Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft:An out of this world talk about UFOs.

"With your mind you have ability to form and transmit thought energy far beyond the norm. You close your eyes, you concentrate. Together, that's the way to send the message we declare World Contact Day" - Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft - The Carpenters.

Plan 9 from Outer Space! Plan 10 from Outer Space! The Thing from Another World! Devil Girl from Mars! The Day the Earth Stood Still! Independence Day! Arrival! The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy! I Married A Monster From Outer Space! Aliens Ate My Homework! The list of films about aliens, extra terrestrials, and monsters from outer space is long and varied and ranges from Hollywood blockbusters to infamous B movie fodder.

During a Q&A session at last night's SELFS talks at The Old King's Head near London Bridge some of these film titles were shouted out by an excited audience during a none too serious discussion about the best space/alien/UFO movies ever made. It was a fun end to an entertaining, and very interesting, evening in which Paula Dempsey had, in a talk she'd titled Flying Saucers:A Modern Myth, laid out a brief history of how the belief in alien visitation had, since the late 1940s, peaked and troughed.

It was a great talk and Paula proved a fantastic communicator. Alongside the history of belief (or disbelief) she digressed into theories as to why people may choose to believe in flying saucers, she touched on theosophy, Carl Sagan and his SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Institute, and she punctuated the whole thing with stills from her favourite space or alien based TV shows.

It was good to see The Jetsons, The Clangers, and ALF again (although The X Files looks incredibly dated now and, to my mind, got boring and predictable very quickly) but it was better still to spend an hour in Paula's company listening to her talk. A talk that began as far back as the 7th century in, of all places, Barking! A part of London I'm still, perhaps remarkably, yet to visit.

Humans are rational. At least that's the theory. We seek rational answers for things so when we see something we can't explain it frustrates us and we create explanations. When one night over Barking Abbey, about 1,300 years ago, the Venerable Bede and others saw a light shining down from the sky following matins it could only be one thing. The light from God in Heaven. How could it be anything else?

We've always seen lights, and 'things', in the sky but how we interpret them depends on the time we live in, the knowledge we already have, and what we want, and expect, those lights to be. Or to mean. Interpretation is, always, key!

In 1947, fire extinguisher salesman and amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold heard a report that a plane had been lost in Washington state and that a reward was available for anybody who could find it. So he took his own plane up for a look. As he flew towards Mount Rainier he spotted what he described as crescent shaped objects which he said moved in the air like saucers skipping on water.

He didn't, however, say they were saucer shaped. A local newspaper picked up the word 'saucer' and ran with it. It caught on and only a matter of weeks later in Roswell, New Mexico another incident occurred. Rancher Willam Brazel saw debris in a field which he assumed to be a crashed aeroplane. This debris, which some say was made of very different material to that of aeroplanes, was taken to Area 51, a highly classified testing range in Nevada whose name is now as notorious as Roswell itself.

There were a few theories at the time, a couple of newspaper splashes about possible spaceships, but the story died down pretty quickly. Until, in 1978, nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman revived it and, also, embroidered it a little. This time the story just wouldn't stop spreading and soon people who lived near Roswell were phoning in radio shows to make bold and unsubstantiated claims. Funeral directors said they'd been asked to bring children's coffins to Roswell to place the dead aliens in and other rumours circulated that the supposed bodies were simply crash test dummies used during a flight test.

There were A LOT of rumours, too many to go into, but the official story remained that the debris was that of a weather balloon and everything else was either pure speculation or complete fantasy. Nonetheless, the city of Roswell has developed a fairly healthy tourism industry out of the incident. There's a museum dedicated to it, statues, lampposts mocked up to look like aliens, and even the local McDonalds has been designed and lit to look like a spaceship!

It's a theme Paula would return to several times, alien tourism, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the reason so many people are prepared to believe aliens have visited their city is because, if nothing else, it's pretty darned good for business!

If there's some truth in that, it's not the whole truth. From the 1950s onwards, Cold War paranoia had set in in the US, the UK, and the USSR. Governments fretted about the defence implications of UFOs. The West were worried that these alien sightings were somehow down to the Soviets although theories as to what they thought the 'reds' were doing seem to be a little unclear. Did they think they were mocking up spaceships or did they believe that Stalin and Khrushchev had managed to harness the power of real ETs?

