Explainer Culture and the UFO Reboot
Since 2017, UFOs have been rebranded as UAPs – and Hollywood trends may be partly to blame.
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Does art imitate life, or is it the other way around? The truth is both. Culture and media form a feedback loop – what we consume shapes how we see the world, and how we see the world shapes the stories we tell. The current media trends of an age inform the world views of its people and vice versa, even down to how they perceive otherworldly phenomena.
Since the creation of cinema, movies have long been a critical driver of culture, and the most significant films reflect the attitudes and concerns of their current society. At present, culture is gripped by the explainer movie, as Max Read details in his Washington Post column, "Hollywood gave nerds exactly what we wanted. Oops."
"Over the first quarter of the 21st century, the transformation of the entertainment business by the internet and Hollywood's obsession with preexisting intellectual property have helped turn almost every blockbuster into an explainer movie. An expansive mythos and sophisticated world-building are all but production requirements for these tent-pole releases," Read writes.
While audiences have always enjoyed diving into the lore of their favorite fictional worlds, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) catapulted the explainer movie into the stratosphere of the zeitgeist. It began first with needing to understand the background of the comics being adapted, then quickly evolved into needing to have seen each other individual movie and TV show to understand the next major installment.
In 2017, the MCU released three major tent-pole films: "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," released May 5; "Spider-Man: Homecoming," released July 7; and "Thor: Ragnarok," released Nov. 3. The three helped to set up part one of its then series culminating movie "Avengers: Infinity War," which was released the following year in 2018 – an entire decade since 2008's "Iron Man" put the whole MCU in motion.
As Hollywood trained audiences to crave detailed world-building, the same hunger for explanation began influencing how people approach real-world mysteries.
A little over a month after the MCU's final release of 2017 on Dec. 16, The New York Times announced the reboot of the UFO phenomenon as UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) with the article "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program."
Most recently, on Nov. 11, 2024, the United States Congress released its latest tent-pole in the UAP series, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth."
While perhaps these two dots have no right to be connected, there are similarities between the culture's 16-year obsession with the explainers and the UAP/ disclosure movement.
Into the UAPverse
Film and UAPs are not one-to-one comparisons (UFOs, on the other hand), yet via explainer culture, we can see how one has potentially led to the manifestation of the other.
Notably, explainer culture may explain why UFO disclosure advocates, who for decades prior to 2017 had been largely distrustful of the government, changed their tune with UAPs. A core component of explainer culture is having authorities who can dictate the meta or lore of a movie's universe. This can be directly from the studio or through the movie itself, but often there is a subindustry that drip-feeds steady explainer content to an audience. From video essays that clarify a film's ending to books that dissect and detail every minutia of a fictional universe's lore.
Likewise, UAPs now have authoritative voices and content creators, like Jeremy Corbell and Luis Elizondo, who detail the lore of shady Pentagon programs and share blurry footage of things in the air – things they're more than happy to explain.
In turn, the UAP audience is more than happy to listen. Reddit's UFO subreddit has 2.9 million members and the megathread for the latest congressional hearing has over 4,400 comments, with 3,500 upvotes. For reference, the top post of all time on the subreddit has 11,000 comments and 55,000 upvotes. What is it? The Debrief’s 2023 article detailing David Grusch's claims of retrieved alien aircraft.
The popularity of these UAP discussions highlights how just as audiences have embraced explainer media to decode fictional universes, they now dissect government testimony and footage with the same enthusiasm. The UAP audience yearns for exposition, and if we look culturally, it's no wonder why. Since 2008, people have been fed almost nothing but explainer media in one form or another and have become used to a lack of magic and mystery in their major mainstream media narratives.
Before the rise of the explainer, movies did not always have the compulsion to explain how everything on screen worked. Magic and mystery were often employed to facilitate and advance a movie's story. Sometimes it was literal magic, or in the case of 1984’s “Gremlins,” it’s water and being fed after midnight which causes the already mysterious mogwai to multiply and transform into the titular monsters. There is no explanation for why getting wet makes a mogwai multiply, nor why being fed after midnight causes them to turn into monsters. Yet, theses bits of supernatural wonder helped propel the movie into a critical and commercial success.
