For a reference point here, think about the peculiar valence the word “alien” has in the Southwest—about what other group, besides extraplanetary visitors, it’s often applied to. Notice anything sinister there? Is it so crazy to imagine the UFO narrative as a kind of disguised psychic reckoning with the guilt-terror of white xenophobia? The kind of thing that you—millions of you; of us—can’t talk about, so you remake it as a myth? All those people, all those histories, erased; where do they go? What happens to your consciousness of them, when almost every feature of your lived reality tells
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