Certainly within the realms of science fiction of the time, flying saucers often acted as a metaphor for the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Less suspicious and bellicose politicking was to come with the birth of the contactee movement. Polish-American George Adamski (killer name) had been active in California's occult scene for some time so it is perhaps no surprise that he got into UFOs. But Adamski went a step further than most people who'd claimed to have seen a UFO. He said he'd met, and spoken to, an alien.

Adamski told of being approached by a handsome man with long blond hair who had travelled to Earth from Venus in a cigar shaped spaceship to warn us how our nuclear weapons were not just a threat to our own planet but to 'intergalactic harmony'. Adamski later asserted that he'd had meetings with presidents and popes in which these alien visitations were discussed. In fact, Jimmy Carter's 1969 UFO sighting has been discussed in such detail it now has its own Wikipedia page!

The aliens that Adamski described came to be known as Nordics and Paula, at this juncture, broke off from the chronological narrative to tell us about the different types of aliens that people tend to report seeing or meeting. As well as the Nordics there are the furry dwarves. Initially these were the most reported but they seem to have dropped off in favour of the more well known 'greys' and reptilians and there's even some debate among ufologists as to whether or not the greys and reptilians are working together and, if so, which group are in charge.

Sadly, little green men from Mars and purple people eaters didn't crop up. But The Flintstones did! The Flintstones were so popular in the sixties (and even had a regular alien visitor in The Great Gazoo, fans of 'jumping the shark' will surely be aware of him) that when Barney and Betty Hill claimed they'd been kidnapped by aliens in New Hampshire in September 1961 many speculated that the aliens would, naturally, be huge fans of The Flintstones and had chosen Barney and Betty because their forenames matched those of Fred and Wilma Flinstone's neighbours, the Rubbles!

Barney and Betty (Hill, not Rubble) were on their way back from holiday near Niagara Falls when they spotted what looked like a falling star, a strange light in the sky, and, later, several times, they saw a huge craft (which looked like a 'giant pancake') hovering above their Chevrolet. Spooked, they drove away at high speed to a background of beeping and buzzing noises. Bar spotting a 'fiery orb',  they claimed to remember virtually nothing about the rest of their journey.

Which is quite normal for long distance drive(r)s though perhaps not in the circumstances. Later, after Betty started having terrible nightmares, they decided to undergo hypnosis in an attempt to try and recall what had happened, fearing they had suppressed memories. Under hypnosis claims were made that Betty had undergone the very painful procedure of having a sharp needle inserted into her chest in some kind of crude pregnancy test and they came to believe they'd been abducted by aliens from the Zeta Reticuli system. Which does exist. But is approximately 23,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth!

Alien abduction and UFO crashes do seem to happen in the USA much more than anywhere else for some reason! Point Pleasant in West Virginia has got its own resident 'mothman' that many have speculated is an alien. Though other interpretations have certainly been suggested. Mothman was first spotted by both local gravediggers and necking teenagers in 1966/7 who reported a man like figure with bulging red eyes and wings that was flying low near the Silver Bridge that crossed the Ohio River from Point Pleasant into the neighbouring state of Ohio.

When, in December 1967, under the weight of rush hour traffic, the Silver Bridge collapsed killing forty-six people some began to speculate that Mothman was a harbinger, presaging or even warning of future peril. Others, particularly ufologist and Monkees scriptwriter John Keel, believed that Mothman was not an extraterrestrial but an ultraterrestrial. He had not come from another planet but from another dimension and had a wisdom beyond our capabilities. A reported sighting before a tsunami in Japan was sufficient evidence for those that wanted to believe what Keel had written in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies was true.

Point Pleasant has, now, of course, a Mothman Museum and statue! Another place that's cashed in, or tried to cash in on the ET boom is Interlaken in Switzerland. Mystery Park, later Jungfrau Park, closed in November 2006 because not enough people were coming to make it financially viable which sounds a shame as it had sections devoted to Stonehenge, cargo cults, the Nazca Lines, the pyramids, and flying chariots as well as space flight and exploration of Mars!

It was the brainchild of Swiss author and convicted fraudster Erich von Daniken who has long made claims that he has knowledge of alien contact with ancient civlisations. Most famously in his 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. Von Daniken has interpreted the biblical figure Ezekiel's vision of 'angels and the wheels' as a spacecraft, he claims aliens built the pyramids (because people in the old days - and not least people from Africa - would never be able to do so), and even that ancient alien astronauts bred with humans.

