Written by Julian Flood

 

We seem to be in a time of collective madness, a time of signs and portents: USN warships report a swarm of unknown contacts which appear on radar and zoom around at unprecedented speeds of up to 150 kts (Wow!); asteroids swing past the Earth on what seems like a weekly basis, with one of them even being videoed as it exploded over the Russian town of Chelyabinsk with the equivalent energy of a 0.5 megaton nuclear bomb. The USA admits to decades of strange sightings and is just about to publish an unclassified report on UAPs (as they have renamed what the rest of us think of as UFOs). The great and the good lose all critical faculties and sit at the feet of a teenage girl who, God alone knows why, is believed to have the answer to global warming, the universe and everything.

All we need is talking animals and we’ll have the full set.

When societies are stressed they are prone to these fits of insanity. The exact visions vary according to the technology of the day. Inuits see rocks move as the spring thaw releases them from the embrace of frost and their obvious conclusion is that the rocks move because they are beings imbued with a will of their own. Angel bands appeared over the trenches of WWI, an obvious benediction from Heaven on the poor bloody infantry dying in the mud below. Flying machines from a much superior technological society appeared when the threat of nuclear war occupied the minds and headlines of the post WWII West, initially tadpole shaped but morphing eventually into the iconic flying saucer, obviously visitors from a beneficent culture seeking to save us from nuclear destruction.

Global warming becomes global heating, climate change, climate catastrophe, climate hyperbole as each new doomsday prediction by ever-more-complicated computer models is greeted with awe while the last failed model is forgotten like all the rest. Few people question these obsessions, and the voices of those who ask sensible questions, such as why would peace-bringing aliens manifest themselves only to isolated people with, let us be polite, limited control over the march of humanity to nuclear oblivion, or how it is that critics of the computer models that so confidently predict viral doomsday or climate conflagration continually fail to match measured reality, are shouted down. The madness of crowds doesn’t ask questions, it just believes.

People need to believe in something. Chesterton, that eccentric, far-seeing prophet of the early 20th century thought he knew what was going on: the quote “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything” is attributed to him without a solid reference, but there is little doubt that that was his position. How that attitude differs from that of the animist shaman shivering at the sentient moving rocks on the thawing tundra I leave as an exercise for the interested reader. Updating that quote for our more secular times (53% of UK subjects claim to have no religion) we might well say “a society which does not understand science or the scientific method will be a pushover for any charlatan with a big media presence and a plausible gift of the gab.” Al Gore, I’m looking at you in your waterfront mansion!

A society that fears judgement will see demons. A society that fears technology will see the ultimate technology as a threat or a portent, and so we get the ultimate flying machine able to accelerate to blinding speeds and reverse direction on a sixpence, a device that defies the normal laws of physics and makes all our defences useless.

Which brings me to the Rendlesham UFO.

There’s no shortage of coverage. You can read books about it – for example there’s ‘Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World’s Best-Documented UFO Incident’ by Nick Pope, a snip in ‘new hardback’ at £174.98. There are at least four others.

Or there are films such as THE RENDLESHAM UFO INCIDENT, a “Sci-Fi / Thriller from the producers of Creep, Severance and Triangle, a found-footage alien encounter movie set near the Rendlesham air base, the site of one the most infamous incidents of extra-terrestrial contact involving US military personnel in the 1980s.”

Perhaps you’d prefer a TV documentary: “A new documentary about one of the most famous UFO sightings in the UK concludes that the mystery has “legend” status like Loch Ness or King Arthur. ‘Codename Rendlesham’ looks at the reports by US airmen who claimed to have seen a UFO in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, in December 1980. by Chill Factor Films.”

And most authoritative of all, in 1983 the News of the World ran a front page story which proclaimed: “UFO LANDS IN SUFFOLK, And that’s OFFICIAL” All doubts dispelled then.

It boils down to this:

“In late December 1980, there were a series of reported sightings of unexplained lights near Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England which have become linked with claims of UFO landings. The events occurred just outside RAF Woodbridge, which was used at the time by the United States Air Force (USAF). USAF personnel, including deputy base commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. Halt, claimed to see things they described as a UFO sighting. The occurrence is the most famous of claimed UFO events to have happened in the United Kingdom, ranking among the best-known reported UFO events worldwide. It has been compared to the Roswell UFO incident in the United States and is sometimes referred to as “Britain’s Roswell”. (wikipedia)

… to be continued tomorrow in Part 2

 

Photo by amandabhslater

Print Friendly, PDF & Email