Close Encounters of the Crackpot Kind

Have you noticed that various of the supposedly 'factual' digital TV channels are currently chock full of series about UFOs and aliens?  OK, I know that many of them have always carried such stuff, but of late Blaze TV seems to have nothing but such programming on and Quest is beginning to go the same way.  Look, I tune into these channels to watch stuff like repeats of Shed and Buried, Wheeler Dealers (when it was still good and had Edd China on it) and Storage Wars.  What I don't want to see is a bunch of cranks showing us fuzzy video shot on a cheap phone and claiming that it constitutes incontrovertible proof of alien visitations.   While I usually avoid such TV shows like the plague, I did recently watch a couple, just to check whether they had improved and actually involved any facts these days. Jesus, that was a mistake!  Absolute bollocks!  I wouldn't mind, but regardless of the title or channel it is showing on, every episode seems to involve the exact same 'experts' spouting the exact same fantasies.  In particular, Nick Pope seems to turn up on every one of them.  Now, while I never crossed paths with him, (I was in Metropole House and late Old War Office Building, while he was in Main Building), he and I were both in the MoD in Whitehall in the late eighties/early nineties - he claimed that he manned the 'UFO desk' there and had access to all sorts of classified stuff about alien visitations to the UK.  If we are to believe him, it was like the UK equivalent of the X-Files, with investigations going on left, right and centre.  Interestingly, I was once on a training course with his successor at said desk, who told me that, in reality, UFO sightings were only a small part of the work and all that they did was to respond to letters from the public with a form letter stating that, unless it could be shown that UFOs presented a threat to the UK, the MoD wasn't interested in the phenomena.

To be clear, I'm not saying that such reports weren't investigated somewhere in the MoD, (I'm assuming that the RAF would have run their own investigations as a matter of routine), but they weren't going on in Main Building.  Nor am I saying that Pope is a liar, but I have read one of his books and it was utter shite. In my opinion, obviously.  But to get back to these programmes, what Pope and the other experts do on them is pounce on some alleged UFO sighting then weave some complex narrative around it, a narrative that has no factual basis other than some unsubstantiated 'eyewitness' accounts.  These narratives, having been established as 'fact' are them used to drag all manner of other stuff into their conspiracy.  In one episode I saw, for instance, they managed to conclude that a now defunct RAF establishment, based around an old country house, was somehow the epicentre of the British 'Area 51'.  'The house is now abandoned by the RAF, so why can't we access it?  Why are there security fences around it?'  Well, probably because it is still a valuable piece of Crown Estate and they don't want it vandalised.  The fact that it was once the HQ of the RAF's 'Provost and Security' organisation was held up by Pope (yes, he was inevitably involved) as 'proof' that it must have been used for secret and sinister purposes.  Really?  I would have thought that, as a former MoD employee, he would be well aware that this was simply the official name for the RAF Police, the Air Force's equivalent to the Military Police who are simply responsible for the security of RAF bases, investigating criminal activity by RAF personnel and arresting drunken air men.  They then tried to link it with the 'CCC' an underground government complex several miles away, which was also, apparently, the home some kind of sinister government organisation. ('CCC' actually stands for 'Corsham Computer Centre', which apparently processes data in connection with the Royal Navy - it is perhaps significant that the Navy's design offices are based in nearby Bath).

Many of these programmes focus on particular UFO sightings and try to 'prove' that they can't be explained in any terms other than alien visitation.  Once again, their 'evidence' relies entirely upon those unverified and, to be honest, unverifiable, 'eyewitness' accounts.  I know from personal experience of having twice (in separate incidents) had to provide the police with witness statements.  I like to think that I have a pretty good memory (it got me through enough exams back in the day), yet I was surprised by how, only a short time (less than hour in both cases), many of the details had become vague in my memory.  The exact order of some of the events, for instance, were suddenly unclear.  It taught me that memory cannot be relied upon, at least not for details.  Now, if my memories can become so vague in such a short period of time, asking people to recall events that took place years, decades even, earlier is going to be problematic.  What doesn't help these shows is that also always seem to focus on the same few incidents - if I hear anything more about Rendlesham Forest, for instance, I think that I'm going to go mad.  In one of the episodes I saw, though, they did highlight a case I wasn't familiar with - an alleged encounter between RAF night fighters and a UFO in the 1950s.  Even the most cursory research on my part revealed another problem with the approach these programmes take: the exclusion of witness statements and other evidence which contradicts their narrative.  In this particular case, it turns out that the crews of the two aircraft involved have given accounts in which they deny that they made any contact with anything anomalous that night.  But that never gets mention by Pope (yes, him again) in the show.  it would undermine the UFO guys' ability to delude themselves and construct their complex alternative reality.  Worryingly, their thought processes and 'logic' are pretty much the same as those of people who believe in really dangerous stuff like the 'Q Anon' cobblers, or that Joe Biden didn't really beat Trump, despite evidence to the contrary.  The world is in danger of drowning in these conspiracy theories.