The truth is out there
The bewildering variety of UFOs – and their consistency over time – is clear in the National Archive’s collection of ufological ‘folk art’
UFO Drawings From The National Archives David Clarke Four Corners/The National Archives 2017 Hb, 128pp, illus, £12.00, ISBN 9781909829091
As with their American intelligence and military counterparts, the UK Ministry of Defence did their best to explain away most UFO observations as mistakes of perception and overactive imaginations responding to explicable atmospheric phenomena or human technology, with photographic evidence resulting from distortions or hoaxing or other fakery. Included among the roughly 11,000 reported sightings in the Ministry’s decadeslong investigation of the UFO phenomenon (1940s-2009), when the Ministry’s UFO desk and telephone hotline, initiated in 1962, were closed, are hundreds of eyewitnessprovided illustrations featuring puzzling and at times inexplicable imagery, consisting of everything from hand-drawn recreations to professionally produced and incredibly detailed diagrams, to photographs of varying quality and detail.
Notwithstanding the Ministry’s efforts, a significant
percentage of reported sightings remained truly mysterious. In UFO Drawings from the National Archives, a co-publication between Four Corners and the National Archives, Dr David Clarke, researcher and author of the recent history of the UFO phenomenon, the excellent, precise How UFOs
Conquered the World (2015) and consultant on the public release of the Ministry of Defence’s considerable holdings of UFO files, presents a carefully curated sampling of drawings (some of them are photographs) that accompanied these reports. Included here are familiar images – including the now-discredited ‘Solway Spaceman’ photograph – as well as more obscure yet no less fascinating and unsettling anomalies.
Clarke presents the material in chronological order with prefatory, matter-of-fact summaries of reports, largely without editorial comment. The chronological ordering provides the reader with a general sense of the UFO phenomenon’s complexity, and the bewildering variety of its manifestations, including the different shapes, sizes, colours, sounds, and movements, as well as a sense of the ways in which the phenomenon has remained consistent in the face of significant social and cultural transformations over a 60-year period. At the same time, Clarke’s straightforward presentation serves to illustrate the phenomenon’s growing complexity, with decidedly technological cigar and saucer-shaped objects making their appearance during the 1950s and 1960s, followed by more high strangeness, close encounter-oriented reports documented in the 1970s and 1980s, and finally a swath of abduction-related and crop circle accounts from the late 80s to the late 90s.
Clarke’s introduction provides a useful, concise history of the Ministry of Defence’s involvement in collecting data on the UFO phenomenon. Though most of the drawings provided by eyewitnesses to the Ministry are mostly without pretence, comprising primarily pragmatic attempts by earnest eyewitnesses (some crackpot but mostly sober) to document apparently inexplicable atmospheric phenomena, some of the artwork included here approaches a kind of folk art. Indeed, despite Clarke’s journalistic approach, there is much here of interest to the sociologist, folklorist, or UFO historian, making UFO Drawings from the National Archives a worthy addition to any fortean library. Eric Hoffman