Written by Julian Flood
… continuing from Part 1, published here yesterday:
“The UK Ministry of Defence stated the event posed no threat to national security, and it therefore never was investigated as a security matter. Sceptics have explained the sightings as a misinterpretation of a series of nocturnal lights: a fireball, the Orfordness Lighthouse and bright stars.” (wikipedia)
Aha, there’s that word! Sceptics! Few people have any wish to be called a sceptic because many no longer realise that scepticism is the heart of science, of truth, and is a vital part of being an adult navigating through the trickeries of life. Why else would the Royal Society, once the conscience and guiding light of UK science*), have “Nullius in Verba” as its motto? “On no man’s word” is the essence of scientific inquiry. First someone has a guess at explaining a phenomenon in the real world, sunspots, auroras, the phases of the moon, whatever. Then everyone looks at the data. Everyone, anyone. The original guess can come from the most eminent of scientists but still we have to check the data. If the data disagrees with the guess then the guess is wrong and we have to guess again. But there is so little data with UFOs that this process cannot be followed. So let’s guess again and again, trying out different scenarios and assessing them against any experiment we can cobble together to produce more data.
It’s odd that someone with my love of science fiction – I remember when ‘Astounding Science Fiction’ renamed itself as Analog, a change of which I disapproved – has such a doubting character, but my encounters with fandom made me acutely aware of how many people have an urge to explain the world with inadequate knowledge to back up their explanations. In 1994 when Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter I was at an SF conference in Winchester and we were treated to images of the impact courtesy of a tech wizard with, for those days, huge access to a new thing called the World Wide Web.
No-one thought it was a signal from alien civilisations disturbed by the end of the Cold War and the disturbing fragmentation of what had seemed for decades to be a stable world order, but driving towards Petersfield after the conference I saw a perfect demonstration of star travellers’ concern: in a wheatfield in a valley beside the A272 was a perfect crop circle. Hmmm. Wincon, fandom, beer? Or aliens? Not a difficult guess. No data, so my guess is not science, so until someone owns up it will have to remain unresolved, but until the data is gathered I’ll be a sceptic.
Which brings me back to the Rendlesham UFO – and dappled shade.
Just up the road from Woodbridge is the RSPB Minsmere reserve, a nice stroll from the Eel’s Foot, one of the best pubs in England. After lunch on a sunny day, take a walk through the leafy lane that leads you towards the sea. Look at the road beneath your feet and look, really look at the patterns thrown by the sun through the leaves. They are not all ragged-edged amorphous shapes: the exceptions are a series of overlapping circles, some brighter, some dimmer, and they slide over and under each other as the wind stirs the leaves. Look up and all you see is dazzle. Why circles? I’m glad you asked that. I saw the explanation on my own stairs as the sun shone through a plant just outside the stairwell window, a single perfect circle, and the answer was obvious. It was an image of the sun cast through one tiny gap in the leaves, a natural pinhole camera. On the Minsmere asphalt you are seeing image upon image upon image of the sun.
One night I went to lock up the nursery in the dark and saw what it looks like when artificial lights shine directly at you through those pinholes. The next village’s street lights were shining through the hedge on the edge of the nursery, and as I moved they seemed to be on my side of the hedge, not a mile away across the fields. The illusion was very strong. The oddest thing was the way the brain persisted in seeing them as close by, even making them move in a convincing simulation of parallax. Tinkerbells, elves, tiny aliens zooming among the trees or a simple optical illusion? Choose which is more likely.
So there’s my guess. The original sighting was the Orford Ness lighthouse projecting through the trees, and later images may have been large stars glimmering in the winter air which explains the colour shifts. As the observers zoomed around they would have seen the lights behaving oddly, now near, now far, as virtual images flicked between the arboreal pinholes.
Far fetched? It’s just a guess. Someone else can now find a forest at the same stage of growth as Rendlesham was in 1980 and carry out an experiment. After all, you don’t want to take my word for it, not if you believe in science.
~~~ *** ~~~
*) I have been unable to track down the reference, but I have read that when Martin Rees (then President of the Royal Society, current Astronomer Royal) was quizzed about his belief in climate change he replied “you can trust me, madam, I am the President of the Royal Society.” No wonder we are in such a mess!
Photo by Rusty Russ 
I found Douglas Adam’s ‘Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ the best Sci Fi/Fantasy creation. He wrote 2 other good books too.
Then he wrote ‘Mostly Harmless’ which disappointed me. Perhaps he had nothing more to say but getting into environmentalism and getting killed was a great shame.
Those crop circles do sound very mysterious.
Crop circles are fascinating. Experience of a very minor nature was two adjacent 8ft diameter swirls in long grass we assumed was a pair of the familiar deer resting places but on closer inspection the grass was not flattened but just smoothed down maybe by some sort of spiralling wind effect except there had been no wind and in the centre of each swirl three or four of the long stems with seed stood up and were radially intertwined with more laid down stems in a complex under and overlapping pattern two delicate to unpick without damaging the stems and therefore too delicate to have been achieved in the first place. The pattern was inexplicable from any sort of wind permutations and the delicate and even and partly smoothed down nature of the larger swirl area showed nothing had walked or trodden there. Seems a possible explanation is some sort of electrical phenomena achieving the randomness seen in the infinite variety exhibited in snowflakes Be great if it was some sort of communication.
The over-under swirl was, according to someone who had studied the things, diagnostic of the genuine article. He was interviewed for a TV programme and was the goto expert at debunking crop circle frauds. The one he pronounced as genuine, too complex to be natural etc had been made by a couple of tricksters with two planks and a few yards of rope.
My favourite crop circle is the Mandelbrot one.
JF
Julian I am disappointed! You have made such a credible explanation of this incident that I will never again be able to hear about UFOs without feeling that there will be a scientific interpretation! I am a fan of the UFO concept. For me ET was real! (Ask my son. He was 11 when I took him to see ET. At the end I was in tears and he was so embarrassed he wouldn’t walk out of the cinema beside me!). For me, crop circles are magic performed for us by ‘visitors’ who want to let us know that they have an artistic culture! ‘Close Encounters’ has now lost its fascination!
But yours was a good story while it lasted. I never went to Rendlesham. I was more interested in Orford Castle that I found utterly amazing!
That president of the Royal Society is yet another example of the overweening, boorish, conceited prigs that somehow rise beyond the level of their incompetence. This Country is full of them and it’s long past time that they were all slapped down!
Curious coincidence that you publish this thoughtful and entertaining article this weekend Julian. Our daughter came over to sgare a BBQ with us yesterday and was talking about a recent break in Suffolk. Apparently there is a Rendlesham UFO tour – stops at all the sityes where the airmen sent to check out the woods allegedly saw ‘something’
Full marks for enterprise to whoever set this one up.
Another curious coincidence, there’s an article in the Observer about crop circles this week. Spooky or what?
JF