Comic · Oxford University Press

The Last Humans

Ufos, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty

In The Last Humans, Alexander Wendt conducts a novel thought experiment that explores a future scenario in which global authorities conclude that Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) are extraterrestrials (ETs), and what this discovery would mean for both human security and the international state system. Drawing on the 2021 Pentagon UAP Report and international relations scholarship, Wendt contends that this situation would indeed be a national security threat, but not of the traditional, military kind. He argues that ontological shock from the state's impotence in the face of ET power could cause it to lose legitimacy and collapse--even if ETs never intervene in human affairs.