From Atlantis to the Roswell Incident, via Wikipedia

 

There's a game where players compete to get from one specified Wikipedia article to another in the minimum number of jumps, just by clicking on internal wiki-links within an article. I thought I'd try a fortean variation on this, navigating my way from the Atlantis article to the Roswell Incident. But instead of going for the shortest route, I've tried to make it more interesting by, wherever possible, including items from the tag cloud on the right-hand side of this blog. Here's the route I came up with:

STEP 0: Atlantis. A long-time favourite topic of mine, this scores 12 in my tag cloud (meaning this is its 12th appearance on this blog). My most recent brush with it was a video I made last year based on an old comic story by Steve Ditko. Historically, the oldest surviving references to Atlantis appear in the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato, who consequently is one of the very first wiki-links in Wikipedia's Atlantis article.

STEP 1: Plato. Wikipedia's article on him mentions his prominent appearance in Raphael's painting The School of Athens, with an onward link to its article on that subject.

STEP 2: The School of Athens. This is one of my all-time favourite "fine art" paintings - a fanciful depiction of a host of famous philosophers of various time periods all congregated together in a classical architectural setting. I've seen the original in the Vatican, and written a blog post about the fortean credentials of some of the people featured in it. An interesting bit of trivia mentioned early in the Wikipedia article is that Raphael's depiction of Plato (top left in the montage at the start of this post) is modelled on Leonardo da Vinci - whose article Wikipedia then links to.

STEP 3: Leonardo da Vinci. The second "hit" for my tag cloud, Leonardo scores 8 in it (which is either a measure of his fortean relevance, or my interest in him, or both). I've seen the originals of several of his paintings, including the most famous, the Mona Lisa, and the most interesting, The Last Supper. Both of them are linked from his Wikipedia article,  but there are no prizes for guessing which one we're going to click on.

STEP 4: The Last Supper (Leonardo). This, of course, is prominently featured in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which scores 11 in my tag cloud. And since Wikipedia's article on The Last Supper links to the one on The Da Vinci Code, that's where we're going next.

STEP 5: The Da Vinci Code. Of the many interesting links in this wiki-article, the one I'm going to pick out is another item from my tag cloud (with a score of 9), the Knights Templar.

STEP 6: Knights Templar. More than anything else, I associate this mediaeval organization with the legend of the Ark of the Covenant, but surprisingly their Wikipedia article doesn't mention it. So we'll have to take a roundabout route via something it does link to, the Temple of Solomon.

STEP 7: Solomon's Temple. OK, now there's a link to the Ark of the Covenant, so without further ado let's click on that.

STEP 8: Ark of the Covenant. This is another favourite fortean topic of mine, with 5 hits in my tag cloud. To most people, however, it just means one thing - Steven Spielberg's 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark - which Wikipedia conveniently links to.

STEP 9: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Astute readers will probably see where we're going now (if they haven't worked it out already)! This, of course, was the film that introduced everyone's favourite archaeologist, Indiana Jones - and the Wikipedia article helpfully links to all his subsequent appearances, including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).

STEP 10: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. By far the most fortean instalment in the series, I love this film - and it neatly provides the last (wiki-) link in the chain, straight to our target destination: the Roswell Incident.

STEP 11: Roswell Incident. With a count of 5 in my tag cloud, this is the ultimate "modern myth", which I thought was a fitting final destination after starting out from the "ancient myth" of Atlantis. Hope you enjoyed the tour!

Fake News and Lazy Journalism

Earlier this year I wrote about the huge upsurge in Fake News Stories circulating on social media. The Snopes website is very good at identifying and debunking these stories, and a few days ago they had an interesting article on Fake News Sites to Avoid Sharing (from which the above graphic is taken). The first paragraph emphasizes the cynical financial motive behind most of these “fake news” stories:

The sharp increase in popularity of social media networks (primarily Facebook) has created a predatory secondary market among online publishers seeking to profitably exploit the large reach of those networks [...] and a number of frequent offenders regularly fabricate salacious and attention-grabbing tales simply to drive traffic (and revenue) to their site.

There’s another factor at play though, besides deliberate fake news sites. That’s lazy journalism by mainstream media, who often repeat a far-fetched claim without attempting to check up on its background and credibility. There was a good example of this last week (admittedly a slow news week here in the UK, what with the General Election) when several tabloids chose to run the “Roswell Slides” story at face value:

• “REVEALED: Images of Roswell ALIEN found in wreckage of crashed UFO almost 70 years ago” (Daily Express, 6 May 2015)
• “Is this evidence of alien life? New Roswell photos prove ‘beyond any doubt’ that ET exists, claim UFO specialists” (Daily Mail, 7 May 2015)

In fact the images in question look less like a dead alien in a government laboratory than a child mummy in a public museum (which is what they almost certainly do show). But if the papers had said that, they wouldn’t have sold as many copies.

