The History & Mystery Of UFOs | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘The military interest in it is purely from the point of view of military intelligence. Are any of these things that have been seen and detected enemy craft of some kind or enemy? I mean, we're not even talking about craft now. Because these these drones that the these two adverse or three adversaries, you've got America, Russia and China now, and the the technology that they're working on, these these tiny drones that are capable of hypersonic speeds. And it's quite obvious if you read some of the descriptions of the pilots that have reported some of these things in the Atlantic and Pacific, they’re talking about tiny objects. I mean, one of them describes the thing that he saw near his aircraft as being suitcase sized. Either that's come from the other side of the universe with little diddy aliens inside it, or it's a drone. So the the most likely explanation, and this is interesting, because the report that was done way back in 1954, Winston Churchill, employed something called Occam's Razor. Where he looked at the evidence and Occam’s Razor simply says, it's a basic scientific principle that if you've got a problem, and you need an explanation for, you choose the most likely explanation, not the one that requires the most ridiculous sort of explanation...
There's actually three different names for these things. And the one that's triggered it all off was flying saucer. Is the guy the the again, it was a journalist who coined the phrase flying saucer, because the fact. the very first sort of modern sighting, which was in 1947, was a chap, that American pilot that saw this formation of nine objects that he described as like Batwing-shaped that were flying above the Cascade Mountains in Washington. He was out looking for a crashed plane and he saw these things in the distance and they were traveling at some fantastic speed. And when he landed the the news reporters said to him, well, how would you describe it? He said, it was like, you can imagine getting a getting a saucer and skipping it across a pond. So he wasn't talking about they were saucer shaped, but some sub editor came up with flying saucer and then everyone started seeing saucer shaped objects even though this guy hadn't actually described them as being saucer shaped...
The military intelligence people sometime in the 1990s have thought we need to get we need another acronym, move away from UFO, because we know that most of these things that have been seen the most interesting ones aren't objects… So that's how they came up with UAP unidentified aerial phenomena… So when people have been asking, do you investigate UFOs, like with the British minister of defense, oh, no, we don't investigate UFOs. And they're not lying. Because from their point of view, they're looking at UAPs…
The British Minister Ministry of Defense, they commissioned a study… I found out about this using the Freedom of Information Act, and managed to persuade them to release it... And the amazing conclusion there is that these things exist, there's no doubt about it, quite a stunning conclusion in there. That they can, they can, you know, they can fly around at incredible speeds, land, take off, this, that and the other. And I was reading this and thinking, this is a Ministry of Defense report that concludes this, but the rope was, that there's no evidence that these things are alien, that something exists, the tiny proportion of sightings that they can't explain, some of them, you know, by pilots and qualified observers. But the author of the report says that these things that we can't explain are some kind of atmospheric phenomena. This is where we get to the UAP. And he proposed something called, that he called atmospheric plasmas. Now, if you, if you've got the patience to wade through this huge report, he claims that there's evidence that meteors that impact on the Earth's atmosphere burn up and they create some kind of plasma that continues to sort of exist in the atmosphere. And his theory was that this is what the pi-, pilots were seeing, you know, like the Aurora Borealis, you know, so a luminescent blobs of light that have their own sort of volition that can move around and, and this is what he proposes... he's proposing one unexplained thing that we don't know about to explain another unexplained thing that we don't know about...
UFOs are the greatest modern myth, it is impossible to kill them... You can't prove a negative... If you put the whole GDP of the Western world into investigating it, and every time someone saw a light in the sky, you had a big X Files sort of investigation? You might be able to say, right, well, yeah, that was a planet or that was a, you know, that was a an aircraft, but the UFO believers will always come back to say, well, yes, you've explained that one. But what about this one? You've got to accept that this is something that is not going to go away. It's got semi religious aspects to it...
You've got TV and film, you've got things like The X Files that really revive the subject in the 1990s. All the big films, for example, like Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind that was released in 1978. If you, if you plot those, as I have, against, say, the Ministry of Defense's UFO log, and they used to keep a log of how many sightings were reported to them, you see these massive spikes, and those spikes aren’t, well there's more aliens visited us in 1978, than in 1997, it's simply that people have watched and seen those TV films and gone to the cinema. And they come out of the cinema. And rather than looking at the ground, or at the bag of chips or whatever, they've looked up at the sky and seen something and thought, well, maybe that's one of those UFOs that I've just seen on the, on Steven Spielberg's film’...
‘The conclusion, what was the conclusion? You see, this was the interesting thing. And I actually found these 23 Squadron, logbook that actually talks about it. And it says, we concluded it was a balloon, a balloon’
‘A balloon, it just sounds suspicious, you can see why conspiracy theorists would be like, a balloon caused that much of a… it doesn't add up’...
‘You can see how people looking at that with a conspiracy frame of mind years later would say that can't possibly be a balloon. But from the point of view of the pilots, they were saying it's something that we've never seen before, and we've been scrambled loads of times, this was the one thing that stood out as the most unusual in their entire flying career. But they weren't saying, we think it was aliens, they were saying, thinking about it logically, this was a stationary object that could be seen on radar from the ground, we could see it on our airborne radar, stationary. That's why we couldn't intercept it, because we kept zooming past it, and then having to sort of circle round and come back. What's the most logical explanation for what it was? A balloon. But you see, people will say, how can a balloon move in the fantastic speeds that the Americans said it was moving out, from the ground? Well, the thing is, with a lot of these UFO cases, it’s not one thing. And if you look at when this happened August the 13th, and the night of August the 13, August the 14th. Now if you're an astronomer, you will immediately see relevance in that date, because that is the height of the Perseids meteor shower, and they're zooming around in the sky, and they can be picked up on radar. So it's possible that what triggered it off was the meteor shower. And that's what the Americans had detected. We sent up the aircraft and it just so happened that there was a stray balloon, maybe a meteorological balloon or something like that. And that's what then became the UFO. And it's, it's a mixture of psychology, and expectation, and the will to believe and, all mixed in with with government secrecy. And pop culture. It’s not one thing that creates UFOs. That's the only way really, I can explain it all.’"
The power of suggestion and mass hysteria. But of course the credulous still believe all the sightings
