Paul Krugman explains here how to use a fictitious threat of space aliens to save the economy. The jist is: the economy was saved in 1941 by an external threat that united the country and allowed the huge deficit spending, that had previously been blocked by congressional republicans, to have near universal support. What they spent it on was actually negative social product--even less productive than Keynes example of paying people to dig a ditch and fill it up again--but they got greater than full employment by doing it. A threat from space aliens could clearly do the same thing today. By composing the threat appropriately, a clever fake could encourage needed infrastructure and social welfare spending.
Krugman says that this was in an old episode of the Twilight Zone (it turns out it's really from The Outer Limits), where a group of scientists faked an alien threat and tricked the world into world peace. This is an old story, rewritten by many science fiction writers. The first that I knew about was Arthur C Clarke's "Childhood's End", in which a benevolent alien race called the "Overlords" demonstrated that they could easily overpower any military on earth, illustrated the fraud of all religions and political and national partisans--generally with video--and convinced everybody to work together for the betterment of the world and succeeded in creating something fairly Utopian. In the end, Clarke goes off the rails with some ESP claptrap, but it gave me an idea, and for a high school creative writing class, I wrote a version of the same idea, where a group of scientists commandeered part of the TV network to convince the world that such an invasion had taken place and to pursue world peace (VietNam was still a very active war at the time). The "aliens" lived in zero G and could supposedly not tolerate earth's gravity or atmosphere, so they spoke over the TV in disembodied, godlike voices, destroyed military facilities, and commissioned "agents" (the conspiring scientists) to convey their wishes to the earthlings. It wasn't a very good story (I was only about 15). But I've never seen that episode of the Outer Limits, so I really did invent it. (update: I just watched "The Architects of Fear" on YouTube and like Clarke, they drifted off into ESP claptrap and also a morality tale about solving your problems without trickery. Sadly, troublemakers rarely have such morals)
The hard part would be getting real incriminating video like the "Overlords" did on the religions and partisans. I bet the NSA could help. Hacking the communications is clearly fairly easy, and once the "aliens" story has a little traction, unnecessary. Homemade UAVs and cruise and ballistic missiles could convince most of the world of the reality of the alien threat, and prior to 1980 or so probably everybody, but the US intelligence community of today could probably see through it. Again, NSA would be a good ally to have. A real, working death ray might do the trick.
One story along this line that I did read was "Occam's Scalpel", by Theodore Sturgeon. A brilliant but shallow businessman is convinced by a fake corpse and a story that invading aliens have been masquerading as human business leaders and intentionally polluting the atmosphere to terraform the earth in advance of their takeover--apparently the aliens need smog to live. The shallow businessman seems to have been convinced by the fraud and when the story ends, we're thinking that with his brilliance he might be able to reverse the pollution trend. There are, of course, lots of other stories about aliens solving our problems...perhaps the most famous is "The Day the Earth Stood Still"....klaatu barada nickto!
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