The latest issue of Animals & Men magazine (issue 53, May 2015) contains a letter from me on another example of lazy journalism with a Fortean flavour. You can read the whole issue online for free (my letter is on pp. 70-71), but here is the gist of what I said:

[...] The mainstream media appear to judge the newsworthiness of Fortean-type stories not by their credibility but by their outrageousness. A case in point was the “Whitstable giant crab” you mentioned on page 25 of Issue 52. This started out as a whimsical piece of artwork in issue 301 of Fortean Times (May 2013), which was a special tribute issue to the actor Peter Cushing on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Whitstable was Cushing’s adopted home, and the magazine included a lighthearted feature on “Weird Whitstable”. The article was the work of artist Quinton Winter, and the idea that a giant crab can be seen on Google Earth images of Whitstable was just one of his inventions. Sadly, however, it seems that people these days simply aren’t wired up to understand irony. In October 2014, it was reported as a genuine news story in the Sunday Express, soon followed by several other tabloids including the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Within days, the story of “Crabzilla”, as it became known, had gone viral on social media around the world! (Source: Fortean Times issue 321, December 2014, page 2).

The Flying Saucer

I finally got round to reading The Flying Saucer, a novel by Bernard Newman that was originally published in July 1948 – just a year after the term “Flying Saucer” was coined following the Kenneth Arnold sighting. Newman’s book was reputedly the very first to cash in on the Saucer craze – which, as far as anyone knew at the time, might have fizzled out as quickly as it had arisen. I first saw it mentioned in Flying Saucerers, by David Clarke and Andy Roberts, and then in Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men, and I’ve been meaning to get hold of a copy ever since (this American paperback edition, dating from 2010, says “originally published in the United States in 1950” – but it had already appeared in the UK two years before that).

It’s a good book, but not at all what I was expecting from the various reviews and teasers I’d read. There are no sinister government conspiracies and no hushed-up crash retrievals. The book is firmly rooted in the political and social preoccupations of its time, and to approach it with the additional perspective of 60-plus years of ufological speculation risks missing the point entirely. As with most fiction, the best way to appreciate it is to think yourself into the mindset of the time the book was written (for anyone who hasn’t read the book yet, the following discussion is guaranteed spoiler-free).

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of 1940s fiction (looking at the authors in my tag cloud, John Dickson Carr, Eric Frank Russell, Agatha Christie and A.E. van Vogt were all active at the time). So I’m embarrassed to say that—apart from this one novel—I’d never heard of Bernard Newman until I did a little research a few days ago. It turns out he was a prolific writer (his bibliography lists almost 50 novels), who was particularly well known during his lifetime for his series of first-person spy thrillers. The Flying Saucer fits into this series – not because it’s a spy story as such, but because (judging by internal evidence) it shares the same continuity and the same characters.

The novel is narrated in the first person by “Bernard Newman”. As well as being the author’s real name, this is the name by which he is addressed by other characters in the novel. The narrator, as well as being a well-known author (he refers to his earlier spy novels as if they were non-fiction), is also a government-trained espionage agent. Was this true of the “real world” Newman too? He didn't do much to dispel frequent speculations to this effect (although such speculations were unlikely to harm his book sales, even if they were unfounded). Newman aside, the two other main characters are entirely fictitious – a brilliant English scientist named Drummond and an equally brilliant (if somewhat elderly) French spy named Pontivy. I get the feeling that both of them appeared in several of Newman’s novels prior to The Flying Saucer.

The plot of The Flying Saucer was inspired by a news report from 1947. But it wasn’t the Kenneth Arnold flying saucer sighting in June of that year. It was a speech delivered on 1 March by Anthony Eden (who was Shadow Foreign Secretary at the time), which the novel paraphrases in the following terms: “It seemed to be an unfortunate fact that the nations of the world were only really united when they were facing a common menace. What we really needed was an attack by Mars.”

At the start of the novel, under the influence of Eden’s remark, Drummond, Pontivy and Newman decide they will stage a fake threat from Mars. This is easier for them than it would be for most people, because Drummond is a scientific genius. He is able to build rockets that are different from any “earthly” rockets in their appearance and characteristics. As the plot progresses, Drummond is called on to develop many other “Martian” technologies, while experts in other fields—sworn to secrecy—are brought into the scheme as and when necessary.

