The Outsider’S Guide to Ufos: Volume 1: Mystery and Science

By James T. Abbott

What exactly is impossible in this universe? The Outsiders Guide to UFOs is for anyone for whom the UFO thing is enduringly fascinating but bafflingly complex. It cuts out all the smoke and mirrors and focuses on core questions like what are UFOs, how long have they been around, and are they hoaxes, figments of the imagination, or real?

Author James Abbott is a highly experienced researcher who has spent years studying this timeless debate as an outsider. With no vested interests, he presents all sides of the story without fear or favour. Read about
40 of the most important UFO cases
9 official projects and reports on the subject
13 fascinatingly strange UFO characteristics
20 possible explanations for UFOs
the very best photo and video evidence

The Outsiders Guide to UFOs explains why there may be up to 3,000 totally inexplicable UFO sightings every year around the world. It also discusses four mind-blowing theories about UFOs, clarifies the background, simplifies the main questions, and presents evidence and counter-evidence about the mysterious things we see in the sky. More importantly, it recommends straightforward action to settle the UFO question once and for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Dec 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781480854574

James T. Abbott

Following a short scholarship to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he completed a Bachelors degree in Politics and Economics at the University of York and later researched a Masters thesis at the University of Cambridge on global trade in the aerospace industry. His career has encompassed time in the aerospace sector, in marketing, in education, and in commercial research. Hes written and contributed to around a dozen academic books, and countless lengthy reports. His greatest professional love is research; having the view that there arent that many jobs in which you get paid for having fun, but thats what research is like. So why UFOs of all things? The answer is a long one, but it boils down to this: Like almost everyone else, the author gets hooked by a good mystery, and UFOs are perhaps the greatest mystery of all; one which is in desperate need of being properly investigated. He lives with his wife in Yorkshire, England, where rabbits are the only alien menace. Or so he believes! UFOs may or may not be of this Earth and time, but the huge job of trying to nail them down is incredibly fascinating.

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Copyright © 2017 James T. Abbott.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-5455-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5456-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5457-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017917107

Archway Publishing rev. date: 12/4/2017

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

CIA Motto

Semper Occultus (Always Secret)

MI6 Motto

For Miranda:

the sort of human being who puts most of the rest of us to shame.

Acknowledgements

Sir Isaac Newton said, way back in the seventeenth century, If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. It’s a sentiment which applies very much to anyone writing books on the UFO phenomenon.

Thank you, therefore, to all the authors, investigators, and organisations mentioned in the text; to the late Edward Ruppelt, Donald Keyhoe, J Allen Hynek, and James MacDonald; to Bruce Maccabee, Richard Haines, Robert Dolan, Stanton Friedman, Nick Pope, and David Clarke; and to all of the others whose expert and considered views illuminate the complexities of this fascinating subject.

And finally, thank you to my wife, who listened to my diatribes, contributed ideas, questioned my more excessive conclusions, and kept faith with me throughout.

It only remains to say that the views expressed are my own and that any and all errors and omissions are unintentional and entirely my own responsibility.

Yorkshire, England, 2017

Contents

PART 1

Introduction

Chapter 1: Early UFO Sightings

Windsor Castle, 1783

Hatton Gardens, 1809

Airships, 1890s

England, 1909

Clapham, 1914

Foo-Fighters, 1939–45

Chapter 2: It Gets Hotter

Kenneth Arnold, 1947

Roswell, 1947

Farnborough, 1950

The 1952 Show

London, 1953

Childerhose, 1956

Lonnie Zamora, 1964

Pilot Sightings This Century

Chapter 3: US Government Investigations

Project Sign

Project Grudge

Project Blue Book

The Robertson Panel

The Condon Report, 1968

Chapter 4: British Government Investigations

The Flying Saucer Working Party: 1950–1953

Condign, 1996–2000

Chapter 5: French Investigations

GEPAN/GEIPAN, 1977

COMETA Report, 1999

Chapter 6: UFOs Everywhere

Classification Systems

Global Reach

Numbers

Statistical Research

The Magic 5 Percent

Chapter 7: Is Seeing Believing?

