I Know What I Saw

Eagle Entertainment

R4 DVD

UFOs. Fact or overactive imagination or wishful thinking? It can be hard to take UFO reports seriously as they conflict with each other, are often not corroborated, or are too simply explained by natural and man-made phenomena. The serious UFO sightings, when all logically explained ones are deducted from the total, are still around 5 percent of the sightings. It is this 5 percent that interests James Fox, self-described UFO investigator.

The documentary begins with brief clips following a major appearance above Phoenix, Arizona in 1997. These UFOs were a little different in that the lights of the UFO appeared in a boomerang shape to some people, although there were reports of other shapes.

So far go good but the documentary than degenerates to conspiracy theory. “They (the Government) just ignored it. “. No, they didn’t. They checked and found that a group of A10 Warthog attack aircraft had been dropping high intensity magnesium flares at the time. The thing about conspiracy theorists is that in the face of a credible explanation they still don’t believe it (well, the government would say that, wouldn’t they?), and so it proved in Arizona. People with no experience of magnesium flares were declaring that it couldn’t have been flares because the lights didn’t look like flares. According to these people any investigations are played down on the orders of the CIA.

“Reports made by a group of credible observers of incredible things”- Military Spokesman. How credible are the observers? Just being a pilot, military man or civilian doesn’t give you any particular credibility unless you can get close enough to the object to positively describe it. In most cases all they saw was lights.

Much is made of the speed and agility of the UFOs. No mention is made of the perceived speed of lower objects versus those higher up. I have seen a searchlight used for an advertising event in Sydney reflecting off low clouds or smoke, something like the Bat-signal in the old Batman cartoons. The glowing blob moved across the sky at a phenomenal rate as the searchlight was swung around. Nothing made on earth could move that fast, so it had to be a UFO of course. Or just a moving searchlight?

F-111 aircraft on nighttime training missions used to regularly pass over. When they were moving away from us low and fast in the distance they displayed two glowing balls of light from their tailpipes. These are even more spectacular if the pilot dumps fuel into the afterburners. They are not really UFOs, though.

On one occasion I saw a glowing lense-shaped ball of light in the evening sky. It was the moon reflecting off a lenticular cloud – we watched the cloud beginning to break up, probably as the wind came up. For a while, though, it looked like the traditional flying saucer.

We sometimes made a sort of hot air balloon from a green garbage bin liner bag with a small amount of burning rag held by thin wire to keep the balloon aloft. At night as it rose and was carried away by the wind it looked like a pulsing blob of green light – quite like a UFO. One witness to the Arizona UFO described it as “floating down Scottsdale Road”. This sounds more like a cooling hot air balloon than a UFO. I offer these examples from my own experience to show why I tend to look for a rational explanation first rather than cry “UFO” at anything unusual in the sky.

When the sightings are sorted except the unidentified five percent, before we put them down to UFOs there are still unanswered questions. If aliens cross space to reach us, why don’t they make contact when they get here? They would have been able to pick up our radio and TV transmissions so why can’t they speak one or more languages? Why do the photographs that exist generally just show a ball of light? Surely after half a century there should be sharp, clear photos that can be corroborated with other sharp, clear photos of the same UFO? It’s not as if cameras are rare these days. The photos shown in the film are ambiguous.

The American Press Club hosted a meeting of military men, researchers, and others who believe in UFOs. Fox uses these people, right or wrong, to add strength to his beliefs – the authority figures who bring credibility to a conspiracy theory. Although the U.S. Air Force’s investigation, Project Blue Book, was finished many years ago for lack of conclusive evidence, this was a coverup according to the theorists. They have evidence that the investigations are still being carried on clandestinely.

The film goes into the secrecy of the investigations. Why are governments hiding their investigations? (Note: not “ARE they hiding their investigations?”:but WHY are they? This disallows the simplest possibility that they may have stopped investigating because there was nothing found to investigate. If there was no risk to aviation there is no reason to investigate further.

The film does not address “mass hysteria “. This is not about a group of people running around screaming, but an influence that is absorbed into the literature and colours peoples’ reports. Ever since an alien was first depicted as small with a teardrop-shaped head and huge eyes, sightings of aliens have mostly described this shape. Before they were so depicted they were the “little green men” of UFO myth or skinny silver-clad beings as per Hollywood depictions. These negative aspects of UFO belief have been left out or glossed over. The kidnappings, anal probes, interbreeding and electrical interference that can stop a vehicle are avoided. Even the conspiracy theorists accept that there are idiots among their “believers”.

“A conspiracy wrapped in superstition and myth”.

Examining this film critically I was struck by how misleading it really is. It starts with the certainty that UFOs exist. It is not a documentary about UFOs so much as a documentary trying to justify those who already believe. It swamps us with information, much of it irrelevant, and treats too many mere possibilities as facts. It uses authority figures as “proof” of the UFO theory without telling us much about the qualifications of the authorities. You may be a four-star general, but does that make you a UFO expert? Most of the evidence is not first hand but is from radio conversations, reports and similar non-visual sources. This evidence has been filtered through the belief that UFOs exist and possibly more has been made of it than was in the original subject matter.

Although the film has value as a compendium of UFO film and information, it is also misleading in that it tries to make a conspiracy theory out of vague evidence. As an example of conspiracy theory, though, it is one of the best I have seen. It should be used in High Schools to teach critical thinking.

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