So where do flying saucers fit into the story? The answer is hardly at all. My guess is that the first draft of the novel (under a different title) was finished before the saucers hit the headlines for the first time. Newman then made some hasty additions – the opportunistic change of title, and a few references here and there to saucer sightings. But the latter aren’t part of the fake Martian invasion – they’re an independent (and never explained) phenomenon that goes on quietly in the background. While our heroes are happy for people to associate the saucers with their Martians, they don’t really exploit the sightings as much as they might. This is what makes me think the first draft was finished before the saucer craze even started. The fake Martian spaceships are described as being cylindrical, not saucer shaped, and they are physical objects found on the ground, not mysterious objects in the sky.

But none of this is relevant to the point Newman was trying to make. He was focused on the single biggest concern of the international community in the wake of the Second World War – namely, the tense standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. No-one wanted another war, but the differences between the two sides seemed irreconcilable. So, inspired by Eden’s quote about the Martians, he thought he’d offer a radical solution to the problem. In a way, it was Newman’s misfortune to slap the trendy new label “Flying Saucer” onto the novel, which makes it look (to modern readers) like an inept treatment of a subject that barely even existed when it was written. Most of the baggage we now associate with the UFO phenomenon lay in the future, and it would be anachronistic to expect to find it in a novel of the 1940s:

• Early on in the novel (in what I imagine is an interpolation into the original draft) Newman recounts numerous saucer sightings from 1947. Significantly, however, there is no mention of the Roswell incident in July that year. Since Roswell was the archetypal “crashed saucer”, and the novel revolves around rocket crashes, this may seem a surprising omission – but it isn’t really. Although few people realize it today, Roswell was scarcely ever mentioned in the ufological literature prior to the 1970s.
• The plot of the novel could be paraphrased as “a conspiracy to fake an alien invasion”... but even so it has little common ground with modern conspiracy theory. The “conspiracy” in the novel is a conspiracy in the historical (pre-JFK) sense of the word – a covert plot by a group of private individuals against the established order, rather than a covert plot by the government against its own people.
• The portrayal of politicians and government officials is likewise in the historical, pre-JFK tradition – as stuffed shirts full of vacuous rhetoric, rather than the coldly competent schemers of modern conspiracy theory. Although the protagonists are perpetrating a massive deception against the governments of the United States and Soviet Union (and all the other governments of the world), their battle is against stolid bureaucracy, not a vastly powerful secret elite.
• The novel paints a vivid picture of early Cold War society, in which the pervading atmosphere was one of suspicion (at one point Newman even anticipates the X-Files mantra: “Trust No One”). But this is suspicion of other people’s governments, not one’s own. The British are suspicious of the Russians and the Americans. The Russians are suspicious of the Americans and the Chinese. The Americans are suspicious of Communist countries and Communist spies. But, in those days at least, the Americans were not suspicious of their own government.

Fifty Years of British UFO Research

As a sweeping generalization, British UFO researchers are less single-mindedly fixated on the extraterrestrial hypothesis (and concomitant beliefs such as alien abductions and government conspiracies) than their American counterparts. Of course there are exceptions on both sides, but British ufologists do tend to adopt a “more things in Heaven and Earth” approach to the subject. This was certainly the message that came across during the first day of the BUFORA (British UFO Research Association) 50th Anniversary Conference that I attended yesterday.

The first speaker was Lionel Beer, who (although he doesn’t look old enough) was a founder member of BUFORA back in 1962, before I had even started school. He talked mainly about the development of British ufology in the 60s and 70s, when it’s probably fair to say the focus was still on the extraterrestrial hypothesis here as in America. But I was really interested in what Lionel had to say about government involvement in the subject. He brought out a subtlety that hadn’t occurred to me before, but makes perfect sense based on what I know of that period in British history.

There is no doubt that during the 1970s the police Special Branch (whose responsibility was national security and counter-insurgency) took a strong and active interest in UFO groups. That’s a well-documented fact. But it’s not the same thing as saying that they took an interest in the subject of ufology. The British authorities in the 1970s weren’t all that paranoid about an alien invasion, but they were paranoid about far-right anti-government extremists. The authorities believed that certain far-right political activists were infiltrating UFO groups in order to recruit new members. That sounds very unlikely to me, because I’ve never met a far-right UFO enthusiast in my life (although I’ve met many far-left ones)... but the fact is that it’s what the authorities believed. And it’s certainly true that if you’re looking for people with a deep-seated hatred of the establishment, a UFO group is as good a place as any to start.

