Never had it so good...
JENNY RANDLES traces the many changes in ufology since 1957 – the UK’s happiest ever year
In 2017 – after an exhaustive survey of millions of texts published between 1776 and 2009 – a group of academics at Warwick University decided that 1957 was when happiness in the UK reached its peak.
Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister of the day, even said that most Britons had “never had it so good” in a speech he gave in July of that year, an assertion that was widely scorned. Yet post-war rationing had ended, the economy was booming, new technology meant people were able to afford houses and TVs, whilst labour-saving washing machines arrived to replace the scrubbing boards and mangles that I recall helping my mum to use for the daily wash. This era also saw the spread of computers, air travel, rock music and many new medicines that are all part of everyday life today. Yet nobody, other than the ridiculed Macmillan, seemed to register much of this or to see much cause for optimism during 1957.
Being five I only dimly recall the year. We moved from the country to urban Manchester, and at nursery school I faced daily cod liver oil and afternoon naps in ex-army blankets with bunny rabbits embroidered on them to distract from the scratchiness. I also saw the ‘cover-up’ over the major fire on 10 October at the first ever nuclear reactor at Windscale in Cumbria, when free school milk was replaced by orange juice because of fears we were never told about.
What has this got to do with ufology? Well, New Year is always a good time for reflection, so I thought it might be interesting, in the light of the above findings, to compare the subject in 1957 with its 2017 incarnation. I was inspired too by a November 2017 Internet debate between UFO researchers asking if we should refresh our entire approach to the subject, or even invent yet another version of ufology to move the field forward.
Some investigators countered such an idea, suggesting that while every generation believes it can do things better than the last, it usually just reinvents the wheel, making the same mistakes all over again, and after another couple of decades we arrive back at where we started. Ufology travels in circles to nowhere.
So, what exactly was our subject like in 1957? And has our approach altered much over the intervening 60 years?
I searched my collection of news reports from that year, seeing how long-gone media sources like the Daily Sketch covered the phenomenon. In many respects, it was all much like today, whilst in other ways it was quite different. There were sightings that proved to be new military jets, dodgy hoax photos, and the latest IFO mystery was the 60-year-old equivalent of our Chinese Lanterns: ‘luminous owls’ generating reports in Norfolk and believed to be caused by phosphorescence picked up from diseased tree bark. Cartoonists loved the subject, with UFOs even starring in a Yogi Bear strip that year.
On the flipside, erudite professors spoke out in support of UFOs and said they saw a government cover-up in evidence. Today, most say almost exactly the opposite. Dr Clifford Thornton, PhD, told Reveille on 9 May 1957 that 20 per cent of UFO reports were unexplained and that they came in waves every 27 months. They appeared to be alien craft that modern science could now better accept because we understood relativity and how they might reach Earth from a distant solar system rather than our own neighbouring planets, now known to be devoid of life.
There were intriguing cases crying out for further study, such as one from 28 December 1956 and reported in January 1957 by Empire News, in which a man out hunting sparrow hawks in Wickford, Essex, saw a UFO emerge from mist and promptly fired a gun at it! At least he was able to answer the age-old question posed by many witnesses – would a flying saucer go ‘clang’ if you threw a rock at it – because in this case it did precisely that. In fact, the bullet bounced back off the metal surface and hit the witness, injuring him slightly and so making him the only person ever ‘shot’ by a UFO. Sceptics said he probably mistook a pylon in the fog, but he said the UFO flew away towards London several minutes later.
1957 was also remarkable for being the point of origin for a key ufological theme that would eventually come to greater prominence: the alien abduction. On 7 September at Windmill Hill, by the River Mersey in Cheshire, a man claimed to have been taken for a ride by aliens from
the planet Zomdic. In November, a woman in Birmingham met aliens and just over a year later claimed to give birth to what we might now call a genetically engineered ‘space baby’ (see “The Space Baby”, by Andy Roberts, FT191:32-38). Meanwhile in Brazil a farmer called Antonio Villas Boas was abducted in his fields and engaged in another sexy experiment to create a ‘hybrid’ baby with a female entity ( FT188:25).
