The House Oversight Committee held a hearing on November 13 on the subject of unidentified anomalous phenomena—that is, UFOs. Besides dropping some tantalizing crumbs for UFO obsessives, the hearing offered little information about alien life or bizarre enemy aircraft. Clare Coffey takes a hard look at the world of those obsessives and notes one of the most popular recent trends, which involves not science fiction but the mysterious antediluvian giants (in Hebrew, Nephilim) of Genesis 6:4:

It is easy to see why the Nephilim became a popular speculative touchpoint for UFO esotericists. The theory accounts for the high-handed way in which the UFO phenomenon seems to interact with its human targets, and provides a framework for many of the bizarre recurring motifs in UFO abductee accounts. . . . It offers a radically reworked vision of human history and the human present, as well as hints about the human future. It touches on the claims of major religions but, because it draws heavily on the apocryphal book of Enoch, incurs little danger of implicitly accepting the authority of any one religion.

But as you scroll through page after page, video after video, purporting to reveal the UFO–Bible–Nephilim connection and what it means, it is tempting to adopt the more capacious conclusion: that interest or belief in UFOs is purely and simply the search for a substitute for religion in a godless age. However, I do not think this is true.

How, then does Coffey explain these obsessions? As an escape from the mechanistic view of the universe provided by the scientific revolution—not as ersatz religion but as an antidote to science.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.