THE UFO FILES
JENNY RANDLES ponders a spate of Close Encounters- related cases and the nature of UFO hoaxes
I did a lot of TV shows over a 30-year period, promoting a stream of books for my publishers. But there was only one for which I happily crossed an ocean in midwinter. That voyage was for an Irish TV show and took place in the middle of a Winter Atlantic storm. My plane home was forced into an emergency landing and diversion to two separate airports – neither of which were where I was actually headed. However, I never regretted making the trip, because on the chat show with me was a singersongwriter who the producer had sold to me as “someone you will never have heard of, but he is good”. In fact, I was a fan, so my answer was an instant ‘yes’.
That singer-songwriter was Al Stewart – probably best known for his hit ‘The Year of the Cat’ – a folksy guitarist who paints musical pictures of people he has known or grand historical events. A quote from his song ‘Carol’ gives this column its title. The song is not really about aliens, more about the singer’s exasperation with the lady in question as he asks “them” to “take me anywhere”; as visitors from beyond, they will surely “understand”.
In a few words, this reveals much about our subject. If UFOs did not exist, we would by now have invented them, because they provide a missing piece in the soul of humanity. Our desire for someone with superior knowledge to rescue us from chaos has a long pedigree: UFOs and aliens are a modern retelling of necessary myths complete with a space age God. I think of aliens as an intergalactic cavalry, where the ‘reality’ matters less than their perceived existence. Like Al Stewart, we peer optimistically skyward, waiting for them to arrive, because surely someone must be wiser than us and can prevent our selfdestruction with the wave of a magic wand.
Aliens exist because it is unimaginable that they do not exist – that the Universe is in the sole hands of humanity, duffers like us who make a pig’s ear out of everything we touch and have not so far destroyed our tiny home due to luck rather than judgement.
My thoughts were engaged by the recent debates in these pages on the subject of a ‘Silvery Man from the stars’ (or more accurately Risley, Cheshire). Glen Vaudrey’s article ( FT397:36-41) relates how he uncovered what might be the truth behind a ‘long-forgotten’ 43-year-old case in which a seemingly alien entity had arrived not in a silvery ship but via a grassy slope outside the UK Atomic Energy plant to spook a driver on his way home.
I do not intend to revisit that case here, and the author may have indeed resolved it; but the suggestion that the story quickly disappeared is inaccurate, as Peter Hough and I discussed it in depth in our book Death by Supernatural Causes? a decade after it happened. By then, tragically, the witness had died from cancer, with speculation that the silvery man who “blew up” his car radio might somehow have triggered that disease. This extrapolation was inevitable, so any prankster going public would have faced a rather grim prospect.
It is easy, due to happenstance, for pranks to get out of control like this. But in the Risley case some context has been missed. There was good reason why the Warrington Guardian ran the numerous UFO stories Glen Vaudrey found in those old editions. The Risley episode occurred when the bestknown UFO movie of all time – Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind – had just opened in UK cinemas. Aliens were big news, and I was helping the film company with the movie’s promotion.
Glen’s article on the Risley ‘hoax’ infers that UFO enthusiasts tend, by default, to seek aliens. Indeed, many do; but as I was heavily involved via my friendship with Dr J Allen Hynek, who inspired the film, and posters with my contact details were on display in many cinemas in March 1978, I was a prime candidate to have indirectly triggered a hoax myself.
This social context adds more nuance to the ‘hoax’ argument, but it also misses the
Our desire for someone with superior knowledge to rescue us has a long pedigree
role ufologists play, one that can make them innocent pawns in a wider game. A hoax here was always the most likely explanation, given that no UFO was seen and the Spielberg movie had primed the nation to be alert to alien incursions. So the idea that the Risley silver man was not from the stars was a likely option from the start, especially as I was helping a national newspaper uncover cases just like it. Indeed, one that was reported to that campaign was not dissimilar and involved a beachcombing witness coming across a similar lone ‘spaceman’ collecting ‘specimens’.
The Risley witness was later confronted with a UKAE fireman who stepped in front of him in his silvery suit so investigators could judge the witness’s response. “Nothing like it,” was his instant reply when asked if this was what he had seen.
Anyone who investigates UFOs has to take into account both the wider context and the fact that a case may not have happened exactly as reported. The stranger the story, the more that possibility comes to the fore. Hoaxes are not common, but they happen, and the reasons why should be considered.
