I Want To Believe

In the seventies, I happily believed that Flying Saucers were real. The 1971 Countdown annual had a great article about UFO's, filled with fascinating photographs of classic sightings. Target books also produced a great little paperback book in 1976 'Investigating UFOs', which I still have. Along with countless other tv and film influences, I was completely sold on the idea of UFO's and even convinced myself that I had seen one, but as I grew older I realised I must have dreamed it!

As its currently 'silly season' for the press, traditionally that period of high summer, where solid news items are thin on the ground and the press invariably tries to sell papers with spurious news stories. Today, 'fake news' is endemic and the nature of the internet makes it increasingly difficult to divine what is actually true.

At the moment, there is a major court case ongoing, hearing the testimony of an ex secret service officer David Grusch, who is attempting to disclose that the US government is aware of alien contact and has recovered and reverse engineered alien craft. The whistleblower hearings are attracting much attention and the recent release of Pentagon footage of supposed UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) activity on jet fighter cameras, of objects variously described as 'tic tac' shaped or a 'black or grey cube inside a clear sphere', has conspiracy theorists eager to see the government come clean.

Photos of various unidentified objects have been around for years, with the phrase 'flying saucers' being seized upon by the press, following Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting in June 1947. Arnold's objects were crescent shaped, but he described their motion as 'a saucer skipping across water' and the name stuck.

Kenneth Arnold with artist Impression

One of the images in the Countdown article were of a 'hat shaped' object, spotted by a motorist in Santa Anna in 1965. Rex Heflin shot a sequence of four photographs of an object hovering over the Californian freeway, before it took off leaving a smoke ring in its wake. At the time of reading about this, I was completely intrigued, as the image - by the standards of the seventies - looked authentic. These days, with A.I and CGI techniques available to anyone, its impossible to tell what what's real and what is fake. 

Brazil 1960

Historically, most UFO images or footage is invariably fuzzy or out of focus and those few images which are clear, are invariably discovered to be fakes. However, there are always a few images, which deserve closer attention.

Some of them are clearly either models, or everyday objects such as balloons, or birds, but in the early 20th century, prior to the advent of computer manipulation, there are still some amazing images appearing.

Brazil 1952

Lots of different techniques were attempted to fake photographs, such as frisbees thrown in the air, pot lids suspended from wires or paper pasted onto glass.

Bremerton, USA 1970

Costa Rica 1971

This image from Costa Rica appears to show a saucer approaching a coastline, but to me it looks like the reflection of an overhead lamp on a glass slide.

Edwards Air Force Base 1957

Some shots show UFO's which are not the actual subject of the photograph and are only discovered after the film is developed, which clearly have not been deliberately tampered with.

Ohio 1932

 Others show objects which seem to show saucer or cigar shaped objects in them. 

Peru 1952

Oregon 1950

With the prevalence of mobile phone, doorbell, dashcam and cctv cameras, there has been a huge increase in sightings of mysterious lights, black triangles, saucers and aliens, but due to the general public's ambivalence towards them, very few are taken seriously. Naturally, government sources deny any involvement with alien contacts or recovered vehicles and the idea of 'flying saucers' is dismissed as the realm of fantasy. Personally, I remain skeptical of the majority of modern sightings, as no clear, categorical evidence has so far appeared. Have you ever seen a ufo - or more importantly - taken a photo or video of one ?