Do you believe in extra-terrestrials visiting Earth from outer space in their Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)?
Well if you do, you’re not alone, as millions of people on planet Earth will today celebrate ‘World UFO Day’. Established in 2001, the annual event aims to raise awareness of “the undoubted existence of UFOs” and to encourage governments around the world to declassify their files on UFO sightings.
Of course, a ‘UFO’ needn’t necessarily be an alien spaceship. It is simply what its name says – a flying object which is currently unidentified and unexplained – but most people connect the term with visitors from outer space.
Opinion on UFOs and aliens from other galaxies is deeply divided. While some believe fervently, others dismiss it all as nonsense about ‘little green men from mars’, while perhaps the biggest group keeps an open mind, taking the view: “I’ll believe it when I see it with my own eyes”.
Believers accuse governments of covering up hard evidence of aliens visiting earth, including instances when UFOs have crash landed. Stories of abduction by aliens abound and some even believe aliens are living amongst us unnoticed – you might know one!
Disbelievers dismiss it as codswallop and conspiracy theories. Yet if you consider the immense vastness of the universe, and the millions of planets within it, how likely is it that intelligent life should develop on just one of them – planet Earth? Even if there is life elsewhere in the universe, the question of whether it makes frequent visits to our home planet is another kettle of aliens.
Back to today’s World UFO Day, which encourages us all to turn our eyes skywards and look for evidence of strange and non-human spacecraft. The date was chosen to commemorate perhaps the most famous UFO incident of all, when a ‘flying saucer’ supposedly crashed into the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, on July 2nd, 1947.
The official story is that what actually crashed was a United States Army Air Force Balloon carrying a nuclear test surveillance device. Because of the then top secret nature of the device, military personnel rushed to the crash site to recover the wreckage, with security in place to keep onlookers away. But it sparked theories that what actually crashed was an alien spaceship and what was recovered was not only the UFO, but its alien occupants.
Interest in the crash waned fairly quickly at the time, but was revived in the late 1970s when UFO enthusiasts – known as ‘ufologists’ – began promoting increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories about ‘what really happened’ at Roswell and why the US government went to such lengths to cover up the truth.
Wider interest in UFOs and alien visitors has for decades been fuelled by Hollywood. In the 1950s, inspired by America’s fledgling space programme, it churned out hundreds of alien-themed B-movies. They usually portrayed aggressive and scary invaders from outer space, often Martians (aliens from Mars), intent on conquering Earth and enslaving all humans.
Gradually the craze waned, but a revival was sparked by Steven Spielberg’s 1977 blockbuster “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and a string of similar movies hoping to cash in on its success. It treated alien visitors more sympathetically and encouraged us to welcome them, with Spielberg himself returning to the subject in an even bigger hit, 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial”.
In 1996, director Tim Burton’s star-studded movie “Mars Attack” affectionately and hilariously spoofed the 1950s alien invasion B-movies. Its seemingly invincible little green Martians were eventually destroyed by an unlikely secret weapon – the falsetto yodelling voice of Slim Whitman singing “Indian Love Call” which caused their enlarged heads to resonate and explode!
Alien visitors have continued as an ever-present theme in popular culture. Conspiracy theorists found a welcome ally in Fox Mulder, the lead character in hit American TV series “The X-Files”, which initially ran from 1993 to 2002 and was more recently revived in 2016. Mulder urged us all to believe that “the truth is out there”.
Just what that truth is remains to be seen, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to scan the night sky every now and then, especially on World UFO Day?