However, there are many other motives beyond a movie inspiration and silvery men from the stars are often curiously a part of them. In the 1970s, probably because space travel was new and exciting, silver suits seemed to be a recurring motif: astronauts wore them, so obviously aliens would do the same. Indeed, only five weeks before the Silver Man of Risley appeared, there was another case just 20 miles away in Cheshire where similarly clad entities were seen. This case found its way to my thenfiancé, who acted as an intermediary with the ‘witnesses’, although neither he nor I were ever allowed to meet them. The story made the papers via an old girlfriend who had come across it by chance.
This ended up as another long-running bit of UFO folklore because the press repeated it around the world in several garbled versions: I watched the tale develop, like a snowball rolling downhill and picking up anything it met. Through repeated misreporting, it had soon turned into quite a different story.
So a UFO legend was created, in part by a young reporter who knew of my partner’s UFO interests. This case report reveals another possible trigger for a hoax – but a story can escalate out of control in many ways.
Around the same time, a third case also involving a man in a silvery suit staring at passing traffic occurred on a remote road on the Cheshire borders. For all I know, one serial trickster using Close Encounters-related media interest in UFOs was on a hoaxing spree and was behind all these cases. At the time, we just followed the leads; here, our best guess was a roadside worker spraying weedkiller while wearing a protective suit just as a hapless passer-by chanced upon him. This fits the witness testimony better than an actual alien, with no apparent spacecraft, who just happened to be standing beside a country road.
What you believe when it comes to these situations is often predicated on two things.
The first is whether you have all the facts or are missing key data that might transform the story. The second is what you actually want to believe – because most of us would instinctively regard a real alien as more exciting than a ufological Sherlock Holmes joining up disparate clues and cracking the mystery in mundane terms.
Hoaxing is much more complex than just a bloke in a firesuit having a laugh. There can be multiple reasons for it – indeed, said ‘alien’ might not even know that a witness believed that is what they were. It could all be down to happenstance, and only strange from the perspective of the observer, not the one being observed.
Cheshire in those days certainly had 50 shades of Greys, and here is one more way a ‘hoax’ can occur. On this occasion, there was no doubt that the plan was to use perception of an alien in an innocent but mischievous way. Peter and I stumbled upon the plan because we investigated a worker from a company in mid-Cheshire who saw a man in a silver suit. The worker was on a night shift, guarding a site by the Mersey. The ‘intruder’ vanished. So far, so familiar.
For various reasons, staff at the company were aware that I wrote books about UFOs. The nation was in an economic recession and the firm created a plan to invent a ‘convincing’ close encounter, then call me in to investigate and use the resulting publicity to promote a marketing campaign with a product linked to UFOs. Thankfully, I became suspicious early on and they quickly abandoned the plan – but it made me realise that as a UFO investigator one can be viewed by some parties as a potential business asset. What, really, is the difference between helping a national newspaper market alien yarns and being the pawn of a struggling business that had scented a PR opportunity? The bottom line is that if aliens did not exist somebody would want them to and might even conspire to bring them to life by harnessing the human desire to believe.
As UFO investigators we rarely consider how others see the phenomena we investigate. We regard what we do as a noble pursuit of truth, but this is not the only path. I doubt that any of the companies and individuals which backed Spielberg’s movie did so because they wanted to show the world that aliens are real: they were doing it because it was a good idea that could prove popular and make a lot of money.
Irrespective of the motives for involvement of real UFO researchers like Allen Hynek, who helped make the movie credible, or others like myself promoting it for the media, the film has the power to affect belief, even if it isn’t actually ‘real’.
There is a good reason why we still see TV shows, books and blockbuster movies about aliens, even though the buzz surrounding spaceflight has long since passed; indeed, not just aliens but the fantasy stuff of TV epics like Game of Thrones – dragons, wizards and so on. These are all things that are, in some sense, believed in as ‘real’ within our collective consciousness, because on some level most of us want them to exist: we keep recreating them to provide ourselves with reassurance that they just might. We yearn for these older, wiser beings who have access to magic that we do not possess; we yearn for that divine essence that can stop us falling into the abyss. And if we need to give that belief a helping hand we will – often without realising it.
Aliens are ‘real’, whether they exist or not – and hoaxes are in some ways the most real thing about them, because those involved in their creation or their perpetuation are part of that age-old creative process. Hoaxes are generated out of necessity; if we cannot actually turn to real magic for our salvation, we can at least create an imaginary version of what the frustratingly elusive aliens would do if they were here.
Whether any aliens have ever visited us is almost beside the point. We have imagined they do, either as elves and demons, or Vulcans and Klingons, or greys and reptilians. All are as ‘real’ as each other, just not in the sense that we usually use the word. This process happens without most of those involved being consciously aware that they are not spectators sitting on the sidelines trying to figure out who is winning the match, but are actually in the game.
We should pay more attention to hoaxes. They tell us more than we realise.