Owen K Waters – These days, the Vatican says that it’s OK to believe in extra-terrestrial aliens. The Vatican is not the only bastion of conservatism to have come out with such a policy in recent years. Both the British and the French governments have now released their extensive files on sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects.

Governments have been shy of talking about UFOs ever since the national panic that Orson Welles caused in America in 1938 when he read out an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel, ‘The War of the Worlds’ over the radio. The broadcast lasted 60 minutes without commercial interruption and was formatted as a series of news broadcasts about the progress of an ongoing alien invasion of Earth.

People who tuned into the radio show after the initial announcement about it being fictional were swept up into a panic that quickly spread across the country. The drama hit such a public nerve in those tense and anxious days leading up to World War II that millions of listeners became panic-stricken. The fallout in the press was enormous, with 12,500 newspaper articles appearing about this episode over the next month.

For decades since then, the fear of public panic in the face of a potential mass alien landing has helped to keep governments quiet about UFO incidents. There was also the nagging fear in the minds of politicians that, if extra-terrestrials landed and spoke words of wisdom, people might start following the ETs instead of the politicians. That fear has since been largely eclipsed by the fact that, today, very few people listen to politicians anyway!

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