Trent Photos, 1950

The Mariana Film, 1950

The Tremonton Film, 1952

Edwards AFB Photos, 1957

Balwyn, Victoria, 1966

Hannah McRoberts, 1981

Chapter 8: There Are No Such Things as UFOs

What the Sceptics Say

Twenty Explanations for UFOs

Chapter 9: Strange Characteristics

Chapter 10: Strangers in the Night

PART 2

Introduction

Chapter 11: UFOs and the Police

Exeter, 1965

Michigan, 1966

Cosford, 1993

Chapter 12: UFOs and Airbases

Lakenheath, 1956

Malmstrom AFB, 1967

Loring AFB, 1975

Chicago O’Hare, 2006

Chapter 13: UFOs and Civil Airliners

TWA 842, 1981

JAL, Alaska, 1986

Air France Flight 3532, 1994

Aurigny Sighting, 2007

Chapter 14: UFOs and Military Aircraft

Operations Mainbrace and Ardent 1952

Major Giroud, 1977

Portugal, 1982

Chapter 15: UFOs and Landings

Valensole, 1965

Rendlesham Forest, 1980

Trans-en-Provence, 1981

Chapter 16: Mass Sightings, 1950–1989

Washington National, 1952

Hudson Valley, 1982-1984

Chapter 17: Mass Sightings, 1989–2017

Belgium, 1989–1991

Phoenix Lights, 1997

England, 2007–Present

The Hessdalen Lights, Norway, 1981–Present

PART 3

Chapter 18: Elusive Answers

Cover Ups & Conspiracies

Disclosure

Chapter 19: The Way Forward

A Science of UFOs

A Shift in the Paradigm

Make It Happen

Glossary of Terms, Acronyms, and Organisations

Bibliography (Chronological)

Bibliography (By Author)

PART 1

Introduction

THE TRUTH MAY, OR may not, be out there, but one thing is absolutely certain: In order to get the most from this book, you will need to have – and maintain – an open mind.

That’s impossible, of course. We all have our preconceptions and prejudices, and the subject of UFOs attracts prejudice like a summer picnic entices wasps. Some people scoff at the very idea of strange, non-earthly machines, while others are attracted and a little scared by the idea of us being visited by weird objects. The subject is one of the most convoluted and confusing anyone can ever try to tackle. It extends from simple sightings of things in the sky to the most outlandish and challenging events and theories.

This book is about those strange things in the sky. Its central thesis is that the UFO phenomenon remains unproven but is sufficiently well-evidenced to require much more serious investigation. As such, my book is for people who aren’t wedded to either side of the debate. It’s for those of you who are neither believers nor non-believers: people who are curious, are open-minded, and would like to know more.

What you are about to read has been restricted, as far as possible, to the simplest end of the subject’s spectrum, which extends from fairly straightforward things in the sky, to weird and scary stuff like abductions, animal mutilations and dark conspiracies. Yet, even so, you’ll find the material incredibly challenging: a mental conundrum of multidimensional proportions. You will find it hard to cope with the detail and the tortuous chains of logic and even tougher having to constantly resist every fibre of your being shying away from, or laughing at, the terminology or the exotic concepts.

I’ve done my best to make it easy for all of us outsiders by using the word objects for flying saucers and UFOs wherever possible and by using the neutral terms event, sighting, or incident for that which some of the more extreme ufologists, in their traditionally loaded way, call encounters or close encounters. The book tries to focus on the very simplest of our UFO problems: the UFOs themselves. Aliens, abductions, missing time events, conspiracies, cover-ups, and the Disclosure movement – while all mentioned and even discussed in passing – are very much treated as side issues for the time being.

Furthermore, you should be clear that, in this book, UFO is used literally to mean unidentified flying object (sometimes, in these euphemistic days, called a UAP: unidentified aerial phenomenon). The emphasis is on unidentified. That is, the term UFO is not used in this book to mean anything more exotic than a thing which is seen in the air which is not immediately identifiable. This means that, right now, I can answer the question you’re all dying to ask at this very moment: Do UFOs exist? Of course they do. We frequently see things in the sky that we cannot immediately identify, but we have got so used to seeing the acronym widely used as shorthand for little green men from outer space that it has been thoroughly debased, to the extent that many people are afraid to use it at all, in case they are regarded as kooks and weirdoes.

There are strong arguments on both sides of the UFO debate, and we’ll look at most of them in the course of this book. The extreme sceptics generally decide that all UFO sightings are either hoaxes or natural phenomena which people have misconstrued. The ufologists take the same cases and come to entirely different conclusions. The key aim of this book is to examine the subject as impartially as possible and to consider both sides of the debate.

