Bill Maher: UFO Skeptics Are the Real "Conspiracy Theorists"

​Last night, in the “New Rules” essay that ends episodes of HBO’s Real Time, comedian Bill Maher made his most direct and public statement yet about his belief that space aliens are currently visiting the Earth. Maher told his audience that the real conspiracy theorists are the skeptics who doubt an alien presence: “if at this point you don’t believe aliens are here and observing us, maybe you’re the conspiracy theorist.” He cited as proof the statements of “serious people” with military haircuts and the ambiguous musings of politicians like Barack Obama and Marco Rubio, both of whom later walked them back. Maher had previously implied a belief in alien visitation in January on his Club Random podcast.

The evidence Maher provided was poor even by ufology standards. He cited military UFO videos, debunked both by skeptics like Mick West and the government’s own UFO office, AARO. He cited Congressional UFO hearings, which presented exactly no provable evidence of space aliens and were held at the behest of ufologists selling books, documentaries, and lecture tickets. He cited David Grusch, whose claims exist beyond evidence and have long been discredited. He brought up Jimmy Carter’s UFO sighting in 1973, widely considered to be the planet Venus, but for Maher proof presidents have seen aliens.
 
Worst of all, he cited Robert Salas’s claims about Malmstrom Air Force Base. Salas had claimed that UFOs turned off the bases’ nuclear weapons in 1967, a claim for which AARO could find no evidence and which skeptics have long debunked. Maher did not mention that Salas also considers himself a UFO abductee and believes that aliens stole his sperm.
 
For Maher, however, the Malmstrom incident serves as an almost religious moment of turning to space aliens as a substitute deity. 

In 1967, an Air Force captain and nuclear crew commander who were there revealed an incident when something unidentifiable hovered over Malmstrom Air Base in Montana and then miraculously 10 nuclear weapons suddenly became disabled. Was something about to go terribly wrong and you stepped in? Whatever it is, please do more like that. Please feel free to beat our swords into plowshares because plainly we’re not going to do it. Get us off oil. Get us off our phones.

​Maher’s segment was remarkably similar to John Oliver’s bizarre 2024 Last Week Tonight episode that similarly abandoned the host’s usual skepticism and reason to embrace ufology’s wild claims uncritically. I can’t fathom what about this subject makes people set aside all standards of evidence unless it is faith.
 
For a man who is famously atheist, seeing Maher retreat to the pseudo-religious idea of space aliens as unseen saviors is both sad and entirely in keeping with the penchant of men of a certain advanced age (Maher is 70) to return to some form of spirituality as they contemplate their mortality. Aliens are substitute gods for atheists. And as with any religious belief, it exists outside of reason. In no other realm would Maher accept the word of U.S. government officials—especially Trump officials—at face value. In no other realm would he consider the U.S. government the keeper of truth.
 
And yet here he is making all the same assumptions as your cognitively dissonant ufologist, promoting government UFO conspiracies while rhapsodizing in the imagined day the government will reveal the glorious truth.
 
Worst of all, Maher seems to believe the ufology conspiracy that some unnamed force is orchestrating “disclosure” through Hollywood movies: “If you don’t believe me now, you will in June when Stephen Spielberg’s movie called Disclosure Day comes out. […] You get it? Disclosure. We’re at the disclosure moment in human history.”
 
No, we’re not. But we are at the stage of civilizational collapse when people feel powerless in the face of the madness of the elites and are grasping at any imagined salvation, even one that comes from the stars, and even when it makes them look like fools.