The call of the UFO
JENNY RANDLES recalls a fascinating BUFORA initiative from the 1980s – a UFO telephone ‘hotline’
Many years ago when I was running the investigations department at BUFORA – the largest UFO group in the UK – I was presented with a new challenge – UFO Call. This was a telephone ‘hotline’ for UFO reports, and it started exactly 35 years ago as I am writing this piece – 10 February 1989. Taking the UFO mystery to the nation via their telephones offered the potential to greatly increase the number of cases that might be reported to BUFORA.
From phone calls to that hotline, we had a brief snapshot of a case, which would lead to an investigation by a local ufologist if the witness was willing. But UFO Call was a service too, reporting on interesting cases and giving the results of our investigations. By good fortune I still have all 570 of my scripts for UFO Call which, amazingly, survived into the 21st century, ending only when such phone lines were superseded by the rise of the Internet.
These messages are a fascinating look back at the changing UFO climate in the 1980s, 1990s and early 21st century. I did once consider writing a book based on them chronologically, although these days that seems unlikely to happen. But you never know.
The first case that featured on UFO Call was from 13 March 1989. Strange colours in the sky over Derbyshire and Staffordshire were reported by many witnesses as green and purple lights. As Jodrell Bank had quickly confirmed to me, it was a spectacular auroral display, then rarely seen that far south. Which led into a surprisingly topical point: I wrote that global warming was changing our atmosphere, and damage to the ozone layer was potentially making these displays more common further from the polar regions than previously.
It is amazing to see how little has changed in ufology 35 years on. But these scripts also reveal something the media failed to grasp in 1989, and still do not. That is, the job of a UFO group such as BUFORA is to solve cases, and that is what happens in over 90% of all reported events. It’s not – as too widely misunderstood even today – finding little green men everywhere. Solving cases is success.
UFO Call No 2 covered a sighting in Scotland. This was reported by witnesses as a ‘plane exploding’, which turned out to be a meteor breaking up in the atmosphere. There was also a discussion of a photograph of a UFO taken through a window. This was one of the first to be sent off for computer enhancement in the USA. The analysis suggested the object was on the window and quite small, not outside and much larger. How that impacts the case is up to you! But UFO Call scored 0 out of 3 in terms of finding real cases with obvious aliens involved to talk about. But our job was to find and report the truth – not what anyone simply preferred to be the truth.
Happily though, things livened up somewhat by the third episode, recorded on 31 March 1989. We then had a real-life space mystery. Indeed, I recall being sent to TV studios to discuss this, so intriguing was it; I think one appearance was on the then new This Morning on ITV, which was in those days live from an old dock in Liverpool. The media were very excited – the Daily Star put it on their front page, with the headline “SHUTTLE CREW SAW ALIENS”. The story was that Col John Blaha – the shuttle pilot, on his first flight – had allegedly had a conversation with NASA ground control, saying “Houston – This is Discovery.
We still have the alien spacecraft under observation.” The words are real: you can still access them online.
Of course, NASA flat out deny there was any sighting of a UFO during this mission, which was sent up to deploy a satellite. It seemed possible someone set out to confuse, or perhaps just joke, knowing full well the nature of the ‘alien’ spacecraft to which they referred. It was most likely the Russian Mir space station – on board which, in fact, Blaha later served – with ‘alien’ being used here in its sense of ‘not ours’. We are so used to thinking of the term ‘alien’ as meaning ‘extraterrestrial’ that we forget it comes from Latin and basically just means ‘foreigner’.
Most of the cases discussed on UFO Call are long forgotten now, but the variety reveals how a UFO researcher has to juggle with the likely in one hand and the improbable in the other, while finding a way to balance them and decide what is most plausible. Anyone doing this objectively quickly realises that the job of a UFO researcher is more mundane than you might expect most of the time, but contains the tantalising possibility that every now and then a case will emerge that defies explanation – for then at least. Because never say never is the one true way to do research.
Indeed, in episode 4 of UFO Call we had a case that ended up getting its own article in Fortean Times years later, and it created quite a debate as to its explanation. This was a true rarity – a photograph not of a UFO but of an alleged alien. It was taken on Ilkley Moor on 1 December 1987 and was to take centre stage in a presentation by my long-term co-author Peter Hough, in nearby Bradford Central Library. He was hoping to dissect what we then knew about this gloriously implausible claim, which took many years to fully investigate. A little green man on the moors being about as archetypical as you can get. Happily, you can follow the debate on that in your back issues of this very magazine (see FT230:3032 and p.64 this issue).
This is just touching on less than one per cent of UFO Call. It’s like going back in time and watching ufology unfold if you were there in its heyday. Perhaps, for history’s sake, I should write that book after all!
On every message I signed off with “Don’t forget make it a regular date to call BUFORA’s UFO Call. My name is Jenny Randles – keep those eyes on the skies.” Words as true today as then. But I might add today – also keep your feet on the ground.
A UFO researcher has to juggle with the likely in one hand and the improbable in the other