Page 73 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - June 2015 Edition

UFOs In The News
After watching sci-fi
movies and TV shows, do
we simply just want to
believe in UFOs?
James Dempsey
Data shows a link between the
number of reported sightings and the
release of movies featuring aliens
In the mid 90s, just around the time that Will
Smith and Jeff Goldblum were saving planet the
US from having its bank holiday weekend
ruined by some trigger-happy alien invaders, the
number of UFO sightings in the UK
skyrocketed. With a sequel to Independence
Day due for release next year, will a new
generation of smartphone-wielding conspiracy
theorists be documenting dozens of blurred
encounters of the third kind on Snapchat?
That’s what Dr David Clarke believes,
an expert on UFO sightings whose childhood
was spent devouring pulp sci-fi fiction and
waiting for the UK government to finally admit
that aliens are living here amongst us. Now,
some 35 years on, David has moved on to
respectfully debunking believers’ credulity.
“As I grew up and put my childhood
things aside,” he told Sean Moncrieff, “I
became a journalist and thought I’d look into
these stories with a bit more depth. So I spent
several decades trailing up and down the British
Isles and Ireland, interviewing people who were
involved in some of the big classic cases that
people usually refer to as proof that aliens have
been here.
“And I found something else, something
completely different to what I’d expected – that
yeah, they do exist, but they exist in the same
way that many other myths exist, you know
myths and legends and stories about spirits and
ghosts and that sort of thing.”
While most of us are quick to shrug off
believers’ fantastic tales and fanciful certainty
that alien spacecraft regularly skims the Earth’s
atmosphere on some intergalactic joyride, the
unwavering belief that UFO ‘truthers’ have is
like, Clarke says, a faith. The stories they tell
are unfalsifiable, wrapped up in the trappings of
a religious creed.
“It’s not a religion in the way that
you’ve got Catholicism and Islam, where
you’ve got a set of things that people believe
and rituals that you go through. It’s got a lot of
the trappings of faith, in that you cannot
disprove it,” he says.
“I’ve gone through loads and loads of
examples where somebody’s reported seeing
something and you’ve reached a rational
explanation of what it is that’s been seen, and
you present that and the people who’ve reported
or seen it simply will not accept it. Even though
it’s absolutely undoubted that that’s what was
seen.”
During his research, Clarke sifted
through a number of declassified British
Ministry of Defence documents in which civil
servants had logged all the UFO sightings
reported by UK citizens. It was there that he
63
noticed the correlation between reports and
blockbuster film releases.
“It’s pretty crude data, and I’m not
trying to say that this is scientifically proved,
but if you just look at the basic number of
sighting results that they logged per year, you
notice that when you plot them on a graph that
you get massive spikes in the years when big
films and anniversaries were out,” he says.
Take for instance 1978 and Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, where Richard
Dreyfuss gets sunburnt by some aliens flying
overhead. The movie led to a significant spike
in sightings.
“Rather than going out of the cinema
and looking down at your feet, people are
looking up at the sky and probably seeing quite
ordinary things that they would otherwise have
just ignored,” Clarke says.
“And you get this massive peak in
sightings reported in ’96 and ’97, which was the
50th anniversary of the birth of flying saucers.
Also we had Independence Day, the film,
released. So the more awareness there is, the
more that people say that they see things.”
And as Clarke is quick to point out, he
never denies that the people who claim to have
witness aliens flying across the sky genuinely
believe in what they saw – just that they are
misinterpreting what they see, seeing the
extraordinary in the ordinary.
At one point in his book, How UFOs
Conquered the World, he interviews the final
investigator sent by the MoD out into the field
in the 1960s to poke around forests and speak to
witnesses of extraterrestrial visits.
“And the investigator basically came to
the conclusion that, yeah, there were people
who were seeing things and believed in what
they saw, but what they saw could not be used
as evidence,” Clarke says.
“And the comment he made to me was
that it’s the people who see these things who are
far more worthy of investigation. But then
again he would say that as a psychologist, I
suppose!” []
Duo arrested for creating
'UFO' scare in Mumbai
Mumbai Mirror
Stunned event organiser whose unwitting act of
releasing gas balloons in the air sent the defence
and intelligence agencies into a tizzy says he
will never ever do it again.
When event organiser Kunal Shah and
his colleague Nilesh Shrimankar decided to
release gas balloons at the end of a cricket
match they organised at Kalina on Saturday,
little did they realise it would trigger a
nationwide hunt by defence and intelligence
agencies, culminating in their arrest on Tuesday
morning.
After a Jet Airways pilot spotted five
objects that looked like unmanned parachutes
on Saturday evening, he aborted take off, and
alerted air traffic authorities. Within hours,
defence and intelligence personnel were all
scrambling to figure out what the objects were.
Shah said he came to know about the
serious security breach from media reports and
from the Mumbai police who called him for
questioning about the event. Shah, 33, and
Shrimankar were charged with endangering the
life and personal safety of others (IPC Section
336), criminal acts by more than one person
with common intent (Sec 34), and disobedience
to order promulgated by a public servant (Sec
188). The duo released on bail bonds of Rs
10,000 each on Tuesday evening. Shah said they
earned Rs 11,000 from the event and ended up
paying Rs 20,000 as bail.
“I'll never release such balloons again,"
he added.[]
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