The Alien Epistemological Crisis

In 1947, an alien spaceship allegedly crashed in the desert just outside of Roswell, New Mexico. The city now hosts an annual International UFO Festival to commemorate the event; leading UFO experts gather to discuss different versions of this crash, including what are clearly viewed by some attendees as a “better” story – that aliens really did crash in Roswell and the U.S. government conspired to cover it up. What can this festival tell us about wider American society, and especially about the success of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign?

This event was held on March 22, 2021.

Speaker bio

Laura Thursby is a Sessional Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University and in the Cultural Studies Department at Trent University, where she earned her PhD in 2019. Her research seeks to expand upon our understandings of American history by reading the figure of the alien as a symptom of the social, cultural, political, environmental and technical landscapes of the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.