It’s now been seventy years since, way back in 1947, journalists reacted to Kenneth Arnold’s sighting by inventing the term flying saucer for the first time. If one thing is very, very certain about those seventy years and hundreds of thousands of sightings of unidentified objects in the United States, Europe, the UK, and most other countries around the world, it is the amazing similarity of descriptions over both time and geography. In the same sense, and contradicting many sceptical authors who argue the power of myth, it is noteworthy that the sightings bear very little resemblance to the space ships of popular culture. We will revisit these important issues later in the book.

Consistency is one of the most surprising things about the UFO phenomenon, but its other defining characteristic is probably the degree to which it is subjected to scorn and derision by officials, the media and, indeed, the general public.

Under these circumstances, you will probably experience the full gamut of being excited, offended, attracted, appalled, fascinated, repulsed, revolted, and possibly much else as the book progresses. This is why, even when your first instinct is to scream your disbelief or to burst out laughing, I ask you to try to meet every step of the story with an open mind. You may, however, need to keep close to you a cup (or glass) of whatever soothes your turbulent spirit. Believe me, you’ll need it.

Just a word about the strategy of this book. As a fully-paid-up non-ufologist, who has never seen a UFO, never met a ufologist, and never belonged to a single UFO study group, I have nevertheless always been fascinated by the idea of UFOs and what they might mean. Equally, I have always been more than a little repulsed by some of the weirder extensions of the debate, the hoaxes, the insane arguments, and the extremes to which some websites are prepared to go to titillate and attract visitors (and advertisers).

There is a certain amount of reasonably credible evidence for UFOs having been seen well before the beginning of the nineteenth century, but what one might call the modern era of sightings began in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. H G Wells may have been a major mover in all this, but he wrote War of the Worlds at a time when people on several continents were already seeing strange things in their skies. At the time they called them airships. In 1938, Orson Welles (no relation) staged his famous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, which set off a national panic in the United States and probably sparked the avalanche of science fiction movies which have entertained us right up to the present time.

But no one has yet convincingly connected H G Wells, Jules Verne, or any of the other early science fiction writers to the earliest recorded sightings of things in the sky. The sceptics believe that these early sightings were suspiciously coincidental, but I have yet to see any proof of the alleged connection.

If there were a link between H G Wells and people seeing things in the sky in Edwardian times, surely the things they would see would be objects shaped like artillery shells, not the massive, lighted airships which were reported. World War II saw a tremendous increase in sightings of strange objects following, or interacting with, bomber formations and military aircraft generally. More on these fascinating subjects later.

And it did not begin with Erich von Däniken and his Chariots of the Gods book. There were plenty of stranger theories before him, but the idea of spacemen visiting the Earth really took off after that book was published in 1968. Alleged abductions of humans by UFOs, and animal mutilations performed by their crews, have been staple fare ever since. There are some famous and fascinating cases, but they are not the core subject of this volume.

Allegations of cover-ups by the FBI, the CIA, the US Air Force, MI6, the British government, and many other official bodies have increased over the years. The United States introduced its Freedom of Information and Privacy Act (FOIPA) in the 1960s, and UFO files have been released into the public realm in many countries, including France, Britain, and America. Some documents were redacted, and there is evidence that many relevant documents were held back by various official agencies. For example, the files of the FBI from the early years, and of the CIA well into the twenty-first century, have only now been released (many still heavily redacted). Consequently, the US and European Disclosure movements have become stronger and more active in recent decades.

One of the most hilarious quotes I have found illustrates the Machiavellian levels of complexity in the ongoing battles between governments and ufologists. It is from an FBI response to a request for documents from Major Donald Keyhoe in 1958 and its core philosophy appears to be followed by most governments to this day. In its response, the FBI said:

This Bureau does not have information on unidentified flying objects which can be released. This does not mean that this Bureau has information concerning unidentified flying objects which cannot be released.¹

And if you persist, it gets even weirder. According to many ufologists, aliens are already here on Earth, in bases under the sea or the Antarctic (take your pick) and our planet is simply a battleground on which conflicts of different alien races are being played out in sinister secret.

