Weird Things in the Sky

There are​ approximately twenty billion Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Scientists think that up to a quarter of them are orbited by planets where water could be present; if the same holds true in other galaxies, it would mean fifty sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that potential seem ridiculously small. It’s safe to assume we’re not alone.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the chances of intelligent life developing on Earth were ridiculously small; the chances of it having developed on another planet are that much smaller. The chances that another planet is currently home to a civilisation more advanced than our own (but sufficiently similar in biological, cultural and technological terms that our two species could meaningfully interact with each other) must be smaller still. And the idea that an alien civilisation is making regular visits to our planet and that our governments are systematically covering up the evidence – Occam’s razor makes pretty short work of it.

A growing number of people can’t see the problem. According to the latest YouGov polling, 34 per cent of Americans and 22 per cent of Britons believe that extra-terrestrial beings have visited Earth. Not all of them are obvious cranks. Greg Eghigian’s fascinating history of the phenomenon shows that a weakness for UFOs has affected an extraordinary range of people and penetrated to just about every corner of society.

Take Prince Philip. A longtime reader of Flying Saucer Review (very much the prestige publication in the field), he would request reports on the latest sightings from RAF Fighter Command, and invited witnesses such as Stephen Darbishire, a schoolboy who in 1954 took photos of a UFO in Cumbria, to meet him at Buckingham Palace. He also amassed a large collection of books on the subject. Towards the end of his life, he read The Halt Perspective (2016), about the Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980, when several UFOs were spotted over US airbases in East Anglia. After his enthusiasm for this sort of thing came to light, the Sun contacted John Hanson, one of the book’s authors, who declared that ‘any sensible person’ would be interested in a phenomenon ‘that has baffled mankind for millennia’.

The extent to which Philip was a sensible person remains open to debate, but as a UFO buff who was on familiar terms with world leaders he was well placed to be an interplanetary ambassador, and it must have been frustrating that aliens never made contact with him. For one reason or another, they’ve preferred to deal with people like George Adamski, a Polish-American handyman and ‘minor figure on the California occult scene’. Adamski claimed to have first spotted a UFO in 1946, having acquired a fifteen-inch telescope for the purpose. Six years later, after reporting nearly two hundred other sightings, he described tracking one down to the Colorado desert, where he was approached by a member of the crew, a young man of ‘Nordic’ appearance, wearing what appeared to be ski pants. He had soft, unblemished skin, long, flowing hair and sparkling white teeth. Communicating telepathically, he explained that his name was Orthon, that he came from Venus, and that he was on Earth to warn mankind that the testing and use of atomic bombs was putting the entire galaxy in danger. ‘The beauty of his form surpassed anything I had ever seen,’ Adamski wrote of the encounter. ‘The pleasantness of his face freed me of all thought of my personal self. I felt like a child in the presence of one with great wisdom and much love, and I became very humble within myself … from him was radiating a feeling of infinite understanding and kindness, with supreme humility.’

Huge if true. By way of evidence, Adamski provided photos of the Venusian spaceship. Not everyone was convinced – Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that the pictures bore an ‘uncanny resemblance to electric light fittings with table-tennis balls fixed underneath’ – but thousands were, and Adamski became an international sensation. His book Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), co-authored with the Anglo-Irish aristocrat and Spitfire pilot Desmond Leslie, went through eleven printings in two years, and he was soon a regular presence on radio and TV. In 1959, he embarked on a lecture tour across five continents, and was granted an audience with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. At a press conference in The Hague, he declared that the British royal family were keen to meet him too and that ‘Prince Philip so far has been the most interested.’ When it came to the crunch, however, Adamski was too much for Philip, who scrawled ‘Not on your Nellie!’ across a letter from Leslie offering to make an introduction.

