In a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow didn’t hesitate when he was requested if area aliens had ever visited Earth. “There was and is an present presence, an ET presence,” mentioned Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based actual property mogul and founding father of Bigelow Aerospace, an organization NASA had contracted to construct inflatable area station habitats. Bigelow was so sure, he indicated, as a result of he had “spent tens of millions and tens of millions and tens of millions” of {dollars} trying to find UFO proof. “I most likely spent extra as a person than anyone else in america has ever spent on this topic.”

He’s proper. For the reason that early Nineteen Nineties, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating every part from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Certainly, if you happen to identify a UFO rabbit gap, it’s a great wager the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it.

However it’s additionally a great wager that Bigelow would see this otherwise. In any case, each the media and Congress are actually solemnly discussing a supposed huge UFO cover-up by the U.S. authorities. There’s even proposed laws to open the X-Information! “The American public has a proper to find out about applied sciences of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Senate Majority Chief Chuck Schumer of New York harrumphed in a latest public assertion.

This legacy of plutocrat-backed fringe science comes as political partisanship, company propaganda, and conspiracy mongering continues to sow mistrust in science. One lawmaker, Consultant Tim Burchett of Tennessee, lately mentioned, “The satan’s been in our method,” claiming a “cover-up” of UFO stories by army and intelligence businesses.

Such discuss was as soon as solely the area of Web fever swamps and late-night conspiracy- themed radio exhibits. Now it’s a part of the political mainstream. This doesn’t occur with out Bigelow (and different rich eccentrics) greasing the best way with their fats wallets. For instance, Laurance Rockefeller was undoubtedly essentially the most outstanding UFO benefactor within the Nineteen Nineties. The rich inheritor financed quite a few UFO panels, conferences and book-length stories that saved alien craft within the public discourse.

From a scientific standpoint, all this cash appears wasted on a zany quest that’s akin to the seek for Bigfoot or Atlantis. The identical may be mentioned of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s latest hunt for proof of extraterrestrial life off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which value $150,000 and was funded by cryptocurrency mogul Charles Hoskinson. Loeb’s polarizing claims of discovering traces of alien know-how and of getting a extra open-minded and dispassionate method to fringe science have garnered a really staggering quantity of media protection, however his friends within the scientific neighborhood are rolling their eyes.

It’s the newest stunt by Loeb, who additionally helms a controversial UFO mission and beforehand drew the ire of his colleagues with outlandish claims concerning the supposedly synthetic nature of an (admittedly bizarre) interstellar comet. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State College, lately informed the New York Occasions: “What the general public is seeing in Loeb shouldn’t be how science works. They usually shouldn’t go away considering that.”

True, however as communication researcher Alexandre Schiele wrote in a 2020 paper for the Journal of Science Communication, what folks see about “science” is normally on TV, notably through sensationalist programming on cable channels  comparable to Discovery and the misnamed Historical past Channel, the place viewers are “bombarded with aliens, ghosts, cryptids and miracles as if they’re indeniable info.”

Sadly, a lot of this nonsense has, at one level or one other, been masked with an aura of legitimacy by prestigious establishments. For instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise lent its imprimatur to an alien abduction convention within the early Nineteen Nineties—which Robert Bigelow helped pay for. A beneficiant benefactor to academia, Bigelow additionally gave tens of millions to the College of Nevada through the Nineteen Nineties to review supposed psychic phenomena, comparable to telepathy, clairvoyance and the opportunity of life after dying. (In recent times, the billionaire has turned his consideration and money largely to the afterlife.)

Certainly, there’s a lengthy custom of fringe science at prestigious universities. The doubtful subject of parapsychology, as an example, owes its existence to the many years of pseudoscholarship churned out at Duke and Harvard College–and financed by rich non-public patrons. A few of our most illustrious thinkers, such because the eminent psychologist William James, have fallen for it. Perception in Martians sprang largely from a rich newbie astronomer, Percival Lowell, who constructed the observatory that also bears his identify. A College of Arizona psychology professor attracted criticism in recent times for taking cash from the Pioneer Fund, based in 1937 by textiles magnate to promote the racist science of eugenics.

Finally, this wacky stuff, be it ESP or UFOs,makes its method to Congress and the Pentagon. That’s how we find yourself with folks in government-funded packages who declare they’ll bend spoons with their minds or stroll by way of partitions. And that’s how we find yourself with the Division of Protection giving Robert Bigelow $22 million from 2008 to 2011 to examine UFOs, werewolves and poltergeists (severely) on a Utah ranch.

This may be the identical ranch Bigelow had already purchased after studying a story in a Utah newspaper about how the property was teeming with UFOs, together with one “big ship the dimensions of a number of soccer fields.”

Does this sound acquainted? If that’s the case, that’s as a result of in latest weeks, quite a few related hard-to-fathom, evidence-free UFO claims have echoed with out problem by way of the halls of Congress and throughout tv networks. Among the many most eyebrow elevating: tales of recovered saucers, hidden alien our bodies, and a soccer subject–sized UFO noticed over a army base.

Guess what: You possibly can draw a line from these outlandish assertions to the huge repository of so-called research as soon as funded by Bigelow. In actual fact, a number of the folks he contracted to put in writing them, comparable to astrophysicist Eric Davis, have acknowledged talking (behind closed doorways) with Congress.

To say UFO enthusiasm has swept Washington D.C. shouldn’t be an overstatement. In recent times, there have been three Congressional hearings and two Pentagon activity forces. NASA is about to ship its personal verdict after a year-long examine. As Timothy Noah writes within the New Republic, “UFOs are quick changing into the most-studied subject in American governance.”

Maybe, however Robert Bigelow will let you know that no one has studied the subject greater than him. He may be proper. Regardless of the newest UFO whistleblower says and no matter Congress turns up, you possibly can wager that Bigelow already paid for it.

That is an opinion and evaluation article, and the views expressed by the writer or authors should not essentially these of Scientific American.