The secret history of Marxist alien hunters

From the early days of the Russian Revolution through the space race and Cold War, a small but dedicated collection of communist UFOlogists believed in and sought out signs of extraterrestrial life, believing that discovery aligned with their goals of raising up the worker.

Via The Outline:

There were also Marxist Ufologists, mainly from the exiled Bolshevik tradition of Leon Trotsky. After Stalin consolidated power, Trotsky was exiled and became a fierce critic of the bureaucracy that swallowed the revolutionary foundations of the Soviet Union and turned the communist Third International into an agent of Soviet foreign policy. Trotsky's followers declared a Fourth International that continued to push for the communist future envisioned by the early Bolsheviks. The handful of Ufologists among them took Tsiokolvsky's assessment that "Time must pass until the average level of humankind's development is sufficient for nonearthly dwellers to visit us" as a messianic prediction. The aliens, like communism, linger in the air, waiting for us to make the world ready for them.

The secret history of Marxist alien hunters (The Outline)

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