Chariots of the Gods came out the year before Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon and while this gave way to a greater understanding of science than ever before, it also gave conspiracy theorists a field day. Most famously those, and I count one of my closest friends among them, who believe the moon landings were faked as Cold War propaganda. But some who believed the moon landings did happen also believe that the existence of an alien base on our lunar satellite was found and has since been hushed up. For some reason.

Britain had not been able to land a man on the moon. But we had birthed The Aetherius Society (it's now headquartered in Los Angeles), a group of British 'contactees'. Members, or believers, formed a syncretic religion which mixed elements of Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism and seek to cooperate with our 'Cosmic Masters' so that humanity can solve its current problems and we can all advance into the New Age!

George King, the movement's founder, was a yoga enthusiast from Shropshire who had become active in the margins of London's theosophical, metaphysical, and spiritual scenes. It sounds like he'd buy into any cult going so maybe it's not that surprising he started his own one in the end. King claimed that in 1954 a man in London approached him and told him "Prepare yourself! You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament"!

Which sounds like quite an onerous responsibility. Once this had been confirmed by, of course, an Indian yoga master, King took his new position very seriously and was soon, so he claimed, conversing with Venusians, Jesus Christ, and the government of Saturn.

While King's story is both amusing and an all too predictable tale of cult belief, the tale of Todmorden ("Yorkshire's UFO hotspot") is a little more mysterious. In June 1980 Zigmund Adamski (a resident of Tingley, near Wakefield) went missing. The former coal miner was found five days later, dead, lying on a pile of coal. He was still wearing his suit but his shirt, his watch, and his wallet had gone missing and parts of his body had been coated in an unidentified green ointment.

Although a post-mortem established that he had died of a heart attack earlier that day no explanation has ever been found for the ointment although the missing items would appear to be a simple case of theft, perhaps exacerbated by a family feud that had recently created a disturbance at a wedding. Because of the unusual circumstances and because of his unusual surname, somebody decided to ask his namesake, presumably no relation, George Adamski.

George Adamski had died in 1965 (which is probably the only piece of research Paula slipped up on, or maybe I just misheard) so I'm assuming it was one of the followers they spoke to and not, as I believe Paula said, Adamski himself. Unless they spoke to him from the grave. The upshot was, however, that they spoke to confirmed believes in alien visitation about a mysterious death and guess what? The believers thought, yes, this sounds very much like an alien abduction indeed!

Even more famous than Todmorden among British UFO enthusiasts is Rendlesham Forest ('Britain's Roswell') in Suffolk. It exerts such a pull that Robert Kingham of Minimum Labyrinth (and former SELFS speaker with a fascinating evening about the lost Gods of London) stood up during the 'parish notices' section of the evening to announce a coach trip (pub lunch thrown in) there on Saturday December 28th. Alas, the same day I'm running a William Blake walk as part of my London by Foot series.

The area of Suffolk around Rendlesham Forest once hosted two USAF bases and in December 1980 there were reports of unexplained lights, animals going 'crazy', and the landing of a craft of an unknown type. A perfectly rational, and rather mundane, explanation that the light was caused by a nearby lighthouse and the fall of a meteor has been discredited by many who prefer to believe far more fantastical explanations for events.

Numerous, competing, theories proclaim that this must have been evidence of alien visitation and as the years have passed the stories have, like yarns, been threaded ever thicker, have become more disparate, and have moved further from anything that seems like the truth and in that Rendlesham is a perfect encapsulation of UFO belief in total.

It's much like religion. There's no evidence for it - unless you want there to be evidence for it. Then it starts to appear everywhere. It's easy to dismiss things that disprove your theories and equally unproblematic to take on board anything that fits with your confirmation bias. Paula Dempsey herself wasn't saying spaceships don't exist, and we can all agree that UFOs (unidentified flying objects) do exist, but she wasn't saying that they do exist either.

She was just saying that after seventy years of people seeing them we're still no closer to the truth. We still don't know anything for certain. It was a lovely, positive way to end a warm, inclusive talk that had been pitched just at the right level so that neither those with a keen interest nor mere dilettantes like myself were ever bored of overloaded with information. Thanks to Paula for a great evening and thanks to SELFS for hosting. They're back on December 12th with a talk about Xmas and for anyone wishing to break free, for at least a couple of hours, of wall to wall General Election coverage, I can highly recommend you get your Santa hat on and get down there. Ho ho ho!