Headless Men From Outer Space

When I was very young, (we're talking primary school, or even pre-primary school, age here), I vaguely remember having seen a TV programme that looked, I think, at ancient explorers, maps and the like.  The thing about it that I clearly remember, though, were the various fabulous beasts that these ancients had chronicled, illustrated with the depictions of them found on old maps.  The 'headless men', who had their faces on their chests, in particular captured my young imagination.  The sea serpents, manticores, dog headed men, monopods etc, were all great, but those headless guys, who apparently lived in Libya, just seemed, somehow, more credible to the young me. Credible to the extent that I recall believing, for a few of those early years, that they might actually have existed.  Obviously, I outgrew this belief, recognising that the 'headless men' were simply creatures of myth which, like many travellers' tales, gained traction in a time when huge tracts of the world lay unexplored by western civilisations.  A natural human desire to believe that the weird and exotic exists in those places that we haven't yet brought into the 'normality' of our civilisation, imposing our ideas of order and rationality upon them, led to their persistence.  Indeed, reports of 'headless men' persisted well into the middle ages, their location shifting in accordance to the expanding boundaries of western European exploration - Ethiopia became their new home, then India and Myanmar, before later explorers placed them in South America.

Eventually, like the younger me, the majority of rational people out grew their belief in the 'headless men', recognising that there simply was no evidence of their existence, that were simply creatures of myth, the product of explorers' and writers' imaginations. Yet there are those who seem very resistant to giving up on belief in unproven phenomena, most of the evidence for which is dubious and anecdotal at best.  The past few days, for instance, have seen the latest spate of UFO related reports all over social media and even in some mainstream media.  While aliens might well exist, the fact that there has never been any credible evidence of their presence here on earth, doesn't deter the UFO enthusiasts.  After all, if aliens had been coming here as frequently and for as long as they claim, you'd think there would be clear physical evidence, or that they would have made contact with the human race in ways other than kidnapping neurotics and enabling their sexual fantasies.  But, of course, like all conspiracists, the UFO lobby avoid proper explanation by resorting to the 'government cover up' stand by.  Which is the crux of the latest 'revelations': that numerous governments have recovered crashed alien spacecraft and have tried to exploit their technology.  This time around, the 'whistleblower' is some guy claimed to have worked on various US government projects and who supposedly has all sorts of high level security clearances.  Maybe he does, but the possession of such clearances doesn't guarantee that someone isn't mentally ill, a pathological liar, a fantasist, a grifter, an attention seeker or just a plain old crackpot making stuff up. Hell, a long time ago I worked in a government post that required me to have all sorts of security clearances, (all the way to Top Secret and including all sorts of handling caveats), but I make shit up and put it on the web all the time, (I have a whole website dedicated to it).

It's important to note here that those 'headless men' I believed in as a small child were also chronicled by what, at the time, were considered credible sources.  Damn it, even Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the most renowned explorer's of his day, reported on their existence in South America -and  he wasn't the only respected explorer who claimed evidence for their existence.  But like much of the UFO reporting we see, they and other explorers and writers, were, as it turned out, relying upon the anecdotal evidence of others, repeating oft told stories which became ever more elaborate with each retelling.  To be fair, their origins most likely lay in misidentification by Europeans, either of apes or monkeys that moved with their heads held low, or even local peoples who moved with similar stances.  Which, of course, is relevant to the whole UFO phenomena - nobody denies that there are sometimes stuff in the sky that can't easily be identified, but ot is worth bearing in mind that the last 'invasion' of such objects shot down by the USAF, turned out to be balloons...