Convenience Big Store: The US presidents who were obsessed with aliens

2 December, 2023

Behind the headlines

The celebrity diplomat who prized stability over all else

No US secretary of state ever achieved such celebrity as Henry Kissinger, says Niall Ferguson in The Wall Street Journal. A 1974 Newsweek cover depicted him as "Super K", a comic-book-style hero. Time called him "the world's indispensable man". And a 1972 Life magazine spread pictured him with a bevy of beautiful actresses. Yet nor has any modern statesman been so "vehemently criticised". Christopher Hitchens wrote a whole book accusing Kissinger of "war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places". Those accusations have "stuck like mud". No one should be excused a "proper reckoning of their life's work", says Gerard Baker in The Times. But Kissinger did more than almost anyone in the second half of the 20th century to "avert global war". At a time of extraordinary peril – the Cold War was the first conflict in history with the potential to "extinguish most life on the planet" – he played a critical role in de-escalating tensions while also "laying the groundwork for the West's ultimate triumph".

The problem is that Kissinger's "unsentimental view of global affairs" blinded him to the force of ideology, says Ben Rhodes in The New York Times. The Berlin Wall came down "not because of chess moves made on the board of a great game" but because "people in the East wanted to live like people in the West" – our "story" was better. And while a willingness to punish your adversaries might help secure short-term gains, in the long run people remember how you treat them. "The US has paid a price for its hypocrisy." Perhaps, but the whole point of Kissinger's diplomacy was to be "avowedly amoral", says David Ignatius in The Washington Post. "Stability was a goal in itself." Realism about national interest was the only reliable guide to policymaking; "idealism created more trouble than it solved". As Kissinger once put it, invoking Goethe: "If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter."

Heroes and villains

Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage/Getty

Hero

Dolly Parton, who has notched up the highest charting album of her career. The 77-year-old's 49th studio album, Rockstar, debuted at number three on America's Billboard 200 chart this week. It's not her best work, says Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times, but it does feature some "dream collaborators": Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Miley Cyrus, Elton John, and many more. "Anything for Dolly!"

Villains

The disgraced entrepreneurs in Forbes's "Hall of Shame", set up to atone for the magazine's questionable past endorsements. It has become a running joke that some of those featured on Forbes's "30 Under 30" lists of young notables are later exposed as criminals, including convicted fraudsters Sam Bankman-Fried and Martin Shkreli. To acknowledge this, Forbes has recently run a piece on the "10 most dubious people" it has honoured. "Regrets," it says, "we've had a few."

Hero

Lizzie the elephant, a wartime hero in Sheffield who has "finally been given the recognition she deserves", says The Star. The patriotic pachyderm came to the city as part of a travelling circus, but was conscripted at the start of World War One to help transport machinery, scrap metal and munitions when many of the horses that usually carried out the task were sent to the battlefield. She became something of a local celebrity, known for stealing food from passers-by, and has now been honoured with a blue plaque.

Hero

Omar Barbosa, a Mexican wine connoisseur who has beaten the French at their own game. The 39-year-old has become the first ever foreign winner of a prestigious wine-waiting competition in Bordeaux, which involved a written exam, tasting test and oral interview. Barbosa, who works for a nearby wine merchant, said: "My colleagues went mad when they learnt that a Mexican had won in Bordeaux."

Villains

Grey squirrels, which are the "Hamas of the squirrel world", according to DUP MP Jim Shannon. The Northern Irish politician made the controversial comparison during a parliamentary debate on controlling the grey squirrel population. He railed against the "very presence" of the silvery rodents, which have almost totally usurped Britain's native red squirrels since being introduced from North America in the 1800s.

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Property

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Global update

The Battle of Chinkiang in 1842, during the First Opium War. Watercolour by Richard Simkim

China is "poisoning" young Westerners

In the mid-19th century, says Luc de Barochez in Le Point, the British Empire, backed by the US and France, "waged two victorious wars against the Qing dynasty" in China to enforce the freedom of the opium trade. The drug, grown by the English in India, was sold to Chinese consumers on a vast scale, wreaking havoc among the population. To this day, Beijing teaches schoolchildren that the Opium Wars marked the beginning of a "century of humiliation" in which the Chinese bent under the yoke of foreign powers. Is China now taking revenge?

Earlier this month, the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok was briefly awash with videos of young Americans sympathising with Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America" – which he wrote to justify the 9/11 attacks – saying it had "opened their eyes". And "the poisoning of young Westerners is not only virtual". The Chinese play a crucial role in producing the drug fentanyl – an opioid, appropriately enough – which last year killed 74,000 Americans, equivalent to 200 overdoses a day. In Europe, meanwhile, clandestine Chinese banking networks play a vital role in laundering cocaine money. Beijing takes a much tougher line with its own citizens, of course: the sale of narcotics is "repressed without any mercy" and social media is strictly policed. The ancient warlord Sun Tzu advised his comrades: "to avoid what is strong, hit what is weak". China has clearly decided the West's weak spot is its youth.

Life

Princess Joan, and Sealand, in 1968. Instagram/@sealandgov

Pirate radio, Molotov cocktails and a coup d'état

Prince Michael Bates, reigning monarch of the Principality of Sealand, has a "unique plan" if the Royal Navy turn up to reclaim his micro-nation off the coast of East Anglia, says CBS News: "Make them a nice cup of tea." His family's tiny kingdom in the North Sea – no more than a platform roughly the size of two tennis courts – was declared an independent state in 1967 by his father Roy, an "enterprising, swashbuckling World War Two veteran". Hastily built during the war to give marines somewhere to shoot at German warplanes from, it was abandoned soon afterwards. In the 1960s, Roy Bates took it over, set up Britain's first 24-hour pirate radio station, and declared his wife Joan a princess.

The newly ennobled Bates family went all-in on the "trappings of statehood", fashioning a flag, stamps, currency, passports and a motto: E mare libertas, "From the sea, freedom". They also dealt with periodic invasion attempts from "rivals and buccaneers". As teenagers, Prince Michael and his sister regularly fired warning shots at approaching craft and tossed Molotov cocktails overboard to defend their home. In 1978, a band of "rogue German and Dutch lawyers and diamond merchants" launched a coup d'état with plans to turn Sealand into an offshore casino, arriving by helicopter and tying up Prince Michael. Soon after they released him, he returned with his father, "fully armed", and took the platform back by force. After a short spell hosting dodgy internet companies – including gambling and porn, but they drew the line at a firm arranging organ transplants – the family now makes a living selling noble titles. Become Lord or Lady of Sealand for a mere £20 here. Become a Duke or Duchess for £500 here.

Inside politics

Aliens blowing up The White House in Independence Day (1996)

The US presidents who were obsessed with aliens

Ronald Reagan was obsessed with aliens, says Garrett Graff in Politico. He reportedly spotted a UFO from a plane in the 1970s, and when running for president pledged to make "every piece of information" the government had on the subject public. At a meeting in Geneva in 1985, he asked Mikhail Gorbachev whether the Soviets would help if the US were attacked by "someone from outer space". ("No doubt about it," Gorbachev replied.) Reagan's staff found his constant references to alien invasions in speeches exasperating. Colin Powell, his national security advisor, would "roll his eyes" and say: "Here come the little green men again."

But Reagan wasn't the only US president with "more than a passing interest" in extraterrestrial life. Harry Truman demanded a quarterly report on UFO sightings. Jimmy Carter, much like Reagan, promised to "open up the nation's UFO secrets" after seeing one himself in 1969. Bill Clinton expressed an interest in aliens "as soon as he'd taken the oath of office", telling his newly appointed associate attorney general: "I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?"

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Fashion

Diana, Princess of Wales, rocking a tartan look in 1981. Anwar Hussein/WireImage/Getty

The idea that there's an "ancient tradition" of Highland Scottish clans having their own tartans is overblown, says Daniel Kalder in UnHerd – there were regional variations but no "strict family taxonomy". When George IV visited Scotland in 1822, the novelist Walter Scott essentially made up the tradition for the king's welcome festival, presenting him with clan representatives "wearing their supposedly traditional and unique" fabrics. So there's nothing wrong with all the "new" tartans that have been created since. These include official tartans for 27 US states; an "American Dream tartan", which features 76 blue threads for the year 1776 and 13 red stripes for the original colonies; a "Climate Emergency tartan"; Obama and Trump family tartans; and a rather sombre "Second World War-themed Russian Arctic Convoy tartan", commissioned by the Russian Consulate in Edinburgh.

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