We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters

Why do we still believe in UFOs, despite repeated efforts to dismiss them? For most of the twentieth century, reports of unidentified flying objects were treated as cultural error: cranks, hoaxes, late-night radio. Then, abruptly, the posture changed. The Pentagon released videos it could not explain. Navy pilots testified under oath about encounters that defied known technology. Intelligence agencies acknowledged that something unfamiliar appears to move through the skies. In We Want to Believe, Adam Kirsch, one of our most searching literary critics, traces the intellectual history behind this reversal to see UAPs not as fantasies or threats, but as a mystery closer to home. Moving from Cold War skeptics such as physicists Edward Condon and Carl Sagan—who helped define the boundaries of legitimate inquiry—to figures like Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt and astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who encountered anomalies from within official institutions, Kirsch follows how UAPs migrated from dismissed error to unresolved problem. Tracing how figures such as Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and astrophysicist Avi Loeb have reopened the question under radically different conditions, Kirsch draws on declassified documents, military encounters, and a wide literature of belief and skepticism to examine why some questions endure and what it means for modern societies when certainty fails and curiosity persists.