machines
Barbara Ludman
THE COMPLETE BOOK OF UFOs by Jenny Randles and Peter Hough (Piatkus, R61)
THE RETURN OF THE GODS by Erich von Dniken (Element, R134,95)
NEXT week marks the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident, one of the landmark events that catapulted to fame the concept of little silver creatures travelling to earth in saucer-shaped spacecraft.
On July 3 1947, a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, found bizarre debris littering his grazing fields and sent a friend off with a sample to a nearby army air field. The rancher was placed under house arrest, the area was cordoned off, and the military put it about that the debris – pieces of light, tough metal, balsa wood that wouldn’t burn, pink-stained parchment with hieroglyphic symbols – came from a weather balloon. It was three years before the rumours began: aliens killed in the crash, autopsies performed in secret. Hundreds of stories and a film or two later, the rumours continue.
The real question is not whether any of this ever happened. What matters is why the American military found it necessary to cover it up.
It could have been an automatic reaction. Government officials around the world tend to act like characters in Spy vs Spy comics when given the chance. And they’ve had plenty of chances over the past half- century, with the skies apparently full of green fireballs, silvery discs playing tag with passenger airliner and spacecraft moving “like a saucer would if you skipped it across water”, in the words of an American pilot who reported a sighting days before Roswell.
We should be grateful for the overreaction of governments, because it has given the paranoids among us more more publicity than transparency would have done. And in a world gone mad and bad, this phenomenon, at least, has entertainment value. Whether we’re talking about books written by alleged abductees, series like the marvellous X-Files, spectacular films, from 2001 to Independence Day, or simple speculation, it does take one’s mind off one’s problems.
In The Complete Book of UFOs, Jenny Randles – a longtime UFO researcher – and Peter Hough have updated their 1994 book to coincide with the Roswell anniversary. It is an exhaustive history of unidentified flying objects, from an 1880 sighting in New Mexico to the post-Sputnik spate of abductions.
The manifestations appear to accord with our expectations – from airships with propellers at the turn of the century to spacemen who looked like RAF pilots seen through a haze after the war. But these days, according to the Randles/Hough book, there are only two kinds of aliens: Nordics and Greys.
A Nordic is a tall, slender, blue-eyed alien, dressed in silver, anxious to help humankind avoid self-destruction. We saw Nordics in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A Grey, on the other hand, is a short, grey-skinned, horrible little creature with a big head and huge black eyes. Greys are the kidnappers, who beam innocent humans up to their hovering spaceships for vivisection. Once, all aliens were Nordics. Now, most are Greys.
Or maybe not. Maybe these aliens are actually “transient paranormal phenomena able to replicate solid objects and entities” or “a distorted reflection of man’s psyche” – a physical manifestation of the collective unconscious. Although Carl Jung called UFOs “a modern myth”, he also noted their presence had been picked up on radar screens. “Either psychic projections throw back a radar echo,” he wrote, “or else the appearance of real objects affords an opportunity for mythological projections.”
In a world where matter and antimatter meet, where quarks spin and all principles are uncertain, perhaps the Nordics, the Greys and their spaceships exist in another dimension. Randles has written a book suggesting they’re time travellers – which means these awful creatures are us.
In the world of UFO littrateurs, Erich von Dniken is the liveliest, and he’s back again, honouring the anniversary with The Return of the Gods. This one is almost worth its hefty price for the parody which begins it: survivors of a meteor strike worshipping a Berlitz translation machine, merrily mistranslating all the crucial bits as they write their own version of the Great Devastation.
Von Dniken has spent a lifetime trying to convince readers that aliens have visited earth many times, helping humans to progress: that the immaculate conception involved space travellers, that objects sculpted on Sumerian scroll-seals are spaceships. This book is more of the same, including a wider view of abductions, with women round the world made pregnant by aliens.
But he makes an interesting point, if true: that polls show that half the people in the United States, two-thirds of the Brazilian population, 45% of French youth and a third of Germans between the ages of 16 and 20 believe UFOs are real.