THE UFO FILES
PETER BROOKESMITH surveys the latest fads and flaps from the world of ufological research
WHAT MAKES A TRUE BELIEVER?
Long years ago, during a gathering of UFO cognoscenti at which I had made a presentation, I slipped outside to reduce the amount of blood in my nicotine stream, and perhaps reacquaint myself with the warming contents of my Dad’s ancient, curved, silver hip-flask. As one does. Standing in the cold sunshine, I was unexpectedly approached by a fierce-looking person of the northern and female persusasion, which as fans of Ena Sharples will know can be a fearsome combination, who accosted me thus (imagine the Lancastrian accent): “It must be very strange to be an expert on something you’ve never seen.”
There’s nothing quite like the combination of relief and glee one feels on being confronted with something so easily dealt with: so in my most emollient tones I told her about my three UFO sightings: the Tsyklon/Cosmos 2238 re-entry of 31 March 1993 (spectacular, and most definitely unidentified by me, or friends in the Defence Research Agency, at the time); the odd craft that sailed over the state highway in front of me near Indian Springs AFB in 1981 or so (still unidentified); and the white circular thing that I saw float sedately under the 747 I was on, over the Atlantic on the way to Phoenix, AZ, date now vague, which I suspect was a weather balloon. She had the good grace to hear me out, but stalked off clearly less than satisfied. Her own odd experience had involved being trailed by an enormous UFO for some miles while driving near Manchester at night. I didn’t get – or make – the opportunity to ask if she’d checked the position of the Moon at the time, which I rather regret. I strongly suspect that she had made no such effort.
I draw two thoughts from this curious encounter. One is that the lady was irremediably convinced that she’s seen something otherworldly and was in no mood, then or later, to look for any other explanation. The other, quite common among UFO witnesses, is the import of her opening gambit: that you don’t know diddly-squat or even jack-shit about UFOs unless you’ve clapped eyes on one (or more) yourself. It’s not my business to try to convince that first class of true believers that they’re wrong: but it’s worth pointing out to everyone else that it ain’t necessarily so. I won’t name names, for fear of inadvertently and invidiously omitting some distinguished individuals; nonetheless, and for the record, there’s no shortage of eminent ufologists who’ve produced some notably insightful commentary on the subject without having had the pleasure of a sighting of something inexplicable – or at least, inexplicable to them. More to my point, though, is the gnashing-on of both species of believer to these articles of faith, and the tendency (it’s not universal) to presume without much further ado that whatever they saw came from outer space and was ‘intelligently directed’ by otherworldly beings. And this I do find genuinely puzzling. It becomes more so when one of these characters proclaims that he’s insisting on the veridicality of his assessment ‘to get the word out’. The word’s been out, one way or another, for seven decades, and the mountains of testimony still don’t amount to proof of any of the exotic theories of the origin of UFOs. John Rimmer, greatly esteemed co-founder of Magonia, wrote recently that “simply by definition, UFOs are real; it’s what causes them to be seen that’s the important stuff!” In my translation, that means the real mystery resides in people, not the stars.
BIGELOW, BIGLY, AND OTHER STUFF
Those of you intrigued by the role played by property billionaire Robert Bigelow in the AAWSAP/AATIP/TTSAAS saga – not to mention the odd part played by MUFON, and the dubious properties of the Skinwalker Ranch – will find much to reward you on Curt Collins’s Blue Blurry Lines blog. In a scything two-parter compiled with Roger Glassel, and with the help of a couple of pseudonymous whistle-blowers, Collins has unravelled a fair chunk of the tangled web that links this alphabet soup. It’s a complicated tale, which I won’t even attempt to précis here, and it doesn’t cast any of the participants in a particularly flattering light – though it is certainly illuminating. The unfortunate Luis Elizondo is pretty much exposed as a papershuffler, not really in charge of anything. As Robert Sheaffer remarked, this “calls to mind a certain ufologist from the UK, who claims to have run its ‘UFO investigation programme,’ which turns out was also a part-time ‘desk’ collecting reports, and not an actual programme.” Who could he possibly mean?
Elsewhere in the blogosphere, I commend Jack Brewer’s review of Sarah Scoles’s
They Are Already Here, on the UFO Trail. This looks like a book to be paying money for. Also: Jenny Randles’s review, on the Magonia page (pelicanist.blogspot.com) of Maurizio Verga’s Flying Saucers in the Sky, a dissection of everything that happened (in the sky) in 1947. Jenny thinks this is the best UFO book of the century. Well, we’ll see about that in 80 years’ time; meanwhile, the book should be read, by the sound of it, no matter the fixity of one’s opinions (see above).
BELGIAN BLAME GAME
You get an outbreak of some illness, and in roughly ascending order some goon would say it’s the fault of smokers, climate change, or the Jews. Now it’s the dreaded coronavirus, which has just been fingered for a spate of UFO sightings in Belgium. To blame any virus for a bunch of UFO sightings is unexpected, although this one’s not entirely irrational. According to the Daily Telegraph: “Frederick Delaere, the coordinator of the Belgian UFO Reporting Centre, said Belgium’s imposition of lockdown measures to fight the coronavirus was likely to be responsible.
‘We suspect that the clear weather of the past few days and the Covid-19 measures have caused this strong increase,’ he told the Telegraph.
‘Hundreds of thousands of Belgian citizens are currently at home in lockdown because of the crisis and are probably looking more at the sky.’”
Delaere reckoned that Belgians were seeing flybys of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. Possible, indeed. But why Belgians, we wonder. But then, why not?