How UFOs Conquered the World

The History of a Modern Myth

David Clarke

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781781313039
• eBook ISBN: 9781781314722
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Space Science

A history of the various manifestations and shifting meaning of the Twentieth Century's single great contribution to mythology: the UFO.

Neither a credulous work of conspiracy theory nor a sceptical debunking of belief in 'flying saucers', How UFOs Conquered the World explores the origins of UFOs in the build-up to the First World War and how reports of them have changed in tandem with world events, science and culture. The book will also explore the overlaps between UFO belief and religion and superstition.

1

Extravagant Fiction Today – Cold Fact Tomorrow

From the outside it looked like any other semi-detached house deep in England’s suburbia and the grey-haired, bespectacled man who answered the door appeared utterly ordinary. Dressed in a neat shirt and tie, neutral trousers and brown lace-up shoes, Denis Plunkett remained every bit the civil servant he had once been. In retirement he lived on the outskirts of Bristol, a city where he had spent most of his life. He had a wife, Maureen, three daughters, several grandchildren and a well-tended garden.

As we exchanged greetings I recalled that Denis had once told a tabloid reporter that ‘looking normal is all part of the facade’. Despite appearances, though, his life had been far from mundane. Denis is the last remaining founder member of the British Flying Saucer Bureau, the oldest club for ufologists in the UK. As we entered the house I could hear the sound of Maureen’s footsteps as she disappeared upstairs. ‘She has got used to strange people turning up out of the blue to talk to me about flying saucers,’ Denis said laconically as he ushered me into his study. ‘She just lets me get on with it.’

I was in Bristol to interview one of the few people in Britain who could remember the early days of the UFO mystery. In some respects I felt an affinity with Denis. Here was someone who, much to the bemusement of his family and friends, had devoted a large chunk of his adult life to pursuing a fascination with forces unknown. Unlike me, however, he had been present at the birth of the UFO syndrome. And also unlike me, his belief in flying saucers remained rock solid.

In the heady days of the 1950s Denis met many of the syndrome’s legendary figures, at a time when the mass landing of flying saucers on Earth seemed imminent. Among the big names who travelled to Bristol to speak to expectant crowds was Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, of Battle of Britain fame, whose faith in flying saucers went hand in hand with his spiritualist beliefs. He was followed by George Adamski, the Polish–American émigré who had taken trips around our solar system as the guest of a tall, blond Venusian called Orthon.

Those exciting days were gone. Half a century had passed since the birth of ufology. Millions of people had seen odd things in the sky, but we were now in the early years of a new century and hard evidence of extraterrestrials remained as elusive as ever. For my part, three decades had elapsed since my mind had been blown by Close Encounters of the Third Kind. My teenage obsession had turned into an adult fascination with the subject and its followers. I wanted to know what motivated Denis to persevere in his belief that UFOs were craft piloted by extraterrestrials. Here was a man in his mid-seventies, enjoying retirement. Yet as we settled down in his study I saw we were surrounded by the paraphernalia of a life in ufology. Boxes and files contained photographs, letters, membership cards, magazines and newspaper cuttings. Then there were the books – lots of books. So many that Denis had to store the overspill in a lock-up garage.

During the 1950s UFOs were known as flying saucers and those who believed in them were very much in the minority, Denis explained. The acronym UFO is a term coined by Captain Edward Ruppelt who led Project Blue Book, the US Air Force investigation into the phenomenon. Ruppelt wanted something that did not imply that ‘unidentified objects’ seen in the sky were alien spacecraft. In this respect he failed miserably as everyone quickly seemed to equate UFOs with extraterrestrial visitations.

‘I was twenty-one years old when I saw an advert in the Daily Mail from an organisation called the International Flying Saucer Bureau, based in Connecticut,’ Denis told me. ‘I applied and got the position straight away.’

