customer thinks they saw a UFO? Well, they believe in aliens, so why not?

Predisposition - a liability or tendency to suffer from a particular condition, hold a particular attitude, or act in a particular way. When you gather a large group of people who all share similarly unscientific beliefs, who were all promised to see a UFO, and who are all probably worried that their money is going in vein if they don't, they will be predisposed to a belief. In the 2017 conference, there was a plastic bag being carried high up and around in the wind; these people started losing their minds about it. This group of people, who all seem to share equally dysfunctional logic, decided that this plastic bag must be a UFO. They were predisposed to believe it was a UFO. The only reason the conference didn’t go into full panic is because somebody stood up in the middle of the crowd and introduced the idea that it was not a UFO, but a plastic bag. The crowd began to calm down because they finally realised they were jumping to irrational conclusions.

Logic seems to be mostly lacking in these believers, except when this guy stood up and introduced it. The fact that the crowd was then able to calm down and realise that is was just a plastic bag means they are capable of at least basic logic, but they seem to make decisions based overwhelmingly on something else, something besides logic. Logic and emotion are the two bases off of which we humans make out decision making, so since these people clearly can’t really be driven by their logic, they must be driven by their emotion. An article from Psychology Today said, “Emotions drive 80% of the choices Americans make [...] when a person is hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, the percentage rockets up to 100% of the time” (Levine). The convention goers have to have some sort of emotional reason to believe these crazy ideas and to make financial risks to go to a scammy convention.

I believe that these people are hurt. Something happened to them at some point that had such and emotional impact that they are now a not only a UFO believer, but one who pays money to travel to a UFO convention. An example could be as simple as them realising the vastness of the cosmos, and falling into a serious existential crisis wondering why we are here and why we matter, or as complex and sad as losing their spouse and trying to find a way to cope with it. There is one man who lost his wife and claims to be able to speak with her in the afterlife through an earpiece that aliens planted in him one of the times he was abducted. If that is not the most depressing example of a complex emotional coping system, I don’t know what is. I think that generally these people are going through hard things and that they need some sort of belief system to rely on. UFO belief is a popular because not only is it a very broad subject, but it can explain the unexplainable concepts that people who can't believe in the reality of a situation need to have explained. It can help people through the loss of a wife when they can’t accept it. It can help them stay sane when they can’t accept the truth- that their soulmate is gone forever. It can answer questions like ‘why me?’, ‘why her?’, or ‘why now?’. It answers questions which would keep logical people who accept reality awake at night with grief and pain. If these believers accept UFOs, they can just be abducted while they sleep. At least it’s better than the pain of accepting reality.

Works Cited

Levine, Michael. "Logic And Emotion." Psychology Today. N.p., 2012. Web. 26 Oct. 2018.