Here are the X-philes
STET
| Of course, my friends also knew me to be waiting for the superheroes in my favourite TV cartoon, Force G, to cart me away from the tedium of family life to a career in fighting interstellar baddies, so it wasn't a great shock. |
| Däniken's critics think he's a fraudulent crackpot. He didn't help his case when he got a potter to fake pottery shards decorated with flying saucers and planted them at an archaeological site "" a surprising move since he's a Taurean and therefore stable, prudent, with a great work ethic, and ideally suited to a career in banking or bureaucracy (or so Wikipedia says). |
| Even in India, where the most outrageous claptrap is routinely given serious consideration by the media, the courts, and Parliament, the press ridiculed von Däniken when he came to research a radioactive cave in Kashmir that he thought might be an alien landing site. |
| The whole thing has left me with an abiding interest in UFOs, partly because I'm still waiting for the Force G chaps. I read books on the famous 1947 "Roswell Incident", in which a crash site in New Mexico was treated with extreme weirdness by the military, and Budd Hopkins' research on alien abduction, which explains some people I know. I badgered my editor to do a story on UFOs until he said, "If you can get me the advertising, knock yourself out." |
| So when I recently had a chance to watch the world's most well-respected documentary on UFOs, I grabbed it. For a few minutes there was just the presenter and me in the room, both looking faintly sheepish, but then 20 other space cadets turned up and I was excited again. Social stigma is a terrible thing. |
| Out of the Blue, narrated by Peter Coyote and produced by James Fox, investigates sightings such as the 1997 Phoenix Lights, in which hundreds of people reported the passing of a huge triangular craft with lights; and the Rendlesham File, which documents the physical investigation of a UFO by American military personnel in the Bentwaters area in England. |
| Besides a hopelessly spoofy musical background it's a rather compelling movie, focusing only on credible witnesses, most of them in the military or government. It also looks at only that tiny percentage of UFO sightings that do not submit to any conventional explanation. |
| One of the points the movie makes is that governments are beginning to declassify information related to UFO sightings, moving away from the strictures of the Robertson Panel set up by the CIA in 1952 to discredit reported sightings. The Russians, British, French, Mexican, Brazilian and Chilean governments are finally releasing documents. |
| Now, I'm a fan of Men In Black. The whole idea lends itself to parody. National Enquirer-style flying saucers don't do anything for me. But I'm quite willing to stick my neck out and say that anything is possible, because truth is almost always stranger than fiction. |