In Advance of the Landing

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An imaginary poster for an imaginary documentary film on the topic of this post (as envisioned by OpenAI’s DALL-E2)

I really owe it to my ten year-old self to revel in the affirmational spotlight that is increasingly being placed on the UFOs. In 1977, it seemed to me that wholly insufficient interest was being directed to what I considered to be (by far) the most important scientific question of the day. Now things are moving. We have front-page articles in the New York Times. A Harvard-centered international research team is dedicated to the Watch the Skies! maxim that I held so dear. Last week, a NASA-convened blue-ribbon panel of experts was stood up to solve the mystery posed by the elusive disks.

Despite all this, I’m somewhat concerned that we may have already reached (or even passed) Peak UFO. Last week the news also broke that the classic Enema of the State-era Blink-182 line-up has been reconstituted. Tom DeLonge has rejoined the band! A triumphant globe-spanning tour stretching into 2024 has been announced. A new Blink single has hit the airwaves, and take it from me, it’s no Vince-Neil-at-the-State-Fair effort to cash in on past glories. In short, it rocks.

Several years ago, DeLonge seemed to have little time for pop-punk. He was (at least publicly) heavily focused on his research, leaving his lead-guitar, lead-vocals roles in Blink to the capable, workmanlike, yet somehow, something’s not quite right here, hands of Matt Skiba.

Now, however, DeLonge’s efforts and emphases clearly appear to have shifted back into line. As the saying goes, “buy the rumor, sell the news.”

Still from Blink-182’s new video for Edges (check it out on Youtube)

The evergreen atavistic need for flying saucers was summed up perfectly by William S. Burroughs in his dust jacket blurb for Douglas Curran’s remarkable book, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space,

“In Advance of the Landing is a fascinating book that shows with compassionate insight how deeply man’s longing for extraplanetary contact is felt. If this is the Space Age, as I have written, and we are ‘here to go,’ these eccentric individuals may be tuning in, with faulty radios, to a universal message: we must be ready at any time to make the leap into Space.”