‘To those who held themselves up to be “serious UFO investigators”’, Eghigian writes, Adamski was ‘an outright embarrassment’. But his story has much in common with other, less blatantly bogus accounts. As Eghigian points out, aliens – whether or not they come in peace – are always ‘identified with superior knowledge evident in their technological achievements and mastery of languages’. Again and again, they’re reported as saying that humanity’s rampant warmongering and use of nuclear weaponry is what has drawn their attention to Earth. It’s an idea with appeal: our delinquent species could benefit from external supervision. The same year that Adamski made his world tour, Carl Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky appeared in English, setting out his ‘psychosocial’ analysis of the UFO phenomenon. He saw them as objects of quasi-religious longing, ‘technological angels’ offering hope of spiritual redemption in a secular, science-stunned age. In recent decades they’ve often been described in more menacing terms, but that hasn’t invalidated Jung’s central point: the way a society talks about UFOs provides insights into its deepest fantasies.

People have been seeing weird things in the sky since the beginning of recorded history, but popular fascination with the phenomenon – what Eghigian calls ‘the UFO era’ – didn’t begin until after the Second World War. In other words, it emerged in the context of an unprecedented expansion of military and civil aviation: there were more things up there to see. One of the earliest modern witnesses was Kenneth Arnold, a businessman and amateur pilot from Chehalis, Washington. On 24 June 1947, he reported seeing nine bright objects flying alongside his plane in ‘chain-like’ formation. Describing the incident to the East Oregonian shortly afterwards, he said that the objects were ‘flat like a pie pan and somewhat bat-shaped’, and that they moved ‘like a saucer would if you skipped it across water’. In a report published the following day, a writer for the Associated Press used the phrase ‘flying saucer’.

The story was picked up everywhere, prompting a torrent of other witnesses to come forward. ‘By the end of the first week of July,’ Eghigian writes, ‘almost every US state had at least one report of a flying saucer sighting.’ The phenomenon soon spread abroad, though with important local variations. In Brazil, there were ‘flying platters’; in France, ‘flying crêpes’. A second wave of saucers made headlines in 1950. If we reject the idea that a sudden influx of low-flying spaceships was responsible, it doesn’t mean all the witnesses were lying. Perhaps they saw shooting stars, comets or lenticular clouds. At the beginning of the UFO era, the idea that flying saucers were from other planets was confined to a negligible minority. A survey conducted by George Gallup in 1947 didn’t even raise the extra-terrestrial hypothesis as a possibility: if anyone believed in it, they were lost among the 9 per cent of respondents who plumped for ‘other’ explanations. Four years later, Popular Science magazine polled the witnesses themselves, and found that only 4 per cent believed they had seen a ‘visitor from afar’. Many of them – including Kenneth Arnold – suspected that the US Air Force was responsible.

Eghigian suggests that the popularity of science fiction in the 1950s – magazines such as Amazing Stories, films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – played a role in connecting the happenings to little green men. There were also influential works of non-fiction, such as a widely read article in Life, ‘Have We Visitors from Space?’, which appeared in April 1952. That summer, the number of reported sightings ‘skyrocketed’. It wasn’t long before people like Adamski were corroborating the most outlandish speculation with eyewitness accounts. By the mid-1960s, it’s estimated that there had been between two thousand and five thousand reported contacts between humans and aliens.

Given the variety of life-forms that evolution has produced on our own planet, you might expect an even bigger range of types elsewhere in the universe – but the vast majority of witnesses claim otherwise. A 1970 study of 333 reports from around the world suggested that 96 per cent of aliens were ‘basically human in form’. The interplanetary visitors of the 1950s and 1960s wore cartoonish sci-fi clothes (helmets, jumpsuits, capes) and had cartoonish astro-kitsch names (Aetherium, LeLando, A-Lan). Female aliens were ‘pleasant-appearing’ and ‘well-proportioned’, while the darker the visitors’ skin, the more hostile they were likely to be. It’s no surprise that the majority of witnesses were ‘white American and English men’.

What ultimately did for Adamski-style encounters, however, wasn’t their narrative shortcomings so much as their scientific ones. The Mariner space probes of 1962 and 1964 revealed that Mars and Venus – the two planets most often cited as the homes of alien visitors and said to be teeming with futuristic cities – were desolate environments blighted by extreme temperatures. Further advances in space exploration dashed hopes of discovering life elsewhere in our solar system.

