Charlotte Allen writes:
That was because the proposition that we earthlings have been visited by intelligent extraterrestrial beings, whether from nearby planets or from distant stars, has been an idea with a trajectory, and that trajectory—for nearly everyone apparently except the Clintons and John Podesta—seems to have drawn to a close, perhaps around the time that the original X-Files folded on television. For some reason, either the aliens have lost interest in us or we (except for a small, UFO-fixated minority) have lost interest in the very idea that they could be interested. Polls show that at least half of Americans believe in extraterrestrials, but there hasn’t been a dramatic spaceship sighting, much less a Close Encounters-style full-fledged abduction, for decades. (…)
UFOs are like Bigfoot: People stopped finding traces of the elusive yetis once the formidably forested Pacific Northwest got more developed during the 1980s. And perhaps, from a Jungian perspective, people’s dislocated religious yearnings have simply fastened onto other things: near-death and post-death experiences, life-extension, or colonizing Mars, which is in fact almost as fantastical a prospect as meeting a little green man from Mars.
Twelve days before the Hills described their alien encounter under hypnosis, an episode of the show titled “The Bellero Shield” aired, and it featured a peaceful gray alien with large eyes and no nose.
This doesn’t explain how they came up with the original idea that they’d been abducted, however.
