UFO sightings: an otherworldly history | HistoryExtra
"‘Am I right in saying this is an example historically speaking of culture influencing the way in which political agencies operated?’
‘Yes. Absolutely. Bo doubt about. it I mean UFOs were created out of the Cold War, out of the Cold War tensions. The the UFO idea that we currently have in our minds, that's not to say that odd things hadn't been seen in the sky before um the Second World War, because they certainly had. If we go back to just before the First World War for instance, if you look at any English newspaper or British newspaper, um just before the outbreak of the First World War, don't don't look for flying saucers and UFOs, but you will see story after story about people seeing strange lights in the sky, beams of light coming down to the ground, long elongated objects moving around around that they were convinced were zeppelins sent by the Germans to spy on the British Isles. This is in 1909, 1913, and lots of people are absolutely convinced that this was going on but if you look at the the descriptions, the they're UFOs. And they are the same things that people are now reporting as UFOs. And they are things like stars, meteors, there were no space junk back then but there were certainly balloons and other meteorological things that people because they had, they were worked up and they were anxious and they knew there was a war coming, and they'd been told yeah when the war comes the Germans will be sending their airships over to drop bombs on us, and they were seeing all kinds of odd things in the sky and I think there's a similar situation going on now that, we are all primed to see UFOs. You cannot escape from the subject...
It's only about 15 years ago, the newspapers were full of stories about alien fleets that had been seen over all the main, major cities of the UK. What did they turn out to be? Formations of Chinese lanterns... People in the UFO community have this odd sort of cognitive dissonance in that A), they say that they don't trust anything, that the government say on the subject, that it's all part of cover up to hide the truth, i.e that the you know aliens have been here and crashed and it's all being kept secret from us, but then again you get someone from the military or from the politician side who who sort of chimes up and says you know I believe that UFOs as alien craft exist and that we should be taking it seriously and those people then are elevated to this sort of special status that because they work for the government therefore they must be telling the truth...
Lord Mountbatten… he was hugely influential and back in 1950 he spoke anonymously to one of Britain's Sunday newspapers… ‘I believe in flying saucers’ and it was like one of the most important people in the British government has said that um these things are real. And he he described them as like you know they're like the Shackletons coming from Mars to explore Earth. And he really really believed in this for a few years and eventually he went on to become the chief of Defense staff, i.e. the most senior military official in the British government. But I've sort of gone through all his personal papers and you can see the change as he becomes more and more aware of the facts and he talks to some of the military um people who've, who've dealt with reports that have been made to the RAF and the Royal Navy and he becomes more and more skeptical so that by, sort of the early 1960s there's there's a little memo from him to um the chief scientist at that time saying should we open a study of UFOs and flying saucers? And this Chief scientist comes back to him and says um well what would be gained from it? It would be almost like opening a study of whether the Loch Ness monster exists. And you know, we know that there isn't a Loch Ness monster and even if we drained Loch Ness completely and there was no monster at the bottom of it, um they'd say that it had nipped out for a few minutes while we were doing the draining and it's now back in...
‘There's absolutely clear correlation between films and TV programs about UFOs and alien life, and sudden spikes in the number of reports that have been passed on to the authorities. I mean it's it's a very crude metric. You can't say it's like cause and effect, because there's this continual drip drip drip now. Be very difficult to make any correlation now, but certainly looking at those earlier decades, as I mentioned 1977, 1978 with the release of Close Encounters, I mean the Ministry of Defense, the number of reports that they received I think literally tripled. It went from sort of an average of a couple of hundred per year to you know heading for a thousand and there was even, I remember seeing reports in there saying, you know I saw an object in the sky over London that looked exactly like the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
There is this correlation and also it's not just with films and pop culture because the, the last statistic we had from the Ministry of Defense files was 2008 to 2009, that sort of period. And that's when they decided that it was costing an awful lot of money to keep tabs on this subject and this is during the first period of um the financial crash of that time when Gordon Brown was prime minister… then people make Freedom of Information requests to see this stuff and it's costing an awful lot of money, so they just pulled the plug. But 2008 to 9 again was the most massive spike of all, even taking into account the 1970s with the film, the late 1990s with the X-Files, Independence Day. A massive increase in in numbers then. But 2008 to 9 there wasn't any big film but what there was was all the publicity about the release of the files at the National Archives...
The whistleblower… I just read this. And I just thought here we go again. Because this is nothing unique if we go back to 1989 there was a guy called Bob Lazar that came forward. Very similar to the current whistleblower who said that he'd worked to Area 51, his security clearance was so high that um no one could check his credentials and he'd actually seen these grounded flying sources that the American government were secretly back engineering etc etc. So so he, this current person that's come forward is just the latest in a long line of so-called whistleblowers, the story that the American government has got secretly hidden away in a hanger somewhere in the desert or in Area 51 is now preferred isn't a new story. It it first surfaced in 1950.
Um as long ago as that, that's 73 years ago when a guy called Frank Scully published a book called Behind the Flying Saucers and he said that he'd heard from two top secret scientists who worked on the project that the Americans had retrieved I think it was six or seven crashed discs that had come down in the Arizona desert, that they were covered in hieroglyphs, the American um army had secretly removed them, and that triggered off whole similar series of questions and statements as like what we're seeing today, and this was three years after Roswell. And that story is a good story. It's effectively an urban legend. That's what it is, it's been classified as an urban legend by Professor Jan Brunvand who is the inventor of you know the phrase urban legend. It's called the landed martians. And and the legend is that the American government have secretly relieved this crash. So this guy that's come forward is is repeating a very well-known urban legend that has been circulating for at least 70 years. And the fact is he, if you actually pare down what he's saying, where's the evidence? Has he seen the evidence? And when you actually look carefully at what he said, no. He's heard from someone else that this is the case. He hasn't actually seen any of this.
So basically he's spreading a friend of a friend story. It's a classic urban legend, it's like alligators in sewers and phantom hitchikers etc etc. And the and this simple idea that because he used to work in US intelligence, therefore he must be telling the truth. I find that bizarre. So why should we believe this hoary old tale that's been regurgitated every few years and that dates back to 1950? But because there's this sort of bandwagon rolling and people are stressed out, they're anxious because of the cost of living crisis, the aftermath of Covid. Isn't it nice to think that somewhere hidden away in the hangers there are these fantastic spaceships of aliens that have ridden across the universe like the seventh cavalry to, to rescue us? It, it's too good to be true’...
'All you've got to do is apply common sense to it. I mean just think. If all these spacecraft had come here and crashed, why have they all crashed in the United States? For instance why have none crashed in North Korea or Venezuela? And there is not a single subject that all the governments of the world agree on. You only have to go and listen to the meetings of the United Nations to see this. So are you telling me that all the countries of the entire world got together and agreed on one subject to hide the fact we're being visiting by aliens from the general public. It just does not make sense, there's got to be a more common sense explanation'"
