In 1987, in a unifying speech to the United Nations, President Ronald Reagan delivered an address without any precedent before or since. “Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize the common bond,” Reagan told diplomats from all over the planet. “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
This was far from the first time Reagan made such a reference. As chronicled in The New York Times, Lou Cannon — perhaps Reagan’s most acclaimed biographer — had learned that the 40th president ...
... was so stirred by the notion that extraterrestrial invasion would trump national differences that he floated the scenario upon meeting Mikhail Gorbachev at Geneva in 1985. This departure from script flummoxed Reagan’s staff — not to mention the Soviet general secretary. Mr. Cannon writes that, well acquainted with what he called the president’s interest in “little green men,” Colin L. Powell, at the time the national security adviser, was convinced that the proposal had been inspired by “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
Whether inspired by the 1951 science-fiction film or not, this triggered ridicule of Reagan that has endured for decades. In a 1991 review of one of Cannon’s Reagan biographies, Sidney Blumenthal — then still a journalist, not yet a cut-throat Clinton operative — cited this and other stories showing Reagan finding inspiration in movies as evidence of his ignorance and lack of intelligence. In 2013, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow called Reagan’s U.N. comments “one of the truly weirdest things” he had ever said.
In December, Harvard’s Nathan J. Robinson — editor of Current Events magazine — offered a different take:
Reagan’s U.N. speech is exactly correct. It’s a refreshing departure from the usual nationalist rhetoric to hear a president talking about the common bonds that unite humanity, and the cosmic insignificance of all our intraspecies conflicts.
One week after Robinson’s essay appeared, a staggering scoop appeared in The New York Times that indirectly offered another theory of how individuals might react to evidence of the existence of aliens — not with alacrity or with terror but with fear they’d be mocked if they shared the news with a skeptical world.
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