UFO clubs are fond of acronyms. The IFSB’s director, a factory worker called Albert K. Bender, was looking for a representative in the British Isles. Denis was their man, but only for a few months. He handed me a black-and-white print; the photo was taken shortly after he was called up for national service in 1952 and it showed a fresh-faced young man in RAF uniform with dark, Brylcreemed hair, beaming at the camera. National service tore Denis away just as flying saucers seemed poised to invade Britain. Weeks before he began square-bashing, a group of pilots had made headline news when they reported seeing a white object following a Meteor jet approaching Dishforth Airfield in North Yorkshire. Initially they suspected a piece of cowling had fallen from the aircraft. But then it began to move in a strange pendular motion like a falling leaf. As the Meteor began its landing run the mystery object started to rotate on its axis, before zooming away at incredible speed. The five airmen, who observed it from the ground at nearby RAF Topcliffe, were in no doubt. This wasn’t any kind of man-made aircraft known to the air force.

The Yorkshire incident occurred during a massive NATO exercise centred on the North Sea. Exercise Mainbrace was meant to simulate a Soviet attack on western Europe. When news of the RAF sighting broke, a jittery Air Ministry decided to set up its own UFO investigation unit and began exchanging information with its US counterpart. Across the Atlantic the fledgling syndrome was at fever pitch. The American investigation, Blue Book, had been inundated with sightings following the release of the film The Day the Earth Stood Still the previous year, and in July 1952 the phenomenon seemed to gain credence when strange moving blips were detected on radars at Washington DC’s National Airport and the nearby Andrews Air Force Base. Aircraft were scrambled to intercept but their crews saw nothing, despite numerous observations of anomalous lights in the sky from the ground. The flap arrived as tensions with the Soviet Union were growing and it alarmed both President Truman and the CIA. It also led the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, to demand answers. ‘What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to?’ he asked his ministers. ‘What can it mean? What is the truth?’

Churchill wasn’t the only one who wanted to know the truth. Throughout the 1950s reports of flying saucer sightings from service personnel filled the in-tray at the Air Ministry’s newly established UFO desk. Denis did not miss out on the excitement. During his national service at an airbase in Warwickshire he saw a fiery ball of light whooshing through the daylight sky. Some time later, on an October night, he was sent to check equipment on the airfield. It was cold and overcast so he turned up his collar and got on with the job. ‘Then I looked up and saw a peculiar black cloud, from which a sphere-shaped object emerged,’ he recalled. ‘It was like an eye in the sky, watching me, before it returned inside the cloud minutes later.’

Soon after this experience Denis spotted an order pinned to the wall of the hangar. ‘It has been decided that sightings of aerial phenomena by RAF personnel are in future to be reported in writing . . . immediately and direct to Air Ministry,’ it read. As the public attached more credence to reports by RAF personnel it was important that information about sightings ‘should be controlled officially’. All reports were to be classified as ‘restricted’. Enlisted men and women were warned they must not discuss their sightings with anyone other than ‘authorised persons’ unless officially authorised to do so.

Like most other Cold War topics, UFOs were now subject to the Official Secrets Act. Moreover, the gagging appeared to extend to civilians who got too close to the truth as well. Within six months of the IFSB’s formation in 1952, Albert K. Bender shocked his 600 penfriends by announcing he had ‘found the solution to the saucer mystery’ and intended to close down his UFO bureau with immediate effect. In a field where rumours proliferated in the absence of solid fact, news of Bender’s about-turn was greeted with a stunned silence. The full bizarre story emerged four years later in a book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, written by one of Bender’s ufologist friends from West Virginia, Gray Barker. This revealed how, while watching a science fiction film in his local cinema, Bender had been approached by three shadowy figures with glowing eyes. They told him that, in a paper posted to a friend, he had stumbled upon the answer to the phenomenon. The visit from the mysterious trio, dressed entirely in black and wearing ‘hats similar to Homburg style’, frightened Bender so much that he was led to abandon the subject. ‘I didn’t know what to make of Al’s story about the three men in black,’ Denis told me. ‘They could have been men from the CIA or aliens in disguise. But wherever they were from, they scared him so much that he lost interest and closed his club down within forty-eight hours.’

The notion that UFO enthusiasts were being persecuted by some secret ‘silence group’ was set to become one of the earliest fixations of the movement. ‘It was happening all the time in those days,’ Denis continued. ‘A lot of people were either visited, threatened or silenced.’ On one occasion, he said, two mysterious men turned up at the Plunkett family’s home while his father was out. ‘My mother took them to be Russians, but we only found out about this many months later.’

