Where have all the UFOs gone? Blame movies
Sightings of unidentified flying objects have declined worldwide. This news, reported last week by The Guardian newspaper, should alarm and sadden anyone who has ever gazed in wonder at the sky above.
Two major websites for UFO reports — the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network — have both registered a steep drop in global sightings. The decline began in 2014, a peak year for UFOs, and by last year the total number of sightings had reached just 55 per cent of the 2014 tally.
The Guardian quotes several academics as to why this is happening, with various theories advanced. But the author of the piece, Philip Jaekl, reports the shocking truth out there may be that “more people don’t care anymore” about UFOs.
“As we are accustomed to being inundated with wild claims churned out by politicians, media and advertisers, the next report of a UFO is no more believed than the longrange weather forecast,” he writes.
If UFOs really are going the way of the dodo bird, I blame the movies. The rocket ships on sci-fi screens today are simply boring, whether they are piloted by earthlings or space aliens. These creations by model makers and specialeffects wizards fail to excite the eye and mind, and hence the imagination that would lead us to see wonderful strange things in the sky.
Consider the interstellar vehicles of the bug-faced invaders in The Predator, currently in theatres. They resemble flying Xbox game controllers — hardly something to set the pulse racing, unless you’re a 12-year-old gamer.
The ungainly extraterrestrial craft in last year’s Alien: Covenant resembled a giant flying shrimp. It was built by a race called the Engineers, who certainly weren’t artists. The human spacecraft in the film weren’t any prettier, just flying boxes with protruding gizmos.
Don’t get me started on the spaceships of Solo: A Star Wars Story, this year’s underachieving instalment of the neverending intergalactic soap opera. It’s heretical to say, I know, but I’m not a huge fan of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, which looks as if it was built out of Lego — and there actually is a Lego version of it. Any attachment I have to the Millennium Falcon is entirely nostalgic, not aesthetic. Remember when humans and aliens used to take pride in the design of their spaceships?
I’m thinking about the flying saucer in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the 1951 classic. It had the archetypal UFO: a sleek silver machine of sculpted curves, built to inspire awe wherever it flew, and not just because it was from another planet.
The saucer was matched with a killer robot, a behemoth named Gort who was so beautifully crafted — there was nary a bolt or rivet to be seen — that you could almost forget that he came here to kill us all.
Gort was almost as cool as the Maschinenmensch, the female robot in Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis that, not so incidentally, inspired the design of C-3PO in the Star Wars franchise.
Lang also had great taste in spacecraft design. Check out his beautiful rocket to the moon in Frau im Mond (Wom- an in the Moon), his 1929 sci-fi melodrama. This silent film offered a remarkably prescient view of how a real lunar mission would work, including the idea of multiple rocket stages.
A big part of the blame for the slump in good rocket design is that reality caught up with fantasy for sci-fi writers and filmmakers. There’s no atmosphere in deep space, so you don’t have to worry about friction. You can make spacecraft as lumpy and misshapen as you wish, and many science fiction designers have taken that science fact to heart. The Lunar Module (LM) used for the Apollo missions was a real ugly duckling. In mechanical terms, it was crafted like a Swarovski crystal; in physical terms, it was as unprepossessing as a tin garden shed.
The Volkswagen company made note of this fact in a 1969 advertisement that ran after that year’s Apollo 11 lunar landing: “It’s ugly, but it gets you there,” ran the adline, equating the LM to Volkswagen’s utilitarian Beetle, which actually is a beautifully designed vehicle.
But Stanley Kubrick didn’t let reality get in the way of great design when he depicted a lunar visit in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out a year before Apollo 11. The Aries moon lander in the film is similar to Apollo’s LM, except it’s a gorgeous orb that refuses to put utility ahead of beauty.
Kubrick believed in UFOs. When he looked to the sky, as might we all, he expected to see wonderful machines, not flying scrap heaps. Otherwise, what’s the point of even looking up?