The “I Believe in…” series that is currently playing out on BBC Three at the audience-friendly time of ‘midnight-ish’ is, by far, the most incredulous, poorly thought-out, nonsense-laden idiot-fest seen on British TV since, well…  *cough* erm…  Jeremy Kyle is on every day…  and The Wright Stuff…  and then there’s almost all of Channel 5’s output…  Satellite channels…  (has anyone ever watched anything of Conspiracy TV?  *giggles*)

OK, so there’s stiff competition out there in the time-rich and thought-poor facets of British media, and anything that comes with short sentences, a couple of nice locations and a pretty face or two is likely to get up there on the box at some point, no matter how inane the subject material, or how utterly bonkers the take on said substrate may be.  This is where Danny Dyer, Jodie Kidd and “I Believe in…” come in.

Danny Dyer’s effort, “I Believe in UFO’s”, deserves its own lengthy analysis, but I’ll just relay one little element that really made me chuckle…  Loveable, credulous, silly old Danny has just been out in a crop field with a ‘Crop Circle Expert’, who is in fact just some random dude with a VW campervan and an IQ problem, calmly explaining how crop circles must be produced by aliens, because the ‘knees’ of the stalks on the crops can only be bent over in this way by high temperatures of some sort, and thus ‘steam’ in the joint and…  WHOOM…  down go the grasses into this week’s pattern picked out of ‘Flying Saucer Crop Patterns Lightyearly’ (WHSmith will get it in if you ask nicely, have two green heads and 6 limbs (but don’t tell Danny!)) by our Alien UberSturmFuhrer on duty to watch over us puny Earthlings and molest cattle on that particular night.  Our hero, swollen with ‘knowledge’, goes into the local pub to meet some thoroughly delightful chaps at the pool table – very casual.  These delightful chaps then go on to tell him that it’s all a load of bollocks.  It’s them!  They go into the crop circles at night, mob-handed, and proceed to inflict criminal damage on a lot of innocent arable crops and the brains of gullible, half-witted townies…  without actually admitting it of course – the local constabulary might be watching.  Cue Danny’s almost weepy lament pouring out of his drizzle-stricken grid.  For everything else there may well be credit cards, but these moments which warm the heart…  Priceless.

Now that Danny’s eventually alien-broken heart has been served up for starters, we can move on to the main event:  The intellectual heavyweight champion of her navel, the cokestess with the mostess, the leanest, skeletelest, the South-East belt-holder for “least able to ponder” at atom-weight for the last 12 years running and now, dear and gentle readers, the southern-spoken swinger for all things supernatural…  Ms Jodie Kidd.

Jodie – it is ok if I call you Jodie, isn’t it Jodie? Thanks, Jodie.  You’re a star. (D-List, natch.  You do crap like this) – believes in miracle healing.  She believes that the material universe isn’t the only thing that exists and that we can be in touch with a secret part of the cosmos that scientists, doctors and the NHS clearly don’t want us to know about…  She knows this, because she was definitely, definitely, definitely healed by crystals.

So you got that, right?  ‘Healers’ tell us that ‘bad stuff’ (I’m not sure, but I think that’s the technical term.  It might be worth checking with your local ‘Nonsense Dealer’, err, sorry, ‘Healer’.  Right…) comes pouring out of our mobile phones and computers.  Crystals can help us by tuning into the electromagnetic charge frequencies of our bodies and rebalancing them.

What?  You don’t believe me/Jodie?

She’s got a NASA Scientist to explain it all.  Honest!

This Bear Walker dude, and he says everything is based on frequencies.

NASA.

HE MUST be right, AMIRITE?

Funny, though…  Bear doesn’t mention anything about his NASA credentials on his website, but other places talk lots about all the lovely energy, breathwork, healing, hypnotherapy and Ancient Native American Wisdom that Bear can teach us all.  I’m sure his uber-science NASA credentials are out there somewhere.  In space?  Maybe he lost them out there.  While he was with NASA, training them about how we can use crystals to rebalance our electric charge frequencies. That’ll be it I’m sure.

So, Jodie’s there giving us the skinny on her terrible trouble with anxiety and panic attacks, which are very serious conditions that I most certainly won’t have anything said against.  No, I won’t immediately go on to mention her relationship with cocaine, either.  That would be like drawing a parallel, making a direct relationship between one and the other…  and I wouldn’t want to do that.  Cocaine doesn’t, in any way, make you feel anxious and lead to panic attacks.

I’m sure Jodie’s right though…  It’s a deep psychological problem based on her relationship to the universe and the ‘bad stuff’ from her ‘Dealer’ that comes via her mobile phone or computer.

I’m not sure I jotted that down right…  Hang on…

…

Yeah.  Bang on.  Except for those who don’t follow the link, then YES.  LENGTHY COCAINE MISUSE CAN LEAD TO PARANOIA, ANXIETY AND PANIC ATTACKS.

Jodie then goes around her house showing us how many crystals of different types she has all around her home, and telling us all about how utterly terrible her life would be without both them, and her trips to the mystic lights and crystal-milking machine on Harley St. that she probably sneezes out – better than coughs up in the circumstances – 500 quid’s worth a go for.  If you haven’t watched the crystals bit yet, then…  GO WATCH IT.

Ok, this is 1000 words, and we’re already beyond coffee-and-a-biscuit length for the average reader, so I’ll stretch this out to another post later in the week.  It’s worth it.  There are Shamans, Faith Healers, Mystic Biologists, Magic Love-Horses, Autism, More Energies, The Big C and even a cameo from Chris French!  But this is enough nonsense for you to digest in one go…

And remember!  Stay clear of the ‘bad stuff’ that you can get via your mobile phone and computer.  Listen to your ‘D/Healer’ at all times.

Be crystalline, and stay frosty out there.

(At least in the morning…  Brrrr….)

As anyone who keeps their eyes to the skies – or, more likely, to the news and the skeptical blogosphere – might imagine, this bumper UFO-tastic article follows on not only from the recent strange spirals over Norway (which turned out to be a stray Russian missile, rather than a stray alien emissary) but also from the news that the Ministry of Defense has latterly closed the UFO-hotline. I know recent Righteous Indignation guest Nick Pope was particularly interested in that latter story, which you can hear over on the RI Podcast site. Feel free to have a listen, I’ll wait if you like.

Actually, that’s a lie – I won’t wait at all: if the MoD have decreed alien sightings too unimportant to report to them, I best crack on through