aliens and communism

Just to put some words into the universe, some thoughts after a conversation with my cousin, F___, who spoke of alien visitors and the monomyth and Jimmy Carter's unfulfilled promise to share UFO intelligence, and how Julian Assange managed to get (only) house arrest because he threatened to expose the Secret Space Program. The thing is, as I told my cuz, I'm not opposed to people getting into "conspiracy" ideas, even ones that suggest that the earth has been "visited" by E.T.s (numerous times even), as long as these ideas lead people to some kind of positive and SOCIAL consciousness, perhaps to the idea of species-being or even the one-ness of all nature. Because these things can be part of a radical and transformative upheaval that destroys capitalism (and its necessary commodity fetishism) in the process of creating human relationships based on mutual respect, love, sharing of resources, etc, etc.

So, do they? Does the "alien" discourse lead in that direction? After watching a disgusting film like "Independence Day," where patriotic soldiers and government officials save the world, I would say no. Perhaps after hanging out in a Humboldt County hippie house, where totally nice people live in totally nice little bubbles, I would again say no. But I do think of people like John Lilly, the dolphin scientist, or Terrence McKenna, the mushroom eater, and the seemingly natural anti-authoritarian bent of most people who like to talk about these things, and this makes me think perhaps there is something there after all. Maybe if an obsession with aliens is an escape from the hard problems of our time there is a need for some kind of escape in order to prepare ourselves to better confront these problems. Isn't it also a problem that people do not have time to imagine?