CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Don’t call aliens ‘little green men’, they might get offended too
What are UFOs? (BBC4)
Ghostbusters are not much use in this situation. If there’s something extraterrestrial in your neighbourhood, who ya gonna call?
A dalek, obviously. That’s what Harvard astrophysicists have done, in the hunt for lifeforms visiting Earth from distant planets.
Their dalek is a dome equipped with eight infrared cameras to scour the night sky — and a death raygun to exterminate anything it discovers, I assume. Pretty pointless to have a dalek without its neutraliser gun, after all.
This psychotic telescope was the closest we came to seeing any space invaders in the one-off documentary What Are UFOs? — a plodding and humourless attempt to debunk every sighting of interplanetary craft and their occupants since the first wave of flying saucer photos, nearly 80 years ago.
For a start, we discovered, it’s politically incorrect to call them UFOs.
They have to be called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: UAPs. I suppose aliens are as easily offended as everybody else now. Heaven forbid you call them ‘little green men’ — you’ll be cancelled instantly on Alpha Centauri.
According to the sceptics, those original flying saucers were either weather balloons, or disc-shaped clouds, or collective hallucinations brought on in middle-class Americans by the psychological tensions of the Cold War.
Triangular UAPs sighted in the 1990s, on the other hand, were real… but they weren’t cosmic tourists. The U.S. military was secretly developing spy planes that resembled flying wedges of Dairylea, as part of the Pentagon’s ‘black ops’ program — with a rumoured budget of $65 billion.
But it is the U.S. military that has supplied some of the most convincing evidence for the existence of ultra-advanced technology from beyond our solar system. Video recorded by cameras on fighter planes appears to show spacecraft performing impossible, gravity-defying manoeuvres.
Two former U.S. Navy pilots calmly described exactly what they’d seen. ‘We were seeing objects with our radars, with our cameras, and even with our eyes, flying on an almost daily basis,’ said one.
Faced with their testimony, the Beeb’s sceptical fervour began to look desperate.
A professional conspiracy debunker and former computer game designer called Mick West was wheeled on, to explain how the video evidence was all just a misunderstanding. The problem was, he implied, these American pilots don’t know how to interpret what they are seeing on their instrument read-outs.
To prove his point, he waved an iPhone in front of a desktop lamp, and then filmed a plastic capsule suspended over a swimming pool. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d also produced a spaceship made from old toilet rolls and sticky-back plastic.
In the end, we were left to make up our own minds. Who are you going to believe: a videogame engineer with a cameraphone? Or a pair of highly trained and experienced ex-military personnel with first-hand experience of UFOs and no reason to lie?
