UFO

I've never been much of a UFO follower, although I've had some fun making mock-ups of them, but if I'm going to do a blog about Fortean Phenomena, I've got to talk about them sooner or later, so I may as well get it out of the way now.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I honestly think it is ignorant to believe that our little rock is the only place in this whole ever-expanding universe for life to have evolved.
Our little star, in the unfashionable end of a dull little spiral galaxy, is just like hundreds of others. Our primitive equiptment has let us see that some of these stars have planets too, some very similar to our little blue-green ball, and some of those planets formed a long time before ours.
Many people feel this is a religious issue, that the idea of aliens somehow negates the idea of God, but consider this, if you built a fifty-acre zoo, would you be content to have the only animals there be a shoal of fish in a bowl? why would the big guy make a whole universe, and then spend all his time watching one tiny spec of it?
We ARE going to find life out there, but when we do, what will do about it?
We may as well be penguins watching fighter planes fly over... and we continue as we are, the best we'll get from them is a chuckle when we fall on our collective asses.

Our little rock has made a hell of a lot of noise over the last century.
No doubt that's attracted some attention, even if ET's just swooping by to watch a movie or two.
Which gives us something else to consider, what will those other, more advanced, societies think of us when they see "Alien" or "Independance Day"? -will it be the same as the "civilised" europeans thought of the "savage" natives when they went to america? or the same as the jews though when they got to the promised land and found it full of heathens?
Will they realise that these tales of science fiction are meant to represtent our own inner struggles, or will they just assume that this planet is full of mentals who'll pick a fight with anything that looks a little different (and who could blame them for thinking that?)
Will they even understand the concept of fiction, or will they judge us harshly for sitting on our asses listening to stories when half the people on our planet are dying?
I really hope they catch some "Dr Who" before they make up their minds about us (although i highly doubt they'll join David Tennant's Doctor in the opinion:"Humans? Brilliant!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Having said all that, I also have to say that I have yet to see a UFO picture that wasn't either a blatant fake like my own photo-shop fairies, or far more likely to be a bug than a bug-eyed monster.

There's a great free download on Fortean Times at the moment [ see www.forteantimes.com and go to strange days, UFO files, and "guide to investigating UFOs" ]
It's got a section all about faking UFO photos, which is well worth a look over.

The real problem with UFO stuff, is the amount of confusion surrounding it.
Most UFO sightings are around airports, they are often made by people who aren't familiar with the area and thus don't know that there's an airport nearby.
As a kid I saw a perfect saucer swooping down towards the rooftops of London... to make a perfect landing at heathrow. An aeroplane can look exactly as we expect a UFO to when you see it face on, rather than the normal side angles we're used to.

Near where I live is a small RAF base, and for a few years ago ('94 to '98 ish) there was a long spate of reports about a "black triangular object" - these became known locally as "Sinfin triangles" and were a sort of local in-joke.
The RAF had borrowed several B2 stealth bombers from the USAF.
The UK government wasn't supposed to have this kind of craft for various reasons, so they just let the UFO reports keep piling up while they trained our pilots to use the planes.

The most common spate of UFO reports in america is in the last two weeks of june and the first two weeks of july.
In England, there's always a load of them at the end of october and the start of november...
I'm sure there must be some reason why people see so many lights in the sky at these times...

Chinese lanterns are getting really popular now as well, and I've seen more UFO photos of them than I've seen square meals in the last few weeks.
They drift about, slowly one way, then whizz off in another direction as they catch a cross wind, and when they're let off one at a time, they all follow roughly the same pattern, as if they were flying in formation; it looks really cool, but it's a paper bag with a candle inside, not an invasion force from another world.

When I was at school I was huge X-files fan and we made our own episode as part of a design project (we used action figures, it was very robot chicken) we made a UFO for one sequence, and it was really quite convincing (there were pupils talking about it as a real sighting for about a week before we had to show the project) we used five matt-black ballons, some coloured glow-sticks and a pukka-pie tin.
The glow-sticks were all bundled up in a twisty shape, with the pie tin on top, all suspended from the balloons by black cord. We let it go after dark and filmed it for a bit, the non-reflective balloons and the black cord were pretty much invisible once it got a few feet in the air.
Also because the whole thing was slightly off balence it spun as the wind moved it, and it had the twisty-glowing bit at the bottom, which looked like some kind of crazy power source that kept changing shape.
Because of the glowing light, I doubt that it would get more than a glance from a proper UFO investigator, bright lights are pretty common in natural phenomena, and they make it really hard to work out the size of an object.

I'm not suggesting that anyone should perpetrate a hoax in this way, rather I'm pointing out that humans love pretty lights and pyrotechnics, we don't need any extra terrestrials to make our sky pretty with lights.

As for the people who want to get photos of REAL UFOs there's enough advice out there for how to get a sighting. The main thing (as always) is to make sure you've got a fast camera.
When you buy the camera, tell them you're going to be watching a meteor shower, (there are
and you'll get all the advice you need about shooting bright fast-moving lights at night, tell them you want UFO photos and they'll laugh at you and milk you for every penny you have.