Venusian hippies went the way of fairies and elves, but a more troubling sort of contact narrative survived. One of the earliest examples had come to light in 1957, when Antônio Villas Boas, a 23-year-old Brazilian farmhand, approached a journalist at O Cruzeiro to report a harrowing encounter. He had been out on his tractor at around 1 a.m., he explained, when a glowing egg-shaped machine with three metal supports suddenly descended from the sky. A group of tiny men speaking ‘an unintelligible language that sounded like the barking of a dog’ emerged and dragged him inside. After they had stripped him naked and sponged him down, a beautiful woman entered the room and proceeded to have sex with him. Before leaving, ‘she turned to me, pointed to her belly and then pointed towards me and with a smile (or something like it), she finally pointed towards the sky.’ He had no doubt that this gesture meant the same to a barking alien as it meant to him, concluding that ‘she was going to return to take me away with her to wherever she lived.’ His account caught the attention of the ufologist Coral Lorenzen, head of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organisation, who found it basically credible. The reason the aliens thought it better to seduce a man is ‘obvious’, she wrote to a colleague. ‘An Earth woman … would be rendered useless at the moment of kidnapping, because she would probably lose her mind from the shock.’ It must have been nice for Villas Boas, who worried that he was just ‘a good stallion to improve their stock’, to have heard that the aliens also valued him for his mind.

The most famous case of alien abduction is said to have taken place in 1961, though it didn’t receive widespread attention until the mid-1970s. Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple (at a time when that made them conspicuous) from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were returning late at night from their honeymoon at Niagara Falls when they noticed strange lights in the sky. They arrived home, two hours later than expected, in a state of extreme confusion and anxiety, their clothes unaccountably scuffed and torn, with odd fragments of memory: a large cigar-shaped craft with extended wings following their car down the highway; a glimpse of humanoid figures with shiny dark uniforms. Over the weeks that followed, Betty was tormented by dreams in which she and Barney were taken onboard the ship and subjected to a variety of medical tests.

Eventually, with the help of investigators from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), which Eghigian describes as ‘the most prominent UFO organisation in the United States’, the Hills consulted Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist trained in hypnotic regression, who conducted sessions with them over the course of six months. The audio recordings of their conversations, available online, are disturbing. Describing the abduction, Barney in particular seems overwhelmed with fear. He alternates between an eerie, zonked-out monotone and blood-curdling howls and whimpers. There’s no doubting the authenticity of his distress. Dr Simon viewed the case as a classic folie à deux: he argued that Barney must have assimilated Betty’s nightmares into his memory of the incident. ‘The fact that they proved it under hypnosis does not prove it was a reality. It only proves that they believed it.’ His distinction has been lost on some UFO enthusiasts, who regard the tapes as clinching evidence of the Hills’ reliability.

The UFO Incident, a film about the Hills, starring James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty, was broadcast by NBC in October 1975, bringing their story to millions of American households. It suited the paranoid mood of the times. Two weeks after watching it, Travis Walton, a forestry worker, was reported missing. When he reappeared five days later, he said that he had been held captive on a spacecraft by short, bald, dome-headed beings. The National Enquirer arranged a polygraph test, which he spectacularly flunked, the examiner remarking that he was a ‘grossly deceptive’ witness. The Enquirer ran the story anyway, and why not? Everyone knows that polygraph tests are unreliable.

By the early 1980s, hundreds of alien abduction cases had been reported, most involving memories recovered under hypnosis and closely conforming to the scenario presented by the Hills: a late-night journey along a lonely road; a glimpse of something following the car; physically invasive experiments and examinations. The leading practitioners of abduction-hypnosis were the artist Budd Hopkins, who had started receiving letters from witnesses after writing about UFOs for the Village Voice, and David Jacobs, a historian at Temple University who had written the first academic monograph on the subject. Believing that abductions were now at epidemic level, part of a sinister intergalactic breeding programme, Hopkins and Jacobs treated their subjects as victims of abuse, going so far as to arrange support groups. Their approach made them superstars in the field, but not all ufologists were happy. The horror novelist Whitley Strieber, whose bestselling Communion: A True Story (1987) recounted his own experiences with paranormal phenomena, was especially hostile: ‘It is beginning to seem more and more that the whole alien abduction/alien rape scenario may be a fantasy that started in the minds of the “abduction” researchers themselves.’ Even Hopkins’s wife, the filmmaker Carol Rainey, queried the ethics of an artist and a historian with zero clinical training putting vulnerable people in hypnotic trances.

