Who needs UFOs when you can play Sudoku?
Rod Liddle asks where all the flying saucers have gone, and explores the death of a great conspiracy theory, ruined by the refusal of governments to keep things secret any more Your chances of being abducted by a grey-skinned, blank-eyed alien creature have receded very greatly over the last decade or so. If you haven’t already been abducted, bad luck — it might never happen. Your chance has probably gone.
Last week a report into UFO activity over Britain was made public by the Ministry of Defence (because it was forced to do so under the Freedom of Information Act). It seems that the whole subject of flying saucers had, for a while, been taken very seriously by our defence intelligence chiefs; the report took four years to prepare. It came to the conclusion that there were indeed such things as UFOs, but that these were not spaceships piloted by humanoids from the general area of Andromeda but were, rather, hitherto unexplained manifestations of the atmosphere. In short, what the puzzled and frightened observers on the ground were witnessing were plasmas of gas created by charges of electricity and sculpted into aerodynamic shapes by air flows. Further, the strong electromagnetic fields present when such phenomena appear had the useful side effect of rendering people on the ground a little doolally. ‘Local electromagnetic fields have been medically proven to cause responses in the temporal lobes of the brain,’ they report. Which may explain why people who think they’ve seen UFOs sometimes appear barking mad.
Well, this explanation may meet with the approval of William of Occam, but I suspect it will play badly with the dwindling band of perpetually paranoid UFO spotters, who will sense a conspiracy on the part of alien infiltrators and the government, and quite possibly freemasons and Jews too.
But dwindling, though, they most certainly are. The UFO craze lasted on and off for more than half a century, but it is on its last legs. Most of the glossy UFO publications folded a few years back, including Britain’s biggest, UFO Magazine (in 2004). The British Flying Saucer Bureau shut up shop in 2001 because, according to its founder, ‘there just aren’t enough new sightings’. Similar forums across the US, Canada and Scandinavia have reported either a dearth of UFOs or have given up completely. The Skeptical Inquirer reports that only about 80 people turned up to the 40th National UFO Conference in Los Angeles, one of the most important gatherings of the year for flying saucer addicts. Over here, the Ministry of Defence collates the number of alleged sightings of UFOs on a yearly basis; back in the middle of the 1990s these numbered 600–700 per year. By 2004 this had dropped to just 91. Cumbria, once an apparent hotbed of alien activity, has seen the decline of its local chapter, the Cumbria British UFO Hunters, to total quiescence. Maybe those space-hopping tentacled beasties have seen enough of Cumbria this last half-century. Imagine it: fly for millions of light years across the universe and then you end up in Workington. One can only imagine their dismay and disappointment.
Abductions are down, too. Early reports of aliens landing, back in the 1940s and 1950s, usually involved the creation of crop circles and the mutilation of cattle. Later, people started being abducted and almost always were subjected to medical experiments, tubes inserted up the bottom and so on. But it seems the aliens have tired of our bottoms, too, much as they have tired of Cumbria.
There are some interesting theories kicking around for the decline of the UFO and I’ve got one or two ideas myself. The obvious starting point is Hollywood: the film industry has tired a little of the aliensvisit-Earth trope and public interest in the subject has waned as a result. The highwater mark for UFO spotters coincided with the enormous popularity of The XFiles and blockbuster movies such as Independence Day. But this is just to scratch the surface. It was often argued that Hollywood’s take on outer space reflected the rather more mundane, earthly, geopolitical concerns of the age — and in particular the shifting temperature of the Cold War. When the Cold War was at its most chilly, back in the 1950s, movies portrayed aliens as sinister and hostile; the thaw in the 1980s led to ET, Close Encounters and Jeff Bridges’s loveable Starman. Now that the Cold War is over, the subconscious paranoia has been dispelled too. Well, maybe. Some UFO experts have even argued what is, in effect, the precise reverse of this; that reality, these days, is more worrying than the imagined threat from beyond our world. Further, we need not dream up exotic alien invaders when we have maniacal Muslim fundamentalists with an antithetical culture living covertly among us, ready to blow us to oblivion. For Americans and, I suspect, a good many Brits, Algeria is every bit as alien as Alpha Centauri.
Our much greater awareness of military hardware may also explain the decline in people reporting strange craft tearing silently across the sky. The first UFO sightings came about at the dawn of the jet age, when there was frantic military expenditure and experimentation in new forms of aircraft, all shrouded in the deepest secrecy. These days, we are aware of stealth bombers; we’ve even seen them in action. Our military chiefs are far less secretive than they once were; details of new fighter aircraft are published on the internet before they have even flown. And it is no coincidence that a good many of the socalled UFO hot spots of the past were situated in or around US or UK airforce bases.
And then there’s the internet, that conduit for the paranoid and bonkers and the conspiracy theorists — but also for the debunkers of conspiracy theories and the exposure of hoaxers. It was the net which revealed that one of the protagonists behind allegations about the famous Roswell incident (military captures alien and cuts it up and then lies about it to the public) had made up a good proportion of his evidence. There are sites online where you can build your own alien being and create fake photos of flying saucers — all sufficient to dampen the fervour of the less credulous UFO spotters.
Further, as the MoD report suggests, governments and governmental organisa tions have taken the issue sufficiently seriously to commission credible reports into UFO sightings to which, because of greater freedom of information, the public can gain access. This development badly damages that crucial component of UFO-lore — the connivance of the politicians and the military. We also have Nasa’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) programme, involving millions of people and their PCs worldwide, which legitimises the notion that there might be alien life out there. Legitimisation, if we’re being honest, is not what the UFO spotters really want. What’s more, we wouldn’t need such a programme as Seti if the extraterrestrials were already among us, with their strange pointy lizard tongues and dark penchant for human flesh.
And then there’s the Specsavers Paradigm. A perfectly serious thesis advanced for the rapid decline of UFO reports is that our bifocals have improved to the extent that we are far less likely, these days, to mistake a flying squirrel or the 06.41 Heathrow to Paris 737 for an alien space ship; we see things altogether too clearly in the 21st century, both literally and metaphorically.
We might simply have become bored of UFOs, of course. It was an agreeable craze for a while, but these sorts of thing come and go. They reach a certain saturation point (which happened around about the middle of the 1990s) and from then on it’s all downhill. The psychologist Susan Blackmore suggests that our attachment to UFOs is a little like our attachment to Sudoku, if rather more long-lasting. Those who wish to wallow in conspiracy theories get their kicks these days from insisting that the Jews or the Zionist Occupation Government or nobody at all perpetrated those attacks on the Twin Towers. Flying saucers are rather old hat, aren’t they? They have the whiff of the hula hoop about them.
There is one last possible explanation, of course. And that’s the rather dispiriting suggestion that the aliens have had enough of us. They came, they had a look around and decided that it wasn’t for them after all and that we’re altogether too ghastly to warrant the waste of another nanosecond of space-time. And so they’ve gone back to wherever it was they came from, annoyed, depressed and possibly suicidal. Either that or they have already arrived and inveigled their way into our power structures and are poised to take over the world. Before you entirely discount this last idea, take a good look at the Miliband brothers or Ruth Kelly. You know, frankly, I wouldn’t bet against it. Mrs Dana Buyers of Los Angeles was kidnapped by aliens and had things done to her bottom, etc., so she knows what she’s talking about. They try to tell you they’re benevolent and they will mess with your mind in order to make you think they are being nice. ‘These aliens are dangerous,’ she says. ‘Don’t ever believe them.’ No indeed, Mrs Buyers. No indeed.
Previous page
