A group of
British UFO-watchers is celebrating 50 years of searching for spacecraft in the
sky. What keeps them looking for extra-terrestrial life?
There are
no windows in the functional-looking basement hall beneath a north London
hotel. But everyone gathered here is gazing to the heavens.
Figuratively
speaking, that is.
The annual
conference of the British UFO Research Association (Bufora), is a gathering of
enthusiasts for unexplained aerial phenomena that might, they speculate, be
evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Dozens of
them have travelled from around the UK to be here. They listen to guest
speakers patiently and attentively. Many carefully take notes during lectures
on such topics as "Ghost Rockets", "Political, Cultural and
Social Influences of UFOs" and "Behind All The Anomalous
Reports".
Ufology -
as its followers like to term it - is a subculture with its own lexicography -
greys, contactees, close encounters.
 |
| Bufora delegates browse UFO titles at a bookstall |
The
ufologists also have their own recurring motifs - abductions, government
cover-ups - and a distinctive visual aesthetic which looks like a sort of blend
of the retro-futurist and the New Age.
At a
bookstall, delegates browse titles like The Real Men in Black by Nick Redfern,
Reflections of a UFO Investigator by Kevin Randle and The Occult Significance
of UFOs by Douglas Baker.
The
predominant demographic is older men. But somewhere between a quarter and a
third of Bufora attendees look under 30 and a similar proportion are female.
Bufora
styles its approach as "scientifically factual", distancing itself
from the more esoteric and mystical wings of the movement, such as the
Raelians, who believe the Earth was created by an alien race called the Elohim,
and followers of David Icke, who teaches that the human race was bred by
reptilians from the constellation Draco.
Instead,
Bufora devotes its efforts to fact-checking unexplained sightings. The group
says that 95% of the 500-plus sightings reported to its National Investigations
Committee each year can be explained rationally. And the rest - well, they
aren't ruling anything out. Not aliens, anyway.
This logic,
and indeed the very notion of an empirically rigorous UFO-spotter, is
guaranteed to provoke snorts of derision from sceptics who regard ufology as a
blend of pseudo-science, conspiracy theory and mystical hokum.
Certainly,
speakers may stress the importance of maintaining an evidence-based approach
and not letting one's beliefs colour judgements.
But the
questions from the floor tend to concern whether they think a spacecraft landed
at Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk in 1980 or if they believe the American
government is covering something up at Area 51 in Nevada. No-one demurs when
the TV presenter Lionel Fanthorpe tells the audience that the "major
possibilities" for explaining strange things in the sky include parallel
universes, extra-terrestrial life and "psychic phenomena".
But even
opponents would have to concede that the ufological world view has seeped into
the mainstream. A study for National Geographic magazine in June found that 36%
of Americans said they believed in UFOs and one in 10 claimed they had spotted
one. Almost 80% thought the government had concealed information on the subject
from the public.
Nonetheless,
the last decade has seen a succession of news reports foretelling a crisis in
ufology.
 |
Is it a bird, is it a plane?
Numerous UFO sightings in the UK were
published by the National Archives in 2012,
but UFO-spotting is nothing new, with many
cases being recorded in different countries:
1946 - Polish-born American George
Adamski claimed to have seen a large cigar-shaped "mother ship"
1947 - reports of an object crashing near
Roswell, New Mexico was thought to be an extra-terrestrial spacecraft. The US army countered that debris recovered belonged to a weather balloon
1980 - The Rendlesham Forest incident,
when lights and a craft were reportedly seen in the forest in Suffolk near RAF Woodbridge |
The folding
of the long-established UFO Magazine in 2004 and the Ministry of Defence's
decision to close its UFO desk in 2009 led several mainstream commentators to
conclude that the phenomenon was a distinctively 20th Century one, unique to an
era of Cold War paranoia, space race-fuelled technological optimism and pop
culture references to aliens and extra-terrestrials.
There was
even speculation that the effect was partly down to 9/11. With a new and
definitely real enemy to focus on, the uncommitted would be less drawn to
ufology, the theory went.
But still
the ufologists gather, longing to discover more about these strange sightings
in the sky.
"[The
movie] Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a membership surge for us, as
did ET and then the X Files," smiles Bufora chairman Matt Lyons, a
cheerful 45-year-old music teacher from Kent.
While
unexplained celestial happenings have been witnessed throughout history,
UFO-spotting as a popular phenomenon took off after US airman Kenneth Arnold
reported sighting nine disc-shaped objects while airborne in 1947. Five years
later, George Adamski attracted huge publicity after claiming that he had met
Nordic-looking aliens who warned him about the dangers of nuclear war.
Against
this backdrop, Bufora was founded in September 1962 as an amalgamation of
various regional groups.
Mainstream
scientists were not yet embarrassed to be associated with UFOs, recalls retired
civil servant and veteran UFO-watcher Lionel Beer. The Duke of Edinburgh was
even claimed as a subscriber to Flying Saucer Review. At Bufora's inaugural
meeting, in west London's Kensington Central Library, it was "standing
room only", Beer wistfully remembers.
Arguably
the high point of ufology's influence on British political life came when the
House of Lords earnestly debated the subject in January 1979.
By this
time, however, sky-watching had taken a darker turn. In the believer's
worldview, aliens had been the wise, benevolent secular angels of Adamski's
depiction.
But by the
end of the 1970s belief was growing in a huge government cover-up at Roswell,
Nevada - a plot that, coincidently, began to be speculated about soon after the
Watergate scandal shattered public faith in politicians.
Indeed,
it's possible to see postwar Western social history reflected through the prism
of UFO belief - from early optimism about technological advance through Cold
War fears of attacks from above, via 1960s counterculture and the later
cynicism that would find its zenith with the X Files.
For this
reason, even sceptics like Dr David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University - who
successfully campaigned for the MoD to release its UFO-related files - believe
the phenomenon is nonetheless worth studying as a powerful example of 20th
Century folklore and mythology.
"Of
course, it's pseudo-science," he says. "But people have always looked
in the sky and seen things that were odd or puzzling. Before aliens, it was
angels, ghosts and spirits.
"What
it tells us is that, as human beings, we need to find explanations and believe
in something bigger than ourselves."
Not that
all non-believers entirely reject life in the ufology world.
Writer and
film-maker Mark Pilkington - whose book about the subculture, Mirage Men, forms
the basis of a forthcoming documentary - has fond memories of his early days in
the UFO community before he abandoned its core tenets.
"If
you get into it and take it seriously, you have to learn about physics,
chemistry, meteorology and so on," he says.
"It
can give you a really good grounding in reality, ironically."
Even the
sceptics, it seems, are staring at the stars.
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