However, the whole circus with which we have become familiar really kicked off in the years immediately following the war. As you will see later, the key initial events – that is, the most highly publicised ones – occurred in the United States in the year 1947, when the term flying saucer was aired for the very first time. That year also saw the incident at Roswell (see chapter 2). Whatever happened near that New Mexico town in 1947 spawned a raging controversy from about the mid-1970s which has never flagged. The sceptics regard that year as a prime example of mass psychosis, of a war-weary nation adjusting to peace after a very nasty conflict. They argue that the US population did this by inventing strange and wonderful objects. But the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, and German populations (not to mention the Japanese among many others) had experienced considerably more death and devastation on their own soil, so why was the UFO craze of ’47 not duplicated (to the same extent, anyway) in any of those nations?

The term flying saucer has since had a long and chequered history. Very quickly, the subject of flying saucers, in itself pretty strange, was expanded to include visitations from other planets. George Adamski was among the first to claim to have met aliens.² Adamski (born 1891) was a Polish-American occultist who was the first widely publicised person to claim they had seen and photographed alien spaceships, met aliens, and travelled to other planets. In the famous year of 1947, he claimed to have counted 184 UFOs as they travelled over his home on Palomar Mountain in California. Adamski’s life was filled with controversy. He claimed to have met and travelled with a Venusian named Orthon and to have attended an interplanetary conference on Saturn. See, I told you you’d want to laugh out loud.

Over the years, the strange claims have been extended to include alien autopsies, animal mutilations, abductions, so-called missing time incidents, electromagnetic interference with vehicles and power supplies, the existence of multiple extraterrestrial races with different agendas, infiltration of certain governments by aliens, Earth-built UFOs, government cover-ups, and even the complete but secret mastery of the planet by races from other worlds.

The arguments in this book certainly do not mean that any of these out-there theories are necessarily wrong. Anyone with an open mind has to accept that we humans do not know everything. The sad fact is that we do not know very much at all. So all of those ideas could be possible. But in the overheated intellectual stew that is the UFO phenomenon – one that has been simmering nicely over a seventy-year period – ideas become myths, and myths become reality, arguments become circular without anyone noticing, and rationality becomes another word for cover-up.

The reader should also resist the temptation to believe that all ufologists are simply ordinary people who’ve found a new hobby to replace pigeon-racing, stamp collecting, or going to Twin Peaks conventions. The image of people who study UFOs as being cranks or nutters is, unfortunately, commonly held. But like most generalisations, it is only true in parts. There most definitely are a good many UFO-nutters, but there is also a strong core of very intelligent, very experienced, and cool-headed ufologists throughout the world, who work very hard to explore the subject in a balanced manner. As we will see, that core includes scientists, government officials, astronauts, US military officers, at least one former governor, an ex-Canadian defence minister, and senior British military officers.

There will be points in this book when elements of the weirder side of the debate will have to be introduced, but the central premise is that it’s the UFO sightings that are the key to the whole issue. They form the logic gate for everything else, and we can effectively ignore all the froth until the yes/no challenge has been settled, until the sightings are proven to be either total nonsense or the most profound thing that has happened to the planet since opposable digits. The prime object is to keep the argument focused on the vital prerequisite for all the other flimflam: Are any UFOs inexplicable in conventional terms, or are they all perfectly susceptible to scientific explanation within our scientific paradigm? It’s that approach that makes this book unique in the UFO arena.

The true sceptic and, to a large extent the true ufologist, is someone who is agnostic on the subject: neither a believer nor a nonbeliever. You will find, however, that there are also pseudo-sceptics and pseudo-ufologists: those who pretend to be neutral but actually start from a position of either rabid, irrational disbelief or hysterical conviction. They can be spotted, quite easily, by their use of absolutes and their ill-justified leaps of logic. When describing sightings, the immovably convinced ufologist tends to slip in words like craft and intelligent movement, where they really should be talking about objects and unpredictable or unnatural movement. The pseudo-sceptic often uses words like impossible and similar absolutes when describing features of sightings. They may also arrive at conclusions of mass hysteria or delusion without the slightest proof of such statements.

As this book was being finalised, NASA announced that no fewer than seven Earth-sized planets had been identified and measured as they rapidly rotated around a dwarf star which, hitherto, had been at the bottom of the list of possible life-bearing star systems. The planets of the Trappist-1 system are almost certainly far too problematic in their orbits for humanoid life but there is a chance that somewhere, on one of those very strange worlds, life will exist. Humanity is constantly being surprised by totally unexpected and unpredicted discoveries.

