In a 2017 job interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow did not hesitate when he was requested if space aliens experienced ever frequented Earth. “There has been and is an current presence, an ET presence,” explained Bigelow, a Las Vegas-dependent authentic estate mogul and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a enterprise NASA experienced contracted to construct inflatable space station habitats. Bigelow was so specific, he indicated, mainly because he had “spent tens of millions and millions and millions” of bucks browsing for UFO proof. “I in all probability expended much more as an person than any person else in the United States has at any time used on this issue.”

He’s right. Due to the fact the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on fashionable-working day UFO lore—investigating every little thing from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. In fact, if you name a UFO rabbit gap, it’s a good guess the 79-yr-previous tycoon has flushed his riches down it.

But it’s also a very good guess that Bigelow would see this otherwise. Right after all, the two the media and Congress are now solemnly talking about a intended huge UFO cover-up by the U.S. government. There’s even proposed legislation to open the X-Data files! “The American general public has a appropriate to find out about technologies of mysterious origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Senate Bulk Chief Chuck Schumer of New York harrumphed in a new public assertion.

This legacy of plutocrat-backed fringe science comes as political partisanship, company propaganda, and conspiracy mongering carries on to sow distrust in science. 1 lawmaker, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, not too long ago claimed, “The devil’s been in our way,” claiming a “cover-up” of UFO stories by navy and intelligence businesses.

This kind of speak was after exclusively the area of World wide web fever swamps and late-evening conspiracy- themed radio displays. Now it is aspect of the political mainstream. This does not occur without having Bigelow (and other rich eccentrics) greasing the way with their unwanted fat wallets. For example, Laurance Rockefeller was undoubtedly the most distinguished UFO benefactor in the 1990s. The rich heir financed a lot of UFO panels, conferences and ebook-length experiences that stored traveling saucers in the public discourse.

From a scientific standpoint, all this revenue appears squandered on a zany quest that is akin to the lookup for Bigfoot or Atlantis. The same may be explained of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s current hunt for proof of extraterrestrial life off the coastline of Papua New Guinea, which cost $150,000 and was funded by cryptocurrency mogul Charles Hoskinson. Loeb’s polarizing statements of discovering traces of alien know-how and of having a a lot more open-minded and dispassionate approach to fringe science have garnered a certainly staggering total of media coverage, but his peers in the scientific neighborhood are rolling their eyes.

It is the most up-to-date stunt by Loeb, who also helms a controversial UFO challenge and earlier drew the ire of his colleagues with outlandish statements about the supposedly artificial character of an (admittedly weird) interstellar comet. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona Condition University, lately explained to the New York Periods: “What the community is viewing in Loeb is not how science operates. And they should not go absent imagining that.”

True, but as conversation researcher Alexandre Schiele wrote in a 2020 paper for the Journal of Science Communication, what individuals see about “science” is ordinarily on Tv set, specially by way of sensationalist programming on cable channels  these as Discovery and the misnamed Heritage Channel, where by viewers are “bombarded with aliens, ghosts, cryptids and miracles as though they are indisputable info.”

However, a great deal of this nonsense has, at a person position or a further, been masked with an aura of legitimacy by prestigious establishments. For case in point, the Massachusetts Institute of Technologies lent its imprimatur to an alien abduction conference in the early 1990s—which Robert Bigelow assisted spend for. A generous benefactor to academia, Bigelow also gave millions to the College of Nevada throughout the 1990s to analyze intended psychic phenomena, these as telepathy, clairvoyance and the possibility of life after death. (In new years, the billionaire has turned his focus and money largely to the afterlife.)

In fact, there is a prolonged custom of fringe science at prestigious universities. The doubtful field of parapsychology, for occasion, owes its existence to the a long time of pseudoscholarship churned out at Duke and Harvard University–and financed by wealthy non-public patrons. Some of our most illustrious thinkers, these as the eminent psychologist William James, have fallen for it. Perception in Martians sprang in substantial aspect from a rich amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, who created the observatory that even now bears his title. A University of Arizona psychology professor captivated criticism in modern years for getting dollars from the Pioneer Fund, established in 1937 by textiles magnate to encourage the racist science of eugenics.

Ultimately, this wacky stuff, be it ESP or UFOs,tends to make its way to Congress and the Pentagon. That’s how we end up with individuals in govt-funded systems who assert they can bend spoons with their minds or stroll through partitions. And that’s how we finish up with the Office of Defense giving Robert Bigelow $22 million from 2008 to 2011 to investigate UFOs, werewolves and poltergeists (severely) on a Utah ranch.

This would be the exact ranch Bigelow had now purchased after reading through a tale in a Utah newspaper about how the residence was teeming with UFOs, which includes a single “enormous ship the measurement of quite a few football fields.”

Does this sound acquainted? If so, that is for the reason that in the latest weeks, a selection of similar difficult-to-fathom, evidence-no cost UFO promises have echoed without the need of challenge through the halls of Congress and all about tv networks. Among the most eyebrow increasing: tales of recovered saucers, concealed alien bodies, and a football field–sized UFO spotted above a military services base.

Guess what: You can attract a line from these outlandish assertions to the vast repository of so-called scientific studies after funded by Bigelow. In fact, some of the individuals he contracted to compose them, these as astrophysicist Eric Davis, have acknowledged talking (powering closed doorways) with Congress.

To say UFO enthusiasm has swept Washington D.C. is not an overstatement. In modern years, there have been three Congressional hearings and two Pentagon task forces. NASA is about to produce its personal verdict right after a 12 months-long analyze. As Timothy Noah writes in the New Republic, “UFOs are fast getting to be the most-studied subject in American governance.”

Most likely, but Robert Bigelow will inform you that no person has researched the subject matter additional than him. He could possibly be right. What ever the latest UFO whistleblower suggests and no matter what Congress turns up, you can wager that Bigelow by now paid out for it.

This is an opinion and evaluation posting, and the sights expressed by the author or authors are not always people of Scientific American.