The second talk was by Heather Dixon, whose subject was “Developing an understanding of the Reality behind the Myths”. Essentially this was a very lucid exposition of the statement, often made by people in BUFORA, that “98 per cent of UFO cases turn out to have a perfectly rational explanation”. In some cases the explanation is physical—for example an astronomical object or atmospheric phenomenon—and in others it is physiological, for example sleep paralysis. Almost by definition, a UFO sighting is something that is novel and inexplicable to the witness, and outside their previous experience. If they have an interest in UFOs, or have been immersed in sci-fi popular culture, they may interpret what they see in ufological terms even if it is something completely different that is outside their experience, such as a rare conjunction of two astronomical objects.

Many people will dismiss this sort of talk as “scepticism”, but it’s really the only way to go about serious ufological investigation. In the real world, it’s inevitable that some UFO reports will turn out to have perfectly mundane explanations. At the same time, other cases—the ones Heather calls “High Strangeness” cases—defy rational explanation. Something is going on that science can’t explain. But that still doesn’t mean it’s extraterrestrials. Many people in the Western world, seeing something they’ve never seen before, will mentally pigeonhole it as a UFO because that’s the way they’ve been brought up. You sometimes hear patronizing statements about primitive peoples along the lines “of course, if they encountered extraterrestrial aliens, they would interpret them as gods or angels or spirits”. But why not the other way around? If a sci-fi geek encountered a god/angel/spirit he or she would interpret them as a space alien!

The next talk was by John Spencer, on the subject of “Political, Cultural and Social Influences of UFOs”. This was a strong contender to be the single best talk I’ve ever seen on the UFO subject... and I’ve seen a lot. Essentially it was about the “cultural tracking” aspect of the UFO phenomenon—the way UFO experiences reflect the technology, political issues and popular culture of the time in which they occur. Again, some people will dismiss this as scepticism, but it’s a real effect that has to be faced up to. This became particularly clear as John went through the history of the subject from the 1940s to the present day. In many UFO cases something undeniably extraordinary—and maybe even extraterrestrial—occurred, but the way it was described by witnesses is shaped by the concerns and obsessions of the time.

An interesting point John made is that the contactees of the early 1950s—people like George Adamski—recounted long conversations with the Space Brothers, in which the latter warned the people of Earth in dire terms about the dangers of nuclear weapons. But in those days, every thinking human being on the planet was worried spitless about the threat of nuclear weapons. The Space Brothers never thought to warn the people of the 1950s about something they weren’t already obsessing about, such as ozone depletion, greenhouse gases or global warming.

John’s take on the Roswell incident was also interesting. This took place in 1947, of course, but when I started reading about UFOs in the late 60s and early 70s it was never mentioned. Books of that time never bothered to mention the biggest UFO case of all time, even though it had occurred more than 20 years earlier. In order to believe in Roswell, you have to believe that the United States government is capable of lying, scheming and deception on an industrial scale. Cultural tracking wasn’t ready for that yet. So there was a long pause from 1947 to 1974, when the Watergate scandal proved beyond doubt that the United States government was indeed capable of lying, scheming and deception on an industrial scale. It was only in the post-Watergate world that people were culturally primed and ready to believe in Roswell.

The next talk was by the legendary Jenny Randles, via a live video link from her home in North Wales. Despite her lower public profile of recent years, Jenny was as lively and entertaining a speaker as when I first saw her almost 20 years ago. The subject of her talk was “solved” UFO cases—cases that have been definitively explained as non-extraterrestrial in origin. Who wants to hear about such things? Well I do, because I think such cases can tell you a lot about people’s perceptions and motivations, but apparently most people don’t—Jenny said her book on the subject ended up being sold for a fraction of the cover price in remainder bookshops!

One striking example came from the 1960s, when a glowing orange ball was filmed hovering over an English primary school, as well as being witnessed by dozens of 10 and 11 year old children at the school. Despite having all the hallmarks of a UFO, the cameraman thought it might have something to do with the fact that a US Air Force F-111 fighter-bomber crashed nearby on the same day (in those days, the USAF was allowed to maintain a small number of air bases in the UK, as a goodwill gesture from the British government—and by inference, the British people). But when the USAF saw the photo of the orange ball hovering over the English school, their response was along the lines “Nothing to do with us. The picture was taken 14 minutes before the crash-landing of the F-111, which at no point caught fire. So it’s nothing to do with us. No, sir. If you ask us, it looks like one of them there extraterrestrial spacecraft people are always talking about.” So contrary to popular belief, this was a case of the US authorities actually encouraging an extraterrestrial interpretation of a UFO sighting.

