Proper Gander – Crafty cover-ups

‘This strange thing is flying very fast but erratically … We didn’t see a cockpit. We didn’t see windows. And it moved in ways that we didn’t understand’ says Alex Dietrich, a former pilot with the American military, of her encounter with an unidentified flying object. The case was featured in BBC4’s documentary What Are UFOs?, which described current interest among scientists of reports of ‘strange things’ in the sky, with a potted history of the UFO phenomenon as context.

In the documentary, astrophysicists, witnesses and researchers discuss Dietrich’s sighting from 2004, which became known as the ‘tic tac’, and the so-called ‘gimbal’, observed in 2015. Both were oddly-shaped and oddly-behaving objects seen by pilots and tracked on radar, with footage recorded and subsequently pored over without universal agreement on what it shows. As some of the experts featured in the programme explain, ordinary objects may seem to have unusual shapes and move in unlikely ways because of how they appear on screen. Infra-red cameras are sensitive to heat, so an object will be more prominent the hotter it is, meaning that an aeroplane could look like a blob because the camera will only pick up the area around the engine. Another effect of this is that an object may seem to vanish if its temperature becomes close to that of what’s behind it. Also, the way that cameras on planes move in relation to other objects can make them misleadingly appear to travel in improbable ways. Recordings on modern equipment can be scrutinised much closer than in the past and, as repeated in the documentary, unexplained aerial phenomena are now investigated scientifically chiefly by analysing data, rather than relying on the veracity of observers’ testimony.

Scanning footage on computers doesn’t explain everything about all sightings, particularly when objects have been witnessed directly as well as through equipment. And some sightings may still be of craft which the state wants to keep top secret. As the programme demonstrates, the explanation that this cover-up has been of earthly tech rather than of extra-terrestrial spaceships seems more substantial now than when UFOs have previously been in vogue. The UFO phenomenon as we now know it began in 1947, not long after the Second World War cemented an association between objects in the sky and threats. Wreckage was recovered from a field near Roswell, New Mexico, which the army initially claimed was of a crashed flying disc, then a weather balloon. The subsequent saga of this being a captured alien ship (with aliens) drew attention away from the explanation that the debris was really from a balloon launched from a nearby military airbase. However, the balloon wasn’t for measuring weather patterns but was developed through the top secret Project Mogul to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The Roswell Incident coincided with a widely-publicised sighting of UFOs over Washington by pilot Kenneth Arnold. The United States Air Force responded to the subsequent wave of other reports of aerial oddities by investigating them under ‘Project Blue Book’, no doubt looking out for incoming Russian craft.

From the 1980s, reports of traditional saucer-shaped UFOs were often superseded by sightings of triangular objects. The shape was similar to that of experimental American fighter jets tested from Area 51, the research base in Nevada which the CIA only admitted existed in 2013. Restricting information is a prerogative of the military and governments, although they’re more interested in keeping their technological advancements secret from rival states than from the general public. If the issue gets blurred by focusing on aliens, then all the better. As researcher Jacob Haqq-Misra and astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi tell us in the documentary, the gap created by the absence of an official, public explanation for UFOs has been filled to some extent by Hollywood, which has reinforced the assumption that extra-terrestrial spacecraft are involved. 1950s science fiction movies played with the notion of alien invaders symbolising commie infiltrators undermining The American Dream. In its early years, the UFO phenomenon was moulded by the tensions and divisions of the Cold War, and has been a more bizarre effect on people’s consciousness than anxieties about the nuclear bomb.

The end of the Cold War didn’t mean the end of UFOs, which were even more prominent in the culture of the 1990s, when TV hit The X-Files emphasised how the UFO phenomenon is intertwined with conspiracy theories. Running through this is a mistrust of the government and military, concentrating on shadowy cover-ups of captured alien tech rather than of new fighter jets. The more zealous UFO researchers have tended towards the approach of trying to demonstrate something is alien, rather than starting enquiries in a more grounded way. A wilder, interplanetary explanation is more attractive in the sense of being attention-grabbing, and therefore has potential for financial exploitation which more mundane explanations lack. UFOs have been commodified particularly enthusiastically in the sci-fi films of the 1950s and the ‘grey’ alien tat and contactee books of the 1990s. These issues were raised in What Are UFOs?, but predictably the documentary didn’t follow them through. The UFO phenomenon has manifested itself in the way it has because it has been shaped by capitalist concerns: nation states, imperialism, military technology, secretive elites, profitability. This is why the emphasis on gathering data to explain each sighting voiced by some of the featured experts isn’t enough to explain the phenomenon itself. This requires an understanding of the societal conditions which have created it.

A good deal of the ufology phenomenon appears to be driven by capitalist concerns, not from another planet. Perhaps any real would-be extra-terrestrial visitors have been put off from landing by seeing the state of capitalist society (and how it has shaped our impression of them)?

MIKE FOSTER

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