On a cold December night in 1950, red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy spent a charity dinner at Washington’s Sulgrave Club trading insults with liberal journalist Drew Pearson. McCarthy had attacked Pearson on the floor of the Senate, calling for a boycott of his radio show. Pearson had attacked McCarthy on air and in his newspaper column, accusing the senator of lying about communist infiltration of the American government. McCarthy had recklessly accused the State Department of harboring hundreds of communists, sparking a massive investigation and an ongoing purge. After dinner, the two ran into each other in the cloakroom and their conflict turned physical. McCarthy kneed Pearson in the groin, and Sen. Richard Nixon had to pull McCarthy off Pearson.

After the fight, McCarthy’s Republican colleagues congratulated him for taking down a liberal. Pearson sued McCarthy, claiming injury, and for months McCarthy publicly accused Pearson of communist sympathies.

Then things got weird.

Pearson soon extended their feud into the realm of science-fiction flying saucer stories and, in so doing, set up a symbolic, supernatural dimension to ideological battles still playing out on cable TV today. That strange mix of McCarthyism and UFOs continues to poison the History Channel and Fox News, a Trojan horse hiding political radicalization under silly alien stories. It sounds funny until you realize that the QAnon conspiracy theory—involving Donald Trump, space aliens, and cannibal pedophiles, among other absurdities—believed by many of the Capitol insurrectionists is founded on exactly this same mix of political propaganda and pseudoscience. And that is by design.

It started out innocently enough. Pearson portrayed himself in the 1951 flying saucer movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the movie, the government panics when an alien with leftist ideas lands on Earth. Audiences got to see Pearson play the anti-McCarthy, the voice of reason, calm and sane in the face of panic. In response to the movie, McCarthy called Pearson a “communist tool.” But anti-communist conservatives didn’t just hate the movie because Pearson was in it. The Day the Earth Stood Still told the story of an extraterrestrial who descends to Earth, displays nearly supernatural power, dies at the hands of soldiers, and is resurrected. Before his ascension back to the heavens, he talks about space as a paradise of pure reason, ruled over by impassive robots unhappy about Earth’s nuclear weapons. He gives humans a choice: live in peace or be destroyed...

https://slate.com/technology/2021/02/ufos-mccarthy-qanon-aliens-conspiracy-theories.html