Astrocomical odds

JENNY RANDLES asks if it’s finally time for scientists to take ufology more seriously

Astronomy has long had a love/hate relationship with UFOs. Most people know these things are supposed to be alien spaceships and think astronomers also know about them. That’s why witnesses have been calling Cheshire’s Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope – ever since it was constructed at the dawn of the Space Age – just to report that they have seen something strange in the sky. For decades, the frustrated call handlers would pass them on to me as, of course, it was not something Jodrell’s scientists were going to investigate.

They have a telescope looking at the sky, some witnesses would tell me, so “they must know what I saw”. Some even believed the astronomers would have seen it too via that telescope. These witnesses were unaware of the difference between an optical and radio telescope – Jodrell is the latter. Indeed, astronomers in the SETI programme do use these to search for alien signals; but do not peer at the heavens to seek the intriguing glimmer a witness has seen whizzing past so as to identify its cause for the puzzled observer.

Such false impressions are why every time TV shows involving astronomers debate UFOs, the focus can be mildly flippant and usually involves a comedian; analysis turns from the astronomical to the astrocomical.

When the BBC series The Sky At Night did an episode on UFOs, the person they asked to present the evidence for the subject was the Goon Show comic legend Michael Bentine (pictured above). I met him a couple of times and chatted about his interest in UFOs and the paranormal, of which he had much first-hand experience (see FT64:32).

But a debate between a Goon Show

comedian and an extreme UFO sceptic like show presenter Patrick Moore was never going to result in the same sort of scrutiny of UFOs as would occur with studies of the atmosphere on Mars (likely warmer than a UFO chat with Sir Patrick! See FT370:33)

That was years ago, of course. But the BBC covered UFOs again recently in the science series The Infinite Monkey Cage.

It’s a light-hearted affair, but had some good minds present, including TV presenter Brian Cox. But it too had as its only UFO witness a comedian who wisecracked her way through the programme. Even Cox playfully pretended to bash the moderator on the head with an unidentified flying Jerry Clark UFO encyclopedia.

The UFO phenomenon has been mistreated by scientists both because it defies simplistic explanations and because they make the error of assuming UFO researchers are fools looking for ET – although the sensible ones have always just looked for answers. Indeed, ufologists had moved beyond the “UFOs are spaceships” hypothesis (so beloved of the media) long before most scientists had acknowledged there might be something else entirely at work in the UFO mystery.

Perhaps UFO researchers are, by nature, mavericks, and most scientists just took the view that these things are best left to the crazies, who are allowed freedom to think the unthinkable as long as they don’t expect more than a giggle in response. When I worked with scientists I was sometimes asked to leave their names out of the results as it might jeopardise their next research grant. ‘Free thinkers’ can contemplate an unlikely cause and have no funding to worry about, and the media shun the cautious and love the bizarre, as it sells.

So it’s no surprise that science has an innate reluctance to think UFOs worthy of its time. There’s also the rather large stumbling block that UFOs are all but impossible to investigate other than retrospectively: basically, it’s like someone saying they saw an invisible elf in the sky that we have no idea was ever really there or will ever return, even if we stood there looking upward for 100 years.

Nonetheless there have always been new ideas about what might be happening, such as the adoption by European UFO researchers of the UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) concept: in essence, yes, these things are unidentified and are seen, and are potentially some kind of novel phenomenon we have only experienced since we had the ability to explore the upper reaches of the atmosphere. That is a far better definition of a UFO than ‘Unidentified Flying Object’ ever was, because ‘flying’ hints at a machine being controlled by someone, which should never have been the first assumption. Ufologists developed the concept of UAP in Europe in the early 1980s. It featured in several of our books written then in the hope of building a bridge with science and finding some common ground while escaping the presumption that we were looking for little green men.

It is worth noting that Michael Bentine was quite possibly the first genuine UFO investigator in the UK and one of the first to investigate a UAP, though he never used that term. He was an RAF intelligence officer during WWII. Three years before Kenneth Arnold saw his flying saucer, he was charged with debriefing air crew from missions over Europe who had seen strange balls of light buzzing their planes (nicknamed foo fighters by the Americans). For obvious reasons, the fear was these might be secret Nazi weapons. So Bentine asked the crew what they did to their planes? The crews said “nothing”, thus diminishing any obvious threat and leaving him to ponder what these things really were, quite unaware that a decade later he would have been considered to be investigating reports of alien ‘flying saucers’.

However, the truth is that what these airmen were seeing were UAP: unidentified phenomena within the atmosphere that could have been missiles, but appeared to behave more like unknown natural phenomena. They were never explained, but did not go away.

One of the most fascinating things about the release of documents long withheld as ‘secret’ (prior to Freedom of Information requests) is not that they show any proof of an alien cover-up. Rather it is that the Ministry of Defence reached the same conclusion as did serious UFO researchers in the UK 40 years ago when the MoD began considering that UFOs might be UAP. They even called them by the same acronym. Unfortunately, secrecy meant they never acknowledged we were on the same side. But of course, they could not, because in ufology the astrocomical is always there and always in the way.

It’s sobering to think what might have been if both sides of this investigation had joined forces and looked for the thing mutually identified, albeit from very different perspectives. But times change, and these stepping stones just might be coming full circle… as we will see next month.