Close encounters David Clarke’s UFO Drawings From the British National Archives
“Intuitive cognition of a thing i s cognition that enables us to know whether the thing exists or does not exist, in such a way that, if the thing exists, then the intellect immediately judges that it exists and evidently knows that it exists, unless the judgment happens to be impeded through the imperfection of this cognition.” — William of Ockham
IN 1952, the Air Ministry, which oversaw the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force, decided the time was right to open a special unit for the investigation of unidentified flying objects or UFOs. The previous year, the Ministry of Defence had established a Flying Saucer Worker Party, tasked with producing a secret intelligence report on UFOs. The report concluded that all UK-based sightings could be explained away as non- extraordinary phenomena: hoaxes, hallucinations, and natural occurrences. But the Air Ministry’s UFO unit was formed to handle the sheer volume of reported sightings by military personnel and members of the public — because the sightings simply would not stop. In 2008, more than 50 years after the unit was established in the attic room of the Hotel Metropole in central London, those case files became a matter of public record. In fact, they’re available on the British National Archives website.
UFO Drawings From the National Archives (Four Corners Irregulars No. 2) is a small compendium detailing a number of the more credible (or incredible, as the case may be) reported sightings over the decades. Author David Clarke is a real-life Fox Mulder (the central character on The X-Files TV series) who works in Sheffield Hallam University’s journalism department. His bio states that his interests are in “investigative journalism, contemporary legends, and rumors.” But Clarke is no crank. He was a leading consultant for the National Archives release of the UFO files, for which he pushed via Britain’s Freedom of Information Act. He is also noncommittal when it comes to the subject of UFOs, simply presenting the cases — at times in rather dry fashion — and letting readers make up their own minds.
UFO Drawings is not like an exhibition catalogue. The drawings represent witnesses’ attempts to describe their encounters. They range from only a handful with some artistic merit ( because the witnesses happened to be artists) to crude line drawings and quickly rendered impressions that are sometimes less compelling than the narratives that accompany them. The l atter t ype of drawings predominate. “Viewed from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, sketches of UFOs made by schoolchildren or policemen might appear naïve or worthless,” Clarke writes, noting the the lack of artistic sophistication accompanying most of the book’s illustrations. “But as visual evidence of unusual sightings that are deeply meaningful and significant to those individuals who have seen UFOs, they are uniquely valuable historical documents in their own right, and shed light on how the events and popular culture of the age imprinted on people’s imaginations.” The visual record in the National Archives is primarily made up of drawings — there is a dearth of photographic evidence, and for that reason only a few images accompany the book. The reason for the lack of credible photographs, Clarke suggests, is that most UFO images are anomalous and prove to be explainable by other phenomena such as double exposures, tricks of the light, and reflections in camera lenses.
What is remarkable about the drawings is that there is no real consistency to what the UFOs look like, except for a few basic shapes. Aside from a lot of discs and saucers, the UFOs vary in appearance: V-shapes, triangles, orbs, ovals, cigar shapes, and crosses, to name a few. “In 1971, the Oxford-based UFO group Contact UK produced a report that acknowledged the ‘ almost bewildering variety’ of UFO shapes,” he writes. And he cites the report as suggesting this multitude of types allows for the possibility that “two or more quite different races of UFOnauts are currently visiting Earth ... .” But when it comes to reported UFO behavior, weird is the order of the day. They are silent, hovering in mid-air, darting off at super high speeds, maneuvering in ways no conventional aircraft can, lit by multicolored lights and masking themselves as though by camouflage. These sightings are inexplicable as some anomaly of weather or manmade object. In fact, reports that mention a particular place and time where sightings were often
assumed to be the result of military aircraft operations sometimes reveal, upon investigation, that no military maneuvers were ever recorded in the area.
One particularly i nteresting case i nvolved a 1977 sighting by a number of schoolchildren in Macclesfield, England, who were later separated and asked to draw what they had seen. Individually, they provided remarkably consistent images. Another incident, presented without author commentary, is a controversial one involving a boy who, in 1962, faked a blurry UFO photograph by first painting the flying saucers on a pane of glass. For years, many people believed the image was genuine, until he later confessed. But in 1997, he retracted that claim, stating that the hoax itself was a hoax and the image was actually real. He pretended it wasn’t, he claimed, to avoid unwanted media attention. It wasn’t the last time the man would present photographic evidence of UFOs to the MoD, but it’s up to the reader to decide if, in light of the possible hoax, any other evidence he sent to them can be given any credence.
UFO Drawings offers no real analysis of its subject and thus provides no definitive answers to the UK government’s position on UFOs and alien visitors.
Interestingly enough, for more than half a century, both the UK and the United States — by way of Project Blue Book and the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program created in 2007 — took the phenomena seriously enough to warrant programs to study them. In the United States, it seems every incoming president vows to look into the matter of UFOs. In the UK, so did Winston Churchill. Clarke cites Churchill’s questions to his advisors in July 1952: “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?” In the case of Britain’s defense ministry, however, stonewalling about the government’s interest in UFOs has led to public speculation and, potentially, provided fodder to conspiracy theorists. Most reported cases in the National Archives were never actually investigated, only documented and added to a vast anthology. Cases the author cites that allege actual alien abductions were often met by the MoD with a curious response: “Abduction is a criminal offense and as such is a matter for the civil police.”
Clarke gives no evidence of coverups and avoids speculation. He suggests that certain sightings were never given proper investigations simply because of lack of funding, manpower, and the fact that most cases had rational explanations. One compelling case that was actually investigated involved a 1967 sighting in Dorset, wherein the witness was able to describe and draw the craft in detail. But in the end, even his sighting was passed off as a vivid waking dream. Another case involving a vision of UFOs from Saturn that a man claimed to have received telepathically seems more likely the result of a disturbed mind.
Other cases involve reported alien encounters with beings from planets like Venus — a place that, science tells us, cannot sustain life as we know it. Then, of course, there are the effects of atmospheric conditions that sometimes make people think they are seeing UFOs, not to mention weather balloons, swamp gas, flocks of birds, misperceived conventional aircraft, and other rational explanations. While such circumstances might explain the majority of cases, belief in alien visitors continues with alarming consistency — the files in the National Archives comprise an estimated 60,000 pages of data. Why? Perhaps, as Mulder once suggested in
The X-Files, “all the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive.”
UFO Drawings From the National Archives by David Clarke is published by Four Corners Irregulars No. 2.