TELEVISION

FT’s very own couch potato, STU NEVILLE, casts an eye over the small screen’s current fortean offerings

Blaze Away!

If you crave more outré viewing after the excesses of festive mainstream TV, then the Blaze channel has much to recommend it. If it’s decidedly enthusiastic fortean material you’re looking for, then look no further...

As saucery is on the ascendant once again, a quick shufti at their schedules tells you that Blaze is right there, with Ancient Aliens ( FT410:67) front and centre and on at least two or three times a day. However, the UFO-prog second division is strongly represented as well: UFO Hunters, Alien Chronicles, Top UFO Encounters, plus any number of titles featuring the same words, and indeed the same content, in a different order. In keeping with the zeitgeist – official knowledge being much greater than is acknowledged – each has a variation on the classic strapline: “Is this proof that the Government is hiding the truth?”

Aliens At The Pentagon announces “Nick Pope, the UFO insider known as ‘The Real Fox Mulder’, provides shocking and revelatory

A zero return against a huge sum invested? There’s a name for that.

insight…” (spoiler: no, he doesn’t), while UFO Hunters asks “Has the US military derived various forms of technology, including stealth expertise, from downed UFOs?” (again…) The latter inevitably leans heavily on Bob Lazar – who has spun a whole industry based on two wage slips and a USAF invoice saying “Back-engineer an alien propulsion system and make good” – and the late Stanton Friedman, his ayatollah-eyebrows beetling away as he raves about interstellar travel. The tone leans heavily towards belief – well it would, wouldn’t it? – and if you were new to the field a day on Blaze would make an acolyte of you. Most of the other titles are standard paranormal telly fare: “Is this very distant blurry footage really a craft from another galaxy?” and so on.

There’s more to Blaze than just blinky lights, though. There’s a multitude of ghost stuff, conspiracy-themed progs (Templars, Illuminati, JFK, JTR). MonsterQuest ( FT407:63) also features heavily, as do both the interminable Curse Of… series – Oak Island and Skinwalker Ranch. There’s so much going on in the latter that it deserves a column to itself, but the former, based around the legendary ‘Money Pit’, is interesting as it is so narrowly focused. This is, in itself, rather ironic: 50 years ago, the money pit was a 10-ft2 shaft that magically flooded every time alleged treasure hoved into view. Nowadays, in a Jacques Tati-style escalation over the nine and counting series, two prospecting brothers graduate from shovel and pick and archæological caution to the use of industrial diggers until the narrow shaft has become an open cast mine slightly bigger than the island itself, and have found… well, nothing. A zero return against a huge sum invested? There’s a name for that.