Many years later the truth emerged in a way that leaves no room for any doubt. When the F-111 first got into trouble, 14 minutes before the eventual crash-landing, the crew went through a standard procedure to reduce the risk of an explosion on landing. They ejected all the aircraft’s fuel, and used the afterburner to ignite it, causing a massive fireball. The US aircrew chose to do this immediately over an English primary school. Had it become known at the time that they had effectively placed their own safety over that of British schoolchildren, the goodwill of the British people would have evaporated... and the USAF would have been kicked out of the country. That’s the kind of cover-up and conspiracy I find easier to believe than the extraterrestrial kind.

The last talk I attended was by another living legend: Lionel Fanthorpe. Lionel is now 77, although he looks ten years younger. His talk was on the subject of six alternative theories as to what UFOs (the kind that don’t have mundane explanations) might be. Only one of the six involved extraterrestrials -- the others ranged from ancient Atlantis and Lemuria to the paranormal. There’s no use pretending the talk was anything but an excuse for Lionel to hold forth about the subjects he’s always been fascinated by: timeslips, werewolves, poltergeists etc. But needless to say it was the most entertaining talk of the day, and it did reinforce what I saw as the whole theme of the conference: that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of by the average ETH-believer.

Alien Politics

There have been two stories in the news recently about British politicians and UFOs. The two cases couldn’t be more different, and yet they’ve been treated in a very similar way by the mainstream media. To me, that’s the most interesting (and indeed horrifying) thing about these cases -- the fact that the average journalist can’t grasp the distinction between someone who fervently and obsessively believes in an unorthodox theory about UFOs, and someone who simply has an interest in the subject of UFOs among many other interests.

The first case concerns Simon Parkes, who is a member of the Labour party and a recently elected town councillor in Whitby in North Yorkshire. As he reveals in a video on YouTube, he believes he has been visited by reptilian aliens throughout his life, starting with a first encounter when he was just a foetus. He believes the aliens have a special interest in him, and that he is part reptilian himself. In the video, he comes across as much nicer and more intelligent than most politicians, and there can be no doubt he’s sincere in his beliefs. His claims are so bizarre, and so embarrassingly personal, that they’re not the sort of thing a politician (or anyone else) would choose to make up if they were simply seeking publicity. Inevitably, the media have portrayed Councillor Parkes as a batty eccentric, although his constituents and council colleagues don’t seem very bothered by his bizarre disclosures.

The second case, as I’ve already said, is completely different from the first. The person in question is Rupert Matthews, a Conservative politician and a prolific writer, as you can see from Rupert's Amazon page. He has written over 170 books, which is an impressive feat in itself, and they span an eclectic variety of subjects. Most of them are popular history books of the “coffee table” variety, and Rupert refers to himself as The History Man. But he has written one book on UFOs, one book on Roswell, and one book on Alien Encounters... and those three books out of 170 spelled political disaster.

At the elections for the European Parliament in 2009, Rupert got enough votes to secure himself a place at the top of the list for the next available vacancy in the East Midlands constituency. That vacancy looked like it was coming up a few months ago when MEP Roger Helmer announced his forthcoming resignation. But then word that “Rupert Matthews believes in UFOs” reached the ears of the Chairman of the Conservative Party, Baroness Warsi. She stepped in to veto the democratically agreed selection process and put forward another candidate of her own choosing (baronesses, of course, have never been very bothered by technicalities like election results).

You might think that, for a party that is constantly being told it’s out of touch with ordinary people, the Conservatives would be delighted to have a populist writer whose books line the shelves at Waterstones and are clearly aimed at the casual reader. And indeed the party doesn’t seem to have anything against his writings on the subject of dinosaurs, ancient Rome, the Titanic, the Art and Civilization of the Renaissance, the Spanish Armada or even Haunted London, Haunted Edinburgh or Haunted Oxford. But a book entitled UFOs, and one entitled Roswell, and one entitled Alien Encounters... the man’s obviously a dangerous crank!

But is he? The typical UFO crank is a single-minded individual desperate to get their message across to the world. They write about nothing else. Their books are turgid and heavyweight, packed with original research and theories, and aimed at their enlightened peers. They don’t waste their time writing glossy coffee-table books for the casual reader, let alone books like Battlefield Walks in Devon, Lost Railways of Berkshire, or Heroes of Bomber Command. UFO believers don’t have time for such trivialities. On the other hand, a professional writer who has to make a living by writing about subjects that are likely to sweep off the shelves of UK bookstores is another matter.

Fortunately this story has a happy, if unexpected, ending. A few weeks ago Roger Helmer decided to withdraw his resignation and stay on as an MEP, but at the same time he defected from the Conservative Party to the UK Independence Party as a protest against Baroness Warsi’s heavy-handedness. So she’s lost on two counts -- she can’t put her chosen puppet into the seat, and she’s lost the seat to a rival party!