In the early 1960s, chemist Stephanie Kwolek discovered Kevlar when she was looking for a new polymer for car tyres. In 1928, the Scot, Alexander Fleming, then working at St Mary’s Hospital, London, discovered penicillin in a culture dish of a bacterium that had been accidentally left uncovered near a window. And equally unexpected was the discovery, in 1965, of the radio energy left over from the Big Bang. It was made by two engineers at Bell Labs – Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson – who were actually trying to reduce electrical noise in their latest radio antenna.

It’s just too easy for humans to decide that something is impossible. For many hundreds of years, the thought of rocks falling from the sky, particularly burning ones, was derided by mainstream science in much the same way that UFOs have been over the past seventy years.

Although falling rocks were well-known as a phenomenon by the ancients, often worshipped as gifts or threats from the gods, the notion of rocks falling from the skies had, by Christian times, become heresy. The Christian faith believed that the Earth had been created by God some four thousand years ago as the centre of the universe. The sun and a few planets circled us for company, and there was a canopy of stars to amuse and distract. To that core Christian doctrine, there really could be nothing else beyond the Earth.

Even to those with slightly freer minds, the issue of falling rocks was a bit baffling. How would huge lumps of rock get up into the sky in the first place? What was it that could possibly set them on fire? The whole notion reeked of witchcraft. How could any sensible person imagine that a piece of rock could burn? For goodness sake, we use rocks to put around a fire to stop other things from setting themselves alight. If you listened to stories of burning rocks tumbling out of the sky, you’d be forgiven for suspecting that the people who were telling such tales were, at best, malicious pranksters and, at worst, part of a group seeking to destabilise the entire foundations of the established church and state.

Yet ordinary people had always known that falling rocks existed. When they were working outdoors, they saw them streaking across the skies and found bits of charred rock lying on the ground. But they tended not to tell their priests. You could be burned at the stake for less.

Even after the Renaissance had begun to loosen things up a bit, and well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the whole idea remained scientifically impossible. The scientists asked – quite reasonably in terms of their existing understanding and knowledge – how would the rocks have got up there? They had identified all the planets and most of the moons of the solar system. How could rocks be levitated from them, up into their skies, out into space, across whatever unimaginable distances separate us, and then fall onto the Earth? And what could then set alight those pieces of solid, inert rock? The notion simply did not make sense. Modern science did not accept that these falling rocks were possible. So the natural philosophers of the day scoffed and jeered and called them figments of people’s inflamed imaginations. They might even have labelled them a myth, although I can’t be sure!

But ever-so-slowly, science began to experiment and to undertake research, to create a basis on which different ideas could be tested and sometimes proved. First we accepted, after much argument, that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, and, an even bigger shock for some, it wasn’t even the centre of the solar system. Think about it: Those two apparently simple facts represented an earthquake for people’s world views. Absolutely everything that everyone had believed as true prior to that point suddenly became untrue and irrelevant. It took a very long time for some to accept it, but eventually, discoveries followed about the planets, about gravity, and more, until scientists began to wonder about other strange things – like whether it was possible, after all, that rocks could fall in a burning streak from the sky.

It was Ernst Chladni in Germany who, in 1764, first put forward the astounding idea that the rocks came from space. But, even in the mid-eighteenth century, his ideas were generally ignored or derided. That is, until forty years later, in April 1803, a fall of literally thousands of meteorites occurred near the French town of L’Aigle in Normandy. This mass fall, unlike individual meteorites, could not be ignored, and it caused the French Academy of Sciences and the British chemist Edward Howard to begin the work which eventually proved the existence and origin of meteors and meteorites.

Although they had been seen and experienced for millenia, it still took a very long time for the phenomenon of meteors and meteorites to be proved beyond reasonable doubt and, more to the point, to be accepted by mainstream scientists. Nowadays, the patently ridiculous idea of large chunks of heavy rock falling in flames from the sky is an accepted fact, and we go out at night to marvel at the fiery trails as the known showers intercept the Earth’s orbit. We now understand that rocks can be present in interplanetary space for many reasons: rocks left over when proto-planets broke up, rocks blasted into space by huge asteroid or meteor impacts, rocks created by collisions between asteroids, and so on. Furthermore, we now also understand that friction in the Earth’s atmosphere can create such intense heat that the rocks do, indeed, burn.