Today, explainer culture leaves no room for mystery or imagination – the backbone of successful storytelling. It's why some film critics have begun to turn against lore and explainer movies’ over emphasis on worldbuilding.
Thus, it may not be a coincidence that the UFO heyday coincided with stories willing to weave magic and mystery into their plots, while UAPs have risen during the age of explainer culture. In other words, is it any wonder that UFOs – a phenomenon so mysterious, varied and baffling in its presentation that it birthed the term High Strangeness – would be rebooted into something easily digestible for today's explainer-hungry audience?
Gone is the mystery and intrigue of the broader UFO phenomenon, which encompassed everything from the contactees of the 1950s to terrifying alien abductions and more. What once was a rich, elusive mystery has been explained away in the 2017 reboot as mere machines from another civilization – always the weakest plot line of the original UFO narrative.
Roll Credits
If we continue with the thought, the next question becomes, why? The reason Hollywood reboots intellectual properties (IP) is profit-driven. There is the chance to wipe the slate clean and start something new but familiar for audiences, making it a safer bet they'll buy into the "new" product.
It may have been recognized that the UFO phenomenon could benefit from something similar. The subject had become chaotic, like a series with too many directors and no cohesive plan, with the government's doctrine of denial only making things worse. Contactees, abductions, little green men and school kids receiving warnings of environmental collapse – all fell under the UFO umbrella, but what was meta and what was fan fiction?
Maybe someone realized the UFO IP, albeit messy, still had potential – provided a voice of authority came in to put everything back on track. – and while the government had always been committed to denial, they also were the only real authority with any say on the UFO subject. Rebranding UFOs as UAPs allowed for the sanitization of the phenomenon, and by framing it as advanced technology rather than inexplicable strangeness, they could better control the narrative while tapping into society's appetite for an explanation to the decade’s long mystery.
Plus, it took little marketing effort, just swapping the 'F' and 'O' in UFO for an 'A' and a 'P,' with the audience's familiarity with the 'U' doing all the heavy lifting. Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon is to Unidentified Flying Object what “Spider-Man: Homecoming” (2017) is to “Spider-Man” (2002).
The acronym is also not the only familiar item borrowed from the old timeline with the UAP reboot. One central plot point is being carried over, the question of why these strange objects are here and what they want. UFO fans never got an answer to that question – left on a cliffhanger somewhere between malevolent gray aliens and O'Hare high strangeness.
One has to assume that whoever is in the director seat of the UAP cinematic universe has a plan, but the exact way it will be wrapped up is anyone's guess. One thing’s certain, like their cinematic counterparts, the budgets will no doubt be huge.
Thankfully, for those who pine for the classics, there is hope that the UAP series will fizzle out. There are signs that explainer culture may be beginning to wane, given the sluggish returns on this year's superhero movies. As Read writes, people may be looking for a return to mystery in their movies.
"Sci-fi fans who once complained about the simplicity and laziness of world-building in Hollywood blockbusters should be basking in the riches of an entertainment industry producing fastidiously conceived universes. But even we know it's become too much of a good thing: an overabundance of what can be explained, to the detriment of the stuff — a mind-warping image, a provocative question, the thrills and chills of a shameless genre exercise — that simply can't," he said.
What offers more thrills and chills than UFOs and their messy world of subplots and spinoffs?
While the allure of easily explainable UAPs is having its moment, it doesn't answer any of the overarching questions of the phenomena. Hollywood and government officials fail to understand that intrigue trumps all else in storytelling. If the UAP reboot fails to deliver a satisfying resolution, the timeless appeal of UFOs and their enduring mystery will reclaim the spotlight.
“What once was a rich, elusive mystery has been explained away in the 2017 reboot as mere machines from another civilization – always the weakest plot line of the original UFO narrative.”
This is the biggest travesty in some respects. We need that good ol fashioned high strangeness back!
Great take in this piece overall!