Bill Maher Claims Aliens Visiting Earth, "Want Us to Know That They're Here"

​Bill Maher has long been UFO-curious, and in recent years he increasingly implied that he believes space aliens are currently visiting the Earth. Nevertheless, it was especially shocking to see him state his acceptance of the unevidenced mythology of ufology as directly as he did on the January 26 episode of his Club Random podcast, while interviewing Age of Disclosure filmmaker Dan Farah:

It looks to me like the aliens kind of want us to know that they're here. It doesn't look like they’re hiding it much anymore. They may be saying, “Jesus Christ, these people are taking a long time to come around to what is fairly obvious,” you know? And as I said to you on Real Time, I’m not that upset about it because obviously they have the capability to do great harm and they’re not. They seem to be just monitoring. 

​Despite this apparent belief, his political opinions seem almost wholly unaffected by the imminent revelation of extraterrestrial visitors. Maher also referenced the conservative claim that the aliens are actually fallen angels or demons: “I talked about it on my show with Marjorie Taylor Green who concurs with some of the people in the Defense Department who think aliens, they’re demons. We’re talking about angels and demons, fallen angels is what Marjorie Taylor said.”
 
Farah, for his part, confirmed the conclusion I drew in my review of Age of Disclosure that the driving force behind effort to push UFOs on Congress and the public is investment in energy research. He discussed nuclear fusion technology as a field that supposedly will benefit from UFO technology, and he and Maher debated whether the oil industry is trying to suppress UFO disclosure to avoid losing market share to UFO-derived fusion technology. They also openly fantasized about Donald Trump confirming the existence of aliens (but only if he could use it to get rich off crypto, Maher joked), comparing the change in attitude it would engender to the emperor Constantine declaring Christianity the one true faith.
 
If that weren’t enough, the 46-year-old Farah also talked about his adolescent love of 1980s and 1990s alien-themed science fiction, and how his desire for those movies and TV shows to be true led him into ufology. This opened into a broader conversation between Farah and Maher about science fiction as a way to prepare humanity for the next technological revolution, and both men seem to badly understand the history of science fiction while also taking a highly selective approach to which sci-fi “predictions” qualify as intentional. (Minority Report? Absolutely preparing you for touch screens. Invasion of the Body Snatchers? “Science fiction [that] definitely hurts the cause.”)
 
It was rather shocking to me how much both men seem to think that Steven Spielberg isn’t just a filmmaker whose brain got soaked in 1970s UFO books—despite the ample evidence from his own papers, production notes, and pre-production recordings discussing exactly that—but is somehow either on the government’s or the aliens’ payroll to prepare the way through mass entertainment. Farah claimed Spielberg purposely encoded elements of the UFO mythos into his movies in ways that even the audience would not immediately pick up upon as an act of “genius” to lay the foundation for public acceptance of them, specifically referencing a brief allusion to alien abduction in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). “And I think he put that in the movie because he knew that the abduction situation is a real situation and wanted to at least address it a little bit, but did in a way, a genius Spielberg way, where a lot of people don’t even pay attention to it.”

​How deep in the rabbit hole is he? Close Encounters came out eleven years after The Interrupted Journey made the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction a standard part of UFO lore, two years after The UFO Incident TV movie brought their story right into American living rooms, and two years after Travis Walton made headlines with his abduction claim, earning the National Enquirer’s “UFO case of the year” prize at a time when the Enquirer was the biggest paper in America. There was no need for sleight of hand.
 
The interview concluded with Farah admitting that he left alien encounters and anal probes out of his documentary to avoid the “slippery slope” of the audience not taking it seriously, even though he personally believes in them. Farah, refusing to understand how culture works or why cultural tropes cycle in phases, instead concluded that the popularity of anal probing during the 1980s was not due to imitation of imagery from Whitley Strieber’s Communion but rather from a “phase” in which the aliens needed a decade to learn about “the human body.” Through the anus. “They did need to find out what a human body was like, and maybe that is what the anal probes were all about,” he said.