In the middle of these unprecedented and outrageous cases, an extraordinary flap of reports occurred around Texas and New Mexico, reaching a focus on the night of 2/3 November when a dozen vehicles had their engine and lights stalled by a lens-shaped object. At the same time, an egg-shaped object was seen over the disused bunkers at White Sands where the first atomic bombs were tested a decade earlier. Remarkably, at possibly the very same moment thousands of miles away, a clean-up team from the RAF were disassembling the site at Maralinga in the Australian outback, where the most recent nuclear test had detonated in October. A UFO hovered above here in daylight and flew away just before scrambled aircraft arrived ( FT229:26).
Hours after that unprecedented sequence of events the Soviet Union sent the first lifeform from Earth into space: Laika the dog aboard Sputnik 2. We had entered the space age at the very moment UFOs shifted their mode of appearance in these dramatic ways.
In 2017, nothing remotely this intriguing seems to be occurring in the moribund UFO world. Yet, it must be said, we only see the true nature of those 1957 events in retrospect. At the time, they were largely missed by the UFO community, and only later investigations allow us to reassess them today. This underlines our need for better co-ordination, because in the world of 2017 there are far fewer people investigating the phenomenon than when UFO groups existed in every major town or city. One also wonders whether the ephemeral nature of the Internet will assist historians in 2077 quite as much as the permanence afforded by hundreds of editions of Fortean Times.
Today, even the MoD and the USAF – in 1957 each recording countless sightings each year – have shut up shop and lost all interest. So, it is not clear if we see a true picture of things as they stand now in the way we perhaps can for 1957, when we had to work hard and document everything. Will today’s love of living in the social media moment leave a similar database of ongoing activity to help seek significant patterns in the way we’ve been able to with older data?
Things have changed in other ways too, partly because thinking about the origin of UFOs was simplistic in 1957, as is apparent from those reports mentioned above. The interpretation of the time – that UFOs were visiting aliens from outer space – was exciting and futuristic as we aimed for the stars. So, when the events of November 1957 were first recorded, aliens were assumed to be reacting to human activity, fearful of us being able to export nuclear weapons off-planet following our first baby steps into the Universe. It was an idea already part of the zeitgeist thanks to the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, which fictionally presaged even the Texas car-stop incidents.
Looking back from a few decades later we have a broader range of ideas that were only just starting to ferment in Europe in the late 1950s. These would allow us to view things from a fortean perspective and see the UFO event not just as a literal reality but also one with an observable human dimension. Carl Jung would soon write about UFOs from their mythic and cultural perspective and how this might be crucial to understanding them, regardless of any physical reality that might underlie individual sightings.
In 2017, we have the option of blending such new and old concepts to ask whether something like the collective unconscious of our planet was causing what we then perceived as nuts-and-bolts UFOs and literal events. We can now identify that the massive Uranium leak at Sellafield happened just days after Earth’s first rocket into space (Sputnik 1, on 4 October) and a month before Laika flew as the first ‘astronaut’ in Sputnik 2. That pattern, blending space and nuclear catastrophe, was an extraordinarily powerful one on the public imagination.
Last month ( FT361:29) I described how the media can influence what we believe about UFOs. It creates a phenomenon within a phenomenon. A ‘soft’ reality is moulded out of the ‘hard’ reality of sightings as they get adapted by reporting and enter public consciousness.
So perhaps rather than aliens displaying their superiority and issuing a warning in November 1957, something else was spreading unseen beneath that major wave. Maybe it was a cry from our global consciousness, manifesting as a waking dream on a planetary scale; perhaps the UFOs were being employed symbolically, rather as we find meaningful motifs within our individual dreams. Was it designed to make us sit up and take note and plead with ourselves to do something about the nightmare facing society as revealed in thencurrent events?
The imagery of 1950s UFO cases is full of messages from spacemen about our future as a planet as seen from the perspective of the rest of the cosmos. It was as if we were sensing, but also absolving ourselves of, our own part in the new risks technology posed to our future by displacing it onto UFOs and aliens. Ever since 1957 we seem to have been waiting for the intergalactic cavalry to come and save us. Are UFOs and aliens just the space-age version of an all-powerful figure like Superman?
From today’s perspective, it looks as though 1957 saw us, perhaps unconsciously, reacting to the Earthshattering events and technological traumas of the age by turning our fears into a plea to the no doubt equally worried aliens to help us get our act together.
But perhaps the aliens were us, and we were simply talking to ourselves.