Bear with me for a minute, this one’s kind of weird.

Four years ago this Thursday, the New York Times broke one of the most incredible stories in modern history: UFOs are real, our government has secretly studied them for decades, and we have absolutely no idea what they are. The news exploded, as any child of the “truth is out there” 90s would expect, and then in less than a week the story vanished from public consciousness. At first, I found this confusing. But then, as the trend continued with each subsequent breaking UFO story, I began to find it disturbing. Here was a potentially existential threat that somehow evaded prolonged, serious focus. Why?

The global UFO discourse was and remains a kind of amnestic social phenomena, which I wrote about, along with the entire class of “damned data” we have repeatedly, for centuries, forgotten we know, in a piece called Fire in the Sky. Central to the conversation is something called an antimeme, as defined by the author Qntm in his fantastic story There is No Antimemetics Division. Imagine — if you can — “an idea with self-censoring properties.” If a thought or fact, no matter how incredible, by its nature faded from memory faster than it spread, it would effectively be invisible. I’ve been thinking a lot about invisible ideas these last few weeks, and the obvious question: how do you fight what you can’t see? How do you save what you can’t remember?