Chladni’s theory ended up being part of a small shift in the overall paradigm of what we know about our solar system and the way it works. The impossible had become not only possible but an accepted and valuable fact.

Modern scientists are widely respected and admired for their mind-boggling inventions. From stunning advances in life-saving drugs and gene therapy to communications satellites, from the Large Hadron Collider to theoretical quantum physics, scientists constantly change the world we live in.

But the outsider has to understand some fundamental facts about scientists: They are human, they are not always right, and they can be as jealous and protective as the rest of us. They possess just as much stubbornness and blind prejudice as the ordinary person in the street and they are every bit as prone to bring those unattractive characteristics to bear on those whose ideas threaten them and their livelihoods.

The tendency for established engineers and scientists to pooh-pooh new ideas is well documented. Heavier-than-air flight was demonstrated several times throughout the nineteenth century in glider form³. Manned, heavier-than-air flight is much older than we usually believe. Around 1849, Sir George Cayley (the father of flight) flew a small boy in a glider across Brompton Dale, Yorkshire, and in 1853, he flew a man (we do not know precisely who he was, but it is said to have been his coachman) across the same dale in a biplane glider. Cayley worked out the mechanics of flight (including cambered wings) and also predicted that powered flight would only be possible once engines had become light enough. In spite of this and other experiments, the established engineers and scientists clung to their belief that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. In the 1890s, Baron Kelvin of the Royal Society is reputed to have been somewhat sceptical about heavier-than-air flight, and other scientists and engineers in both the US and the UK took the same line.

Dr Simon Newcomb, the famous Canadian-American scientist, pronounced in 1903 that heavier-than-air flight was impossible without someone discovering a new force in nature. That was fifty years after Cayley’s flights, twenty years after the gasoline engine had been fully developed, and ten years after the Duryea brothers had launched their first horseless buggy onto the market.

Francis Crick and James Watson were heavily scorned for their DNA theories, but Albert Einstein was in a different league. He set off a world-shattering avalanche of criticism when he published his General Theory of Relativity⁴. Scientists queued up to lambast him, and hundreds of doctors, engineers, and others did their best to undermine the theory. It just could not be right, they argued; it was impossible.

We now know that rocks can fall from the sky, and most of us accept other ridiculous ideas like the sun being the centre of the solar system, people being able to travel at more than 30 mph, the existence of black holes, evolution, continental drift, exo-planets, symbiogenesis,⁵ heavier-than-air flight, prions, and the power of nuclear reactions.

As outsiders, therefore, it is vital that we try never to use the word impossible. If rocks can fall from the sky and particles can communicate at immense distances faster than light,⁶ who are we to set absolute limits on what might or might not be possible? One could only wish that scientists could set aside their prejudices against the UFO phenomenon and accept that we have yet to meet much that is absolutely and provably impossible.

This book argues that the most pressing need is for us to scientifically investigate the UFOs themselves. In a very real sense, the logic for the human race is simple: prove beyond doubt that a single unidentified flying object is from somewhere other than this planet or time, and we will have changed the world forever in the most profound way. Only then will we need to go into the motives and mechanisms of whoever or whatever might be travelling in them, or whoever or whatever sends them to whiz around our backyard.

Equally, prove that every single UFO can be scientifically explained, and the whole issue can safely be consigned to the bookstore shelves marked Weird Things and Silly Theories, and we can all go home and watch some football (or whatever).

Okay, so we’re all agreed:

1. There’s been something called a UFO phenomenon for at least the past seventy years;

2. We all have to keep an open mind;

3. We are going to avoid the weird stuff as much as possible; and

4. Nothing is impossible unless proven so in a scientifically replicable fashion.

Heads Up

Towards the end of the book you can find a glossary of most of the acronyms used in the text. There are also two full bibliographies: One is chronological, and the other is in the traditional author-surname order.

CHAPTER 1

Early UFO Sightings

THE SUBJECT OF UFOS is like a battleground. The metaphorical and actual bodies of ufologists and sceptics are scattered across it like cherry-blossom after a gale. After so many years, both sides have dug themselves into positions which make the Maginot Line look like a Japanese paper screen. Each set of zealots has convinced themselves that they, and only they, are in the right. The exchanges, especially between the more extreme ends of the spectrum, are bitter indeed. And that’s not the end of the conflict. Even within the individual UFO groups, there are factions