Despite the closure of its American headquarters, the British branch of the IFSB survived under the control of Denis’s father, Captain Edgar Plunkett. In those early days membership grew to around one thousand and as the years passed it rose and fell, reflecting the peaks and troughs of public interest in the subject. By the end of the twentieth century, numbers had dropped to an all-time low. So much so that the national media began talking about what it called the ‘death of ufology’. In the spring of 2001 The Times ran a story headlined ‘UFO BUREAU SHUTS AS ALIENS SHUN EARTH’. It was based on a conversation between Denis and a local journalist. During the discussion he mentioned in passing how the bureau had temporarily suspended its monthly meetings.

In this interview Denis attributed the decline to a lack of new sightings but he was confident that one day the UFOs would be back. In fact, what had really damaged small UFO clubs like the BFSB was the arrival of the Internet. It allowed enthusiasts to exchange the latest news and conduct their debates from the comfort of their own armchairs, without the cost of membership fees or the constraints of an organisational hierarchy. Few now wished to attend the meetings, slideshows and skywatches that had once provided the social glue of the syndrome. Denis’s comments were picked up by the tabloids who reported as fact that the oldest surviving UFO organisation in the UK had closed. In its editorial commentary The Times portrayed the BFSB’s demise as ‘the end of an era of little green men’. It was a quirky story of the type loved by newspapers during the summer silly season.

My mention of The Times story was the only point at which Denis appeared to lose his calm composure. ‘It was factually inaccurate,’ he said. ‘But despite writing to the newspaper and to the Press Complaints Commission, I could not get anyone to take me seriously. They refused to publish a retraction or an apology. For weeks afterwards the phone never stopped ringing. People from all over the world wanted to know why we were closing.’

‘Well I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for that story,’ I said. ‘So in a way it’s done you a favour and put you back in the public eye. I’m surprised you took it so seriously.’

But Denis clearly did. He had come to believe the whole episode was part of a wider conspiracy involving both the media and the government. I knew that one of his contemporaries, a retired diplomat named Gordon Creighton, had been convinced the BBC had blacklisted him because of his outspoken belief in a government plot to hide the truth about UFOs. Creighton, who edited Flying Saucer Review for two decades until his death in 2003, also believed that UFO books were being removed from the shelves of public libraries to prevent people from reading the facts.

I felt uneasy. I was a journalist and this made me, if not part of, then complicit with, the conspiracy imagined by Denis.

‘So what do you think was going on?’ I asked.

‘Well I don’t think it was any coincidence the papers published the story when they did,’ he said. ‘I think the negative publicity was deliberately engineered and timed to deflect interest from the UFO disclosure conference that was being held in Washington DC a few weeks later.’

This wasn’t the first time that Denis had been closed down by the power of the press. Nor would it be the last time that he found significance in coincidences. His father Edgar was a retired merchant seaman, who shared his son’s fascination with UFOs. Plunkett senior ran the club first as secretary and then president until his death in 1993. On one occasion he accounted for his son’s absence while on national service by saying in the bureau’s newsletter that Denis had been ‘claimed by the airforce’. This was an unfortunate turn of phrase. Some of the BFSB’s more paranoid readers took it to mean his son was dead. Even in 1976, long after Denis had returned to the fold, a profile of the BFSB published in a national UFO magazine stated that Denis had been ‘unfortunately killed during national service’.

As he told this anecdote there was no hint that Denis appreciated its delicious irony in the context of his tussle with the national media. I knew from my own experience how easy it was for words to be quoted out of context or innocent errors to creep into newspapers as deadlines approached. But ufologists like Denis saw this as evidence of persecution by a sinister ‘silence group’. I could not agree with him. For now the Men in Black could wait, though. I wanted to establish the basic facts. How did Denis get drawn into the UFO syndrome? The answer surprised me, for his interest predated the arrival of flying saucers.

In 1945, when Denis was a teenager in wartime Bristol, he read stories about the mysterious foo fighters reported by Allied bomber crews. The name was coined by American aircrew to describe uncanny balls of light that appeared to pursue their aircraft during raids over enemy territory. ‘Foo’ may have been a reference to the French word for fire. An alternative theory traces it to a comic strip popular with US servicemen during the war that featured the exploits of a madcap firefighter called Smokey Stover. His catchphrase was ‘Where there’s foo there’s fire’.

