I have not yet seen “Super 8,” and I am not sure I will see it, but I found the reasoning in the following excerpt from a post over at Partial Objects quite compelling:
“How ironic then that Abrams’s characters dismiss the Soviet hypothesis at the very moment that an exposé of Area 51 written by a journalist and published by a respectable and credible publishing house posits that very theory. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base presents a detailed history of the secret base where all UFO conspiracies converge. And the greatest of all UFO stories, the 1947 Roswell incident, is explained in the book as the deliberate crash landing of an experimental Soviet aircraft intended to demonstrate to the US government the aerospace technology that Stalin possessed after the Second World War.
But the more plausible explanation posited in Jacobsen’s book, that a Soviet aircraft of a then-advanced nature crashed on US soil in exactly the same way that many US spy aircraft crashed on Russian soil, was never considered. And the reason is simple. At that time, that truth that the battlefield of the Cold War was as much US airspace as Soviet airspace was far more dangerous and frightening than either aliens or a deceitful government. As a consequence, there was simply no place in the public sphere for the most likely explanation of these phenomenon to be presented, even as a space was made for the most outlandish ones.
It’s amazing when you consider the facts: every American learned that the Soviets were the first to put a satellite into orbit and the first to put a man into orbit. Soviet physicists were legenendary in Western circles. So why wouldn’t the societ Union they have spy planes and the like? In hindsight, it seems almost idiotically obvious to at least consider the possibility. Of course it’s not aliens and of course it isn’t weather balloons. It’s them spying on us. Duh.
But that hindsight only works because we have changed since the Cold War. The 80s sense of invulnerability and superiority has utterly evaporated. Today, we know we aren’t special. We are learning to be a second-place country. Back then we were great. We were the richest, the best, the most powerful. Reagan and Arnold kicked ass and all was right with the world. The only way we saw ourselves getting knocked down a peg was by fictional forces from the beyond — aliens, robots, monsters, and even the devil incarnate (all of which were the plots of very popular 80s films). Those were the stories we told ourselves believe the ones about us slipping off our pedestal were too crazy to believe.”
“Super 8” and Hindsight
I have not yet seen “Super 8,” and I am not sure I will see it, but I found the reasoning in the following excerpt from a post over at Partial Objects quite compelling:
“How ironic then that Abrams’s characters dismiss the Soviet hypothesis at the very moment that an exposé of Area 51 written by a journalist and published by a respectable and credible publishing house posits that very theory. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base presents a detailed history of the secret base where all UFO conspiracies converge. And the greatest of all UFO stories, the 1947 Roswell incident, is explained in the book as the deliberate crash landing of an experimental Soviet aircraft intended to demonstrate to the US government the aerospace technology that Stalin possessed after the Second World War.
But the more plausible explanation posited in Jacobsen’s book, that a Soviet aircraft of a then-advanced nature crashed on US soil in exactly the same way that many US spy aircraft crashed on Russian soil, was never considered. And the reason is simple. At that time, that truth that the battlefield of the Cold War was as much US airspace as Soviet airspace was far more dangerous and frightening than either aliens or a deceitful government. As a consequence, there was simply no place in the public sphere for the most likely explanation of these phenomenon to be presented, even as a space was made for the most outlandish ones.
It’s amazing when you consider the facts: every American learned that the Soviets were the first to put a satellite into orbit and the first to put a man into orbit. Soviet physicists were legenendary in Western circles. So why wouldn’t the societ Union they have spy planes and the like? In hindsight, it seems almost idiotically obvious to at least consider the possibility. Of course it’s not aliens and of course it isn’t weather balloons. It’s them spying on us. Duh.
But that hindsight only works because we have changed since the Cold War. The 80s sense of invulnerability and superiority has utterly evaporated. Today, we know we aren’t special. We are learning to be a second-place country. Back then we were great. We were the richest, the best, the most powerful. Reagan and Arnold kicked ass and all was right with the world. The only way we saw ourselves getting knocked down a peg was by fictional forces from the beyond — aliens, robots, monsters, and even the devil incarnate (all of which were the plots of very popular 80s films). Those were the stories we told ourselves believe the ones about us slipping off our pedestal were too crazy to believe.”
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Published in Commentary, Culture and Miscellaneous