I have been fascinated by aliens and UFOs for as long as I can remember.

Not only by the physics or the engineering or the hard science of it all. What captivated me was the story. The mythology. The implications. What belief in something beyond us revealed about humanity and, more honestly, about myself.

I loved the grainy footage. The impossible lights. The old paperbacks with cracked spines and lurid covers. The government files. The pilots who sounded too sober and too measured to dismiss outright. The late-night documentaries that made the world feel larger and stranger than whatever room I was sitting in.

I liked knowing. Or at least feeling close to knowing. In some strange way, it was where I practiced my own version of faith. I lost my ability to believe in God when I was young. Not gradually, but violently. I experienced deep pain inside the Christian church as an adolescent, and whatever innocence or trust I once had in religion did not survive it. The older I became, belief itself began to feel impossible.

Heaven was fiction. Prayer felt hollow and fake. I could not pray to a God that had been used to hurt me. But I could believe in UFOs.

The idea that we were not alone made human life feel less sealed shut. Less trapped inside itself. If there were others out there, then maybe existence was still unfinished. Maybe humanity was not the final draft of consciousness stumbling through the dark.

Some of my warmest memories are tied to that feeling. I remember my father taking just me, not my older brother or my mother, to a matinee showing of “Mars Attacks.” We laughed the entire time. I remember feeling understood by him in a way that is difficult to explain now. He did not mock my curiosity or dismiss my fascination. He fostered it. UFOs became a conduit for love and acceptance. Wonder became a language we shared.

So when politicians, defense officials and intelligence agencies begin dangling the possibility of disclosure in front of the public, I cannot pretend I am immune to it. I feel the gravitational pull. I want the files. I want the clean, impossible answer hiding somewhere inside the blur.

And that is what makes this moment feel so disorienting. Because while all of this spectacle unfolds, I am also watching a country abandon vulnerable people in broad daylight.

I have spent much of my adult life working alongside people experiencing homelessness, severe mental illness and generational poverty. I have watched people stay alive because programs like Medicaid and SNAP existed. So when lawmakers propose cuts that would strip healthcare and food assistance from poor families, children and disabled people, I cannot treat it as abstract policy debate.

I know what happens downstream from those decisions. I know what untreated psychosis looks like. I know what hunger does to a body over time. I know what it means when someone reaches the pharmacy counter and learns they cannot refill medication because they lost coverage. Some people will die because of those choices.

At the same time, the machinery of power continues doing what it has always done: moving wealth upward through systems so complex and deliberately opaque that most people stop looking before they ever reach the end of the story. Public money disappears into private hands while ordinary people struggle to afford groceries.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, the government releases another blurry image from the sky. There’s another hearing. Another breadcrumb. Another impossible thing for people like me to stare at.

That is the part I have struggled to admit to myself. I can feel my own sense of wonder being used against me. Not necessarily through some grand coordinated conspiracy, but through something older and more familiar: spectacle. Narrative. Emotional timing. The understanding that human beings will always look upward when reality becomes unbearable to look at directly.

The child in me still looks up. The adult in me watches the hand reaching for my pocket.

This is not an argument against curiosity. I believe the public deserves transparency regarding unexplained phenomena. If there is truth being withheld, people have a right to know it. But I also believe power understands the psychological force of mystery. It understands that wonder can pacify people just as effectively as fear can. Maybe more effectively.

Because wonder feels good. Wonder gives meaning. Wonder briefly relieves the crushing gravity of ordinary human suffering. And maybe that is why this hurts a little, because some part of me still wants it to be true. I still want to believe there is something out there more advanced than us, wiser than us, capable of seeing humanity from far enough away to recognize how absurd our cruelty has become. Maybe they would look at a civilization where children go hungry while billionaires accumulate incomprehensible wealth and conclude we are still emotionally primitive.

We’re capable of reaching toward the stars but still unwilling to take care of one another on the ground. Or maybe the real story has never been about aliens at all. Maybe it has always been about us. About loneliness. About faith. About grief. About our endless capacity for wonder and our equal capacity for cruelty. About the unbearable desire to believe that someone, somewhere, might finally arrive with proof that humanity can become something better than this.

I still look up when the stories break.

I still want it to be true.

Sam Beckett is a Chestnut Hill resident.