Abduction-hypnosis acquired a new sheen of respectability in the 1990s thanks to John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard and the author of A Prince of Our Disorder (1976), a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of T.E. Lawrence. Mack’s decision to use hypnosis with patients reporting strange dreams and memories wasn’t unusual for a mental health professional with an interest in trauma; what did raise a few eyebrows were the conclusions he reached. In 1992 he told a conference at MIT that ‘the people with whom I have been working, as far as I can tell, are telling the truth.’ In April 1994 he published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, which discussed the experiences of thirteen abductees and gave tacit support to the Hopkins-Jacobs theory of an intergalactic breeding programme (it was dedicated ‘to Budd Hopkins, who led the way’). That same month, Time ran a takedown of his work, including allegations that he provided his subjects with UFO literature to read in advance of their sessions, asked leading questions, and edited their responses to support his conclusions. Most damning of all, the article revealed that Donna Bassett, one of Mack’s ‘experiencers’, had actually been ‘an undercover debunker’. She’d cooked up a story that culminated in her meeting JFK and Khrushchev onboard a spaceship during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mack appeared to lap it up. ‘I’ve never seen a UFO in my life,’ Bassett afterwards confirmed to Time, ‘and I certainly haven’t been inside one.’ The article compared Mack’s practice to the moral panic over Satanic ritual abuse, which had shown how easily false memories could be implanted under hypnosis. None of this seems to have damaged his reputation: his book became a New York Times bestseller.

The original and most influential debunker was Donald Menzel, director of the Harvard Observatory from 1952 to 1966, who proposed three reasons that ‘so many civilised people’ had ‘chosen to adopt an uncivilised attitude toward flying saucers’:

First, flying saucers are unusual. All of us are used to regularity. We naturally attribute mystery to the unusual.

Second, we are all nervous. We live in a world that has suddenly become hostile. We have unleashed forces we cannot control; many persons fear we are heading toward a war that will end in the destruction of civilisation.

Third, people enjoy being frightened a little. They go to Boris Karloff double features.

These remarks went somewhat beyond Menzel’s area of expertise (theoretical astrophysics, with particular emphasis on the chemical composition of stars), but that didn’t hold him back. He compared himself to Sherlock Holmes as he doggedly traced UFO sightings back to tricks of the light produced by such mundane phenomena as water droplets, ice crystals and dust. Many ufologists concluded that he was being sponsored by the CIA.

There are in fact often good reasons for doubting the official line on UFOs. Faced with speculation that a flying saucer had crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, the US government flat-out lied, claiming that the debris had been caused by a downed weather balloon. It wasn’t until 1994, more than a decade after Charles Berlitz and William Moore’s book The Roswell Incident (1980) had spawned a new generation of conspiracy theories, that the Clinton administration fessed up: the crash was related to a secret surveillance programme, in which balloons had been equipped with listening devices to monitor Soviet atomic tests. There’s also evidence that the first major government-sponsored investigation into UFOs was conducted in bad faith. The committee, which began work in October 1966, was led by Edward Condon – a scientist who had flounced out of Los Alamos after a few weeks on the Manhattan Project – and headquartered at the University of Colorado. It took pains to appear open-minded, employing a panel of consultant ufologists from NICAP. They soon became disheartened, feeling that the ‘overbalance of psychologists’ on the committee showed that Condon was treating witnesses as essentially delusional. Things came to a head in July 1967, when the ufologists uncovered a memo in which Condon’s right-hand man, Robert Low, argued that the study should be staffed ‘almost exclusively by non-believers’:

although they couldn’t possibly prove a negative result, [they] could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the observations. The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of non-believers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer. One way to do this would be to stress investigation, not of the physical phenomena, but rather of the people who do the observing – the psychology and sociology of persons and groups who report seeing UFOs.

It never looks good to be framing your research in terms of an underlying ‘trick’. By the time the Condon Committee’s report was published in January 1969, its conclusion that ‘further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified’ surprised no one.

