Ontological Shock, Mental Kerning, and The New War of the Worlds

Our epistemological bubble is bursting, and that's not comfortable for any of us.

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When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the golden days of radio.

I bought a cassette tape with the “50 famous commercials of yesteryear,” which I would listen to again and again. I was fascinated with the way they would talk in their Mid-Atlantic accents, the way they would talk about and advertise the products, even the cutesy little jingles that seemed so wholesome to me as a child of the 80s. My fascination gave rise to my own weird talent for imitating the old-timey radio announcer voice, a video of which I posted on YouTube has actually gotten hundreds of thousands of views and even landed me a paid voiceover gig for a Hollywood Oscar special. Here’s the video that launched my mini-voiceover career:

With this in mind, it will come as no surprise that when I became aware of Orson Welles’1938 radio drama of War of the Worlds, I became entranced.

I would sit huddled over my little boombox in my bed and listen to the expert storytelling play out, imagining the fear and panic people must have felt if they tuned in late and did not know they were being treated to a reality show-style performance. When I was a kid, there was no internet to look things up, and the persistent rumor was that people were so panicked about the threat of alien invasion when they heard the broadcast that some of them actually killed themselves.

This turned out not to be true, but I didn’t know that. It only made the broadcast much more powerful. It was a thing imbued with a kind of deep, dark magic.

In the middle of a musical performance by Ramón Raquello and his orchestra, ostensibly broadcast from the Meridian Room in the Park Plaza in New York City, the audience would receive breaking news reports about anomalous phenomena originating from the planet Mars. The first went like this:

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell’s observation, and describes the phenomenon as (quote) like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun (unquote). We now return you to the music of Ramón Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York.

The music would return for a moment, and then another bulletin with another update would interrupt the performance. Each time, the note of urgency in the report would grow a little more shrill.

As it turned out, the fictional performance of a Martian invasion of earth began in none other than the state of New Jersey.

The 1953 film adaptation of War of the Worlds became a fascination too, after I saw it (not knowing what it was) playing on the television of Ethan Hawke’s character Ben Crandall in the opening scene of the 1985 alien first-contact movie Explorers.

To this day, the town of Grover’s Mill will forever be etched in my mind as the location where the Martians began their reign of terror.

When news reports of the real-life anomalous drones over New Jersey first broke a week or two ago, my mind immediately returned to the War of the Worlds broadcast. It was almost too perfect. Too on the nose. The part of my brain that’s always trying to write science fiction stories pinged my consciousness with the thought that perhaps there were non-human intelligences behind these drones, and that maybe, just maybe, they were hoping to trigger a cultural memory that many humans, with their short memories and even shorter attention spans, have already forgotten.

As stories of these mysterious drones that looked to be disguised as airplanes began to proliferate, one of the theories I saw floating around the social media space was this: perhaps NHI craft, using mimicry to look more like human craft, were attempting to acclimate us to their presence in a less alien and shocking way than appearing as they are, because they want us to know that they’re here.

As fanciful and fun (and potentially frightening) as that all may be, the truth is, we don’t know what’s going on up there.

But we all know it’s weird, and I can tell you that people are very interested in finding out. A thread I posted on the New Jersey drones on X yesterday has, as of this writing, 17.2 million views, 51,000 likes, 23,000 bookmarks, 11,000 retweets, and nearly 5,000 comments.

The public wants answers. And nobody is giving it to them.

What is being given to them is a particular brand of “aww shucks” gaslighting from the White House that, “my goodness,” nothing anomalous is occurring: