What Was At The Root Of Ronald Reagan’s Obsession With Alien Invasion?

Before we delve into a Reagan-era mystery that has remained under the radar for the last 35 years, it might be worth noting Hawley’s accidental timeliness regarding discussion of extraterrestrial life. It’s as if the showrunner had an inkling UFOs would come zooming back into the zeitgeist upon his series’ Season Two return. Since Fargo‘s October 12, UFO-filled premiere, “masterpiece” that’s “even better than Season One,” Hawley’s Coen-inspired anthology crime drama has also led some to wonder what the heck outer space has to do with the endless expanses of late ’70s era Midwest.

Hawley gave some hints about his inspiration for this season Hawley’s use of extraterrestrial motifs fit like glove with Coen-themed existentialism: that we are all just specs on an infinite map of existence.

Hawley also specifically mentions two films in the Coen canon, The Man Who Wasn’t There —both of which contain mysterious, otherworldly themes— that he felt gave him license to explore this territory in his show. While we can’t wait to see how Hawley brings together the Gipper and the Green Men, what we want to explore a bit today does not take place in this fictional universe; rather, this is about how extraterrestrial life affected the policies of the 40th President of the United States.

While Reagan is perhaps best remembered as a God-fearing conservative, he was, in many ways, just as paranoid as the rest of us when it came to foreign invaders — and I’m not just talking about the Soviet Union. In fact, despite Cold War tensions between the United States and the USSR, Reagan made a point to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to discuss more than just the banning of nuclear arms.

At a Geneva, Switzerland summit in 1985, President Reagan, who was an avid consumer of science fiction, Bruce Campbell), juxtaposed against even vaguer elements of UFOs can’t simply be narrative coincidence.

Even before Reagan flew to Geneva to talk turkey with Gorbachev about outer space, he was said to have been obsessed with the work of Steven Spielberg, particularly 1977’s Conspiracy theorists even tout Spielberg’s confirmation that, after viewing the film, the former president stood up and looked around the room before thanking the director and stating, “There are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true.”