UFO films and UFO flaps

NIGEL WATSON looks at the relationship between popular entertainment and ufology

ALIEN MEDIA INFLUENCES

The interaction and influence of the media on how UFOs are reported and experienced is a cornerstone of the psychosocial hypothesis (PSH; see FT400:52-53) to explaining the belief in extraterrestrial UFO invaders.

Martin Kottmeyer, in the pages of Magonia,

made a strong case for such factors, especially in his 1990 article “Entirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Reports”. Kottmeyer disputed the claim by UFO historian David Jacobs that science fiction and popular culture in general did not feature anything like the UFOs of the early flying saucer era, and showed that the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic strips depicted disc-shaped space vehicles in the early 1930s and that abductionist Budd Hopkins failed to recognise the puny aliens in HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds were very similar to those reported by his abductees.

The indispensable The Saucers that Time Forgot blog by Curt Collins and Claude Falkstrom also points out that Ray Palmer’s Amazing Stories pulp magazine carried numerous UFO-like stories before 1947 and notoriously promoted the long-running ‘Shaver Mystery’ (see FT127:36-41, 355:40-45). One story, “Star Base X” by Private Moore Williams, in the September 1944 edition, is about an Army aircraft crashing in the Antarctic. The soldiers find a teardrop-shaped spacecraft hidden in an underground cave that is crewed by eight diminutive humanoid aliens with hoofed feet. Fearful that the humans would use their advanced ET technology for the purpose of warfare, the aliens put the men in a cage created by their mental powers. These aliens have telepathic and hypnotic abilities, and can disguise themselves as humans to infiltrate our society – all of which are attributes of post-1947 alien encounters. With echoes of the Dulce base shoot-out, the story ends with the soldiers battling with the aliens, who escape in their spaceship; and fans of Philip J Corso’s The Day After Roswell

should note that a surviving soldier resolves to reverse-engineer the alien craft using the equipment left behind in the ice cave. The blog mentions a better-known story “The Green Man” by Harold M Sherman, published in October 1946. This features a messianic alien visitor called Numar, who seems very much the prototype for George Adamski’s Orthon and a host of other contactee stories.

Kottmeyer also gave several examples of film and TV influences on the Betty and Barney Hill case – most famously, he was the first to point out the similarity between Barney’s description of an alien with wraparound eyes and an alien in “The Bellero Shield” episode of the TV series The Outer Limits (see FT322:4648; 384:44-47). The problem is that we do not know if Barney actually saw that programme, and ,even if he had, that does not mean the Hills’ abduction is invalid, only that such media might have shaped how they understood and reported their experience.

On a wider scale, if the PSH is correct, there should be a correlation between UFO flaps and peaks of popular interest in UFOs stimulated by the media. As an example, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in late 1977 and has been cited as causing a surge of UFO sightings in the USA the following year. Yet, as Kottmeyer states in his article “Do UFO Films Stimulate UFO Flaps?”, this rise in sightings was months later and after the film’s theatrical release had come to an end. Data from the UK, France and South America showed the film had very little influence on the number of sightings. Looking further back at the release dates of UFO movies compared with UFO report data from July 1956 to September 1958, he found that 14 were associated with sighting increases and six with decreases.

There does not seem to be any direct correlation in terms of creating UFO flaps, however Close Encounters in the UK did gain extensive newspaper coverage that sparked a widespread interest in the subject (see FT357:25, 358:31). Through UFOIN and Jenny Randles, I received numerous letters from people who had psychic or high strangeness experiences that they would probably never have reported if it were not for the film. Its portrayal of spindly aliens and abductions no doubt had a much more pervasive influence on abductees and researchers in the 1980s and to this day.

In his more detailed “UFO Flaps: An Analysis” Kottmeyer shows that we began with the ‘Reconnaissance Theory’ to explain the presence of flying saucers, and then the ‘Martian Hypothesis’, which tried to find a link between the position of Mars and UFO flaps. Mathematical models have tried to find patterns in UFO data, as have ‘Behavourist’ theories that suggest UFO visitations are manipulating human behaviour. Flaps might also be caused by extraterrestrial holiday makers in the ‘Tourist Hypothesis’ or by media influences under the ‘Silly Season’ heading. ‘Crisis’, ‘Paranoia’ and/or ‘Mass Hysteria’ are also factors that might condition flaps. In some flaps, like the British phantom airship sightings of 1909 and 1913, we can see they were the product of ‘Crisis’ that fuelled ‘Paranoia’ and ‘Mass Hysteria’.

Getting meaningful statistical correlations between factors that condition UFO flaps is, like most things ufological, complicated and hard to prove.

‘Science Fiction: Saucers Before Saucers’ at: https://thesaucersthattimeforgot.blogspot. com/2022/01/science-fiction-saucers-beforesaucers.html; ‘Entirely Unpredisposed’ at: http://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/2013/11/entirely-unpredisposed-cultural. html; ‘Do UFO Films Stimulate UFO Flaps?’ at: www.users.waitrose.com/~magonia/ms57.htm; ‘UFO Flaps: An Analysis’ at: www. academia.edu/12960819/UFO_Flaps

I’M AN ALIEN GET ME OUT OF HERE

British TV entertainers Ant and Dec admit their acting career was killed off when they starred in the Alien Autopsy comedy film (see FT395:32-36). The same cannot be said for the ‘original’ alien autopsy footage that still generates plenty of heated debate. Despite Philip Mantle’s impressive examination of its origins in his book Roswell Alien Autopsy: The Truth Behind The Film That Shocked The World, it’s not a story to be killed off as easily as Ant and Dec’s big screen career.

The further merging of fact and fiction came in 2015, when Uncensored, a New Zealand UFO magazine, promoted a short video clip that purported to show aliens in Area 51.

It was claimed the footage was analysed frame-by-frame, but others soon identified it as coming from Ant and Dec’s film. Don’t be surprised if it pops up again on social media as a new discovery!