A Flying Saucerful Of Secrets.

"A flying saucer right inside my head" - Flying Saucer, The Wedding Present.

All we know for certain about aliens is that we know nothing. It's seventy-three years since the first reported sighting of a flying saucer in 1947 and our knowledge of UFOs and alien visitation has progressed not one iota over those seven and a bit decades. Almost as if aliens don't really exist. Or at least have never come anywhere close to Earth.

So why does belief in them not just persist but, especially in America in recent years, rise? I was with the London Fortean Society online (for reasons we're all familiar with) to see if I could find out. Science writer Sarah Scoles was Zooming in to us live from her house in Denver, Colorado to deliver an hour long lecture called UFO Culture and Why We See Flying Saucers and following Chris French's brilliant A Skeptics Guide to Aliens (for the LFS in January) and Paula Dempsey's superb Flying Saucers:A Modern Myth for SELFS last November I couldn't help wondering if this was alien overkill.

I was at least worried that too much of the same ground would be covered and I'd find myself losing interest (much easier in the comfort of your home than in a pub surrounded by others). To begin with, as Sarah read fairly long passages from her book - explaining she's more a writer than a speaker, those concerns seemed to be genuine but once the talk got going, once Sarah really warmed to her theme, I found myself fascinated and entranced. On top of that I had some of my existing prejudices overturned.

Which is always good. The systems of belief and structures of thought we build up in our own minds should always be the ones we put most thoroughly to the test. Sarah began by telling us of how, in December 2017, videos emerged showing footage of alleged UFOs and how these videos were said to be filmed from American military jets. Supposed footage of UFOs, often very blurry, is not an uncommon event. Footage arriving from the United States Department of Defense is quite a different matter.

The alleged veracity of the footage was underlined when The New York Times, not the National Enquirer or Fox News, ran the story on its front page with the headline Glowing Auras and 'Black Money':The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Programme. There were even claims that debris from crashed UFOs had been recovered. All this brought about a resurgence of interest not just from already committed ufologists, but from the general public.

But something didn't add up, and soon the Pentagon denied all knowledge of the footage, the debris, and, seemingly - in keeping with modern politics, even their own prior accounts of events. This triggered Sarah's natural tendency towards investigation and even though UFOs weren't, and still aren't, her main interest she delved in to see if she could find out what had gone on. What was going on.

Here Sarah's talk took us back to the early days of UFO sighting and here we did cover much of the same ground as French and Dempsey's earlier talks. It's not that the story of Kenneth Arnold's sighting of the original flying saucer in 1947 and the conspiracy theories that arose following the Roswell incident aren't interesting (they very much are) but they've been covered in some depth before and there are other blogs (linked to above) if you want to read about that.

So I'll rush past that, stopping to add Sarah's idea that from Roswell emerged a belief that the government is some kind of monster that is keeping something from us, the people (something that could help us) and that we, the people, are the heroes in this story and need to do something about it. Something heroic. It's a tale as old as time but with aliens now in the roles formerly played by ogres and dragons.

What happened in Roswell is no longer as important as the mythology that has grown up around it. Or, for the New Mexico city, the tourists that come to visit. In Roswell, you get a lot of bang for your alien buck. Area 51, in Nevada, is not so heavily populated with alien obsessed tourists but it's become equally well known with the belief that it's the place where the US government keeps alien specimens. Are they living or dead? It's a point that's been hotly debated.

Last autumn a college student started a Facebook group advertising an event called Storm Area 51:They Can't Stop Us All and tens of thousands of people claimed they were attending. Or at least 'interested' in doing so. As anyone who's organised a Facebook event knows getting a positive response to an RSVP is very different to people actually turning up, but a few dozen people did turn up at the gate with the supposed intentions of uncovering the secrets inside. 'They can't stop us all' may have been the mantra but, of course, they could. Quite easily too.

It didn't really matter because the event soon become, and probably was always intended as, more of a party anyway. Memes were created, Bud Light made a beer to tie in with it, and a few dozen people got together to chat, drink poor quality booze, make friends, and share highly improbable conspiracy theories.

Some of which may have related to what the US government calls the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme. The fact that title has no mention of aliens or UFOs is, of course, a red rag to the conspiracy theorist bull and the idea that the American government would use easily debunkable claims of alien sightings (Venus, magic lanterns, etc;) as a cover to hush up genuine alien sightings and visitations took hold.

The truth didn't really matter anymore. Belief in UFOs and aliens had become something of a religion and the similarities with the megachurches you see throughout the US are many, obvious, and overwhelming. There was the cult of personality and there was the hope for salvation. All that had changed is that in the place of God there was now an extraterrestrial super intelligent being or beings.

All wrong ideas eventually migrate towards the original sin of thinking, the wrongest idea of all time - that of religion - and alien belief is proving no different. Ufologists share beliefs, they share a community, and they focus their attentions on to a higher power to make sense of the confusing and often dangerous, depressing, and unfair world they live in.

Offerings, votives if you like, are even given. But to models of sunglasses wearing aliens instead of gods. To my mind, it's no weirder than the worship of an unproven, and non-existent, omnipotent being. In fact there are many similarities. Not least that they both are seen to come from, or live in, the sky.

I was all ready to launch into a diatribe about the stupidity, immorality, and danger of religion when Sarah Scoles deftly sidestepped and made me think again. Not just about UFO believers, but also about religious people. On a visit to UFO Watch Tower in Hooper, Colorado she met with people, believers, who live there. Many of them had led lonely, difficult lives and find a sense of comfort in the community they have there that they have never been fortunate enough to experience before.

The Colorado Mutual UFO Network, like many churches, mosques, and synagogues, are less interested in history and evidence and are more focused on bringing people together to share their stories with each other in a safe space. I was looking so hard at the demonstrably terrible side of religion I'd not been able to see that many people use it as a force for good.

Sarah's talk was so much better when she introduced these ideas and it opened my eyes up not to belief in aliens or Gods but to understanding those who view the world from a very different perspective to me. To me, it's still complete and utter bullshit but if it brings people happiness, it brings them community, and it makes their lives feel worthwhile (and nobody's getting hurt by it) then even I, an avowed atheist extremist, can say "amen" to that.

A brief coda on SETI (the search for extra terrestrial intelligence) and a Q&A that took in the incredibly precise theory that there are thirty-six contactable alien civilisations in the universe and a question from Paula Dempsey herself (as well as somebody mentioning The X Files and describing it as "a show we may have heard of" - no shit) added little to proceedings but it didn't need to.

Sarah Scoles had, after a slow start, given us a talk that on the surface was about alien visitation but turned out, really, to be about something far more important. People, community, and hope. Thanks to Sarah for that, thanks to the LFS for booking her, and thanks to Conway Hall who, facing an uncertain future due to Covid, hosted once again. Na-nu na-nu.