Looking For a Link Between Sci-Fi UFOs and UFO Reports

NewsWatcher writes "The BBC has an interesting story about the link between sightings of UFOs and sci-fi films. From the article: 'Documents from the Ministry of Defence released by the National Archives show the department recorded 117 sightings in 1995 and 609 in 1996.' Those years correlate with the screening of the film Independence Day (1996) and when The X-Files was at the height of its popularity in the UK (1995). 'The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University."

Comments

Just my imagination?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to my ass.

Of course

[geekoid]

people see what they have been thinking about.

For example: when you buy a new car, all of a sudden you see that same model car everywhere.

Add to that peoples inability to think critically, and you get UFO's.

Re:Of course

[maxume]

My favorite is when the serious conspiracy theorists trot out the fact that the Air Force had an officer making reports about UFO sightings to the president. Of course, this was during a period when the United States was developing a variety of secret aircraft, so it stands to reason that the Air Force was keeping track of people who saw unidentified flying objects.

A slip?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University.

Which means that they are seeing something.

UFOs have been observed since ancient times. The apostle John saw one. The Egyptians inscribed a UFO in their hieroglyphics. And the ancient Hebrews recorded the interactions of aliens and humans as the Nephilim.

I think there's more than the authorities are willing to divulge. It's interesting to see leaks like the quote above confirm what some of us have believed for a long time.

Re:A slip?

[eldavojohn]

The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University.

Which means that they are seeing something.

UFOs have been observed since ancient times. The apostle John saw one. The Egyptians inscribed a UFO in their hieroglyphics. And the ancient Hebrews recorded the interactions of aliens and humans as the Nephilim.

I think there's more than the authorities are willing to divulge. It's interesting to see leaks like the quote above confirm what some of us have believed for a long time.

[citations desperately needed]

Ahhh, the human imagination and psyche. Full of so much wonderful things as the ability to conjure up grand imaginations and interactions ... as well as post a third hand account of several unrelated occurrences thousands of years ago in one paragraph.

I wish the article had gone back further to War of the Worlds time or the old classic 50s black and white abduction movies. Note the first abduction didn't happen until it had already been in pulps and film. And, from my own personal savior, Carl Sagan:

In The Demon-Haunted World astronomer Carl Sagan points out that the alien abduction experience is remarkably similar to tales of demon abduction common throughout history. "...most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?" (Sagan 1996 124)

It's fun stuff to read about and write tall tales about ... and nothing more.

Don't look down at their own feet?

[DragonWriter]

'The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University.

I'll start to believe this might be credible when there is a proven, positive correlation between the prominence of UFOs in film and on TV and the incidence of trip-and-fall accidents.

Re:i wonder ...

[Chris Mattern]

Of course! Don't you realize that Wormhole X-treme! is just a coverup for the secret government Stargate project?

Re:Alien Web Profit

[maxume]

Really, the show ended after the Dinosaur Wars, they just didn't bother to tear down the studio.

Re:Movies and imagination

[AP31R0N]

If you see an OBJECT, that is FLYING, and you can't IDENTIFY it (making it UNIDENTIFIED)... it *is* a UFO (relative to me).

That blurry, fast moving thing in the sky that i can't recognize is a UFO.

UFO does not state or imply that the object is or might be alien... that's a leap people make on their own. If i say "i saw a UFO", i am NOT saying i saw something from outer space, just that it was in the air and i don't know what it was. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re:i wonder ...

[koolfy]

If you look closely, you will learn that most of X-Files episodes are based on real cases and mysteries.
While this includes people's imagination being debunked by FBI's investigation, it also includes references to "top secret" projects only known by early "conspiracy theorists" and some of them were sometimes revaled true a few years later.

That's why it got that sucessful (besides the quality of the show itself) : it mixed mystic theories, unbelievable myth, and real theories about government and UFO's that were sometimes factual.

I don't have much examples in mind right now, but I remember hearing much words like "aurora" "blackbird" or theories about UFO's when I was kid, and later, discover that those were based on real reports of people claiming to have experienced those things.

Re:That is old news

[Tablizer]

If you look at UFO sighting report from the earliest to the latest you would remark that alien face evolved with time, and surprise surprise, cinematography. There is a web page somewhere which shows that somewhere , too bad I did not bookmark it. Same for alien "saucer" evolution by the way.

I've looked into this some, and it's not so clear cut. The chicken and egg have fuzzy boarders. For example, (alleged) abduction experts point out that one generally does not recall the abductor's (alien's) face except under hypnosis, and until the Hill case, nobody was bothering to perform hypnosis for such purposes. Thus, there's very little pre-Hill material to compare (and some of it does match).

As far as the "saucer" shape, there appeared to be an increase in saucer sightings even before the original "saucer" news article came off the press. A weatherman spotted about a dozen disks, for exammple, just before the paper. True, the rate jumped even further after the paper came out, but it's hard to tell whether people are simply looking and/or reporting harder, or whether they are imagining things they read about.

I've read fairly extensively on the UFO phenom, and generally conclude it's premature to make any conclusions. If it's not a "space mystery", then it certainly is a psychological mystery. We'd have to toss out a lot of court cases and free a lot of "criminals" if eyewitness accounts from UFO-observing professionals such as airline pilots, emergency response, and cops is dismissed because of an alleged propensity to hallucinate based on media exposure.

Something is really odd, either in the sky or in our heads. It's a fascinating topic regardless of the real answer.