The debunkers are, in some respects, richer subjects for psychological study than the true believers. If you think there’s a realistic chance that aliens are visiting Earth, you’re going to want to make your case as noisily as possible. But if you think it’s all a bit far-fetched, why bother getting involved? Eghigian sees figures such as Menzel as public moralists, intellectual descendants of the early modern sceptics of witchcraft, but that doesn’t explain why they think rational arguments are the best tool for combating beliefs that don’t have a rational basis. You start to suspect that many debunkers are contending with their own latent wish to believe. That would explain the trajectory of the astrophysicist Allen Hynek, whose classification system for witness accounts, from minor (seeing lights in the sky) to major (actual contact with aliens), was made famous by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Hynek started out as a debunker – in the 1940s and 1950s he was employed by the US Air Force to call out the cranks – but later became openly agnostic about the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

A not dissimilar narrative arc drove The X-Files, the show that introduced people of my generation to the tenets of UFO lore. Its conspiracy-minded hero, FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), constantly had his belief in paranormal activity challenged by his sceptical, scientifically minded partner, Dr Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Almost all of the episodes began with a motto blazoned across the screen: ‘THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.’ Viewers were left in little doubt that the truth in question was Mulder’s version, and as the series progressed (it ran for nine seasons, from 1993 to 2002), Scully was reluctantly won over. The show’s creator, Chris Carter, whose interest in the paranormal was first piqued when he read John Mack, said he wanted to reverse gender stereotypes – to have the male protagonist instinct-driven and emotional, the female more rational and cool-headed – and was widely praised for it. If the trade-off was that Mulder and Scully inhabited a world in which instinct and emotion always came out on top, then nobody seems to have minded.

UFOs have been back in the news in recent years. In 2017, the US Department of Defence revealed that between 2007 and 2012 it had run a secret investigation into what are officially referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (or UAPs), with a budget of $22 million. Three years later, following a leak by the ufologist group To the Stars (headed by Tom DeLonge, a member of the pop-punk band Blink-182), the Pentagon declassified three videos of UAPs, and on the face of it they’re not easy to explain away. In the most compelling sequence – known as GIMBAL and filmed in 2004 from a US Navy Super Hornet fighter jet – a vaguely saucer-shaped object can be seen moving rapidly, in a smooth trajectory, above a bank of clouds. The voices of the Super Hornet’s pilots can be heard. ‘There’s a whole fleet of ’em,’ one says. ‘My gosh,’ the other replies. ‘They’re all going against the wind! The wind is 120 knots to the west!’ Before the video ends, the object seems to rotate ninety degrees. A gasp comes from one of the pilots: ‘Look at that thing!’

It does send a little shiver down the spine, but the debunker Mick West has argued on his YouTube channel that the object in GIMBAL is probably just another plane, whose apparent speed and direction of travel result from the parallax effect (the optical illusion that makes nearby objects appear to move more quickly when viewed against a distant background), and that what’s rotating is the camera rather than the UFO itself. The ‘unprecedented velocity’ ufologists have attributed to the object at the centre of another video, GOFAST, may be a product of the camera changing its zoom level, making the object seem to accelerate suddenly to the left, when in reality its position relative to the viewer hasn’t changed.

If there is a case for taking such incidents seriously, then it hasn’t been materially helped by David Grusch, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, who last year went public with claims that the federal government had for decades been running a top-secret UFO retrieval programme and was in possession of not only numerous alien spacecraft but also the corpses of their pilots. The Republican-led House Oversight Committee arranged a hearing, at which Grusch repeated many of his allegations, but failed (at least in the open sessions) to provide any supporting evidence. That didn’t faze some members of the committee. The Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett, who co-chaired the hearing, told reporters that the government was clearly engaged in a massive cover-up, and that the ‘technology’ seen in the declassified Pentagon videos ‘defies all of our laws of physics’. He demonstrated his grasp of those laws when he explained why he thought Grusch’s claims about alien bodies being recovered from UFOs were credible: ‘I don’t want to oversimplify things, but how are you going to fly one? You got to have somebody in it. That seems to be pretty simple.’ It’s a strange cast of mind that credits aliens with the power of intergalactic travel but not the wherewithal to manufacture drones.