‘We thought they were a German secret weapon and the Germans thought they were an American or English weapon,’ Denis explained. ‘But they didn’t appear to cause the aircraft any harm. They also appeared over the Pacific. After the war I heard stories about them following American aircrew into raids on Tokyo.’

For the adult Denis the appearance of these wartime UFOs made perfect sense. They were part of an emerging pattern of behaviour. This was evidence that Earth was being systematically surveyed by creatures from other worlds. ‘It was almost as if they were conducting an overview of how we were progressing,’ he said. ‘Both H. G. Wells and Charles Fort wondered if we were the property of someone and I wonder that too.

‘At that time most of us followed what was known as the “nuts and bolts” theory for UFOs. Basically this said if what people saw wasn’t man made then it must be made somewhere else from nuts and bolts like our own aircraft,’ he explained. ‘This is the same message that Donald Keyhoe had picked up from his contacts in the US Air Force and government.’

Keyhoe had served in the US Marine Corps but retired from active duty after he was injured in a plane crash. In the 1920s he took up writing short stories, often with a supernatural theme, for pulp and science fiction magazines such as Weird-Science Fantasy. The arrival of flying saucers after the Second World War provided him with fresh material and he began quizzing his contacts at the Pentagon. He concluded the speeds, movements and technology displayed by UFOs were way ahead of the capabilities of any earthly power. His contacts also implied the US government was involved in a cover-up to prevent a mass panic of the type that had followed Orson Welles’s broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1938. The resulting article, ‘Flying Saucers Are Real’, printed in the January 1950 issue of True, a popular men’s magazine, was described by Captain Edward Ruppelt, the original head of Project Blue Book, as ‘one of the most widely read and widely discussed magazine articles in history’. Keyhoe’s first book The Flying Saucers are Real, published later the same year, sold over half a million copies in paperback and is still regarded as a classic by ufologists. It was the source of Denis’s key beliefs.

Keyhoe reached three conclusions based upon information he claimed came from his sources in the US government. Firstly, ‘The Earth has been under periodic observation from another planet, or other planets, for at least two centuries.’ Secondly, this scrutiny had suddenly increased in 1947 following the advent of the atomic bomb. His third axiom was that these observations were set to continue indefinitely ‘as the spaceman’s plans are not complete’.

‘I still don’t know where they come from,’ Denis said. ‘But I do know they always seem to appear in times of real trouble such as war. Watching over us, perhaps observing us to make sure we don’t pose a danger to the rest of the universe.’ For Denis this provided a satisfying hypothesis. It also explained why UFOs were frequently reported buzzing around atomic power plants and military bases equipped with nuclear weapons.

‘But 1947 was the real beginning of the mystery,’ Denis continued. ‘It was the summer of Kenneth Arnold and Roswell. Wherever you looked the saucers were everywhere. The newspapers were absolutely saturated with news of sightings from all over the world. Not just one or two per month but dozens every day.’

The creation of UFOs – or flying saucers – can be timed perfectly. Shortly after 3 p.m. on 24 June 1947 Kenneth Arnold was flying above the Cascade mountains in Washington State in his light aircraft. He was on the lookout for the wreckage of a missing C-46 transport plane when his attention was suddenly attracted by a ‘tremendous bright flash’ in the sky ahead of him. Approaching from the direction of the snow-capped mountains to the north were ‘nine peculiar looking aircraft’ moving in a diagonal line. Initially he thought he was seeing a flock of geese but they appeared to be moving far too fast for b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• A Note to Readers
• Introduction: The UFO Syndrome
• 1. Extravagant Fiction Today – Cold Fact Tomorrow
• 2. I Know What I Saw
• 3. Purple Lights and March Foolishness
• 4. The James Bond Department
• 5. Demand the Truth
• 6. The Crashed Saucer Syndrome
• 7. Cosmic Voices
• 8. They Are Coming to Take Me Away
• 9. Angels or Demons?
• 10. Take Me to Your Leading Scholars!
• Conclusion: In the Eye of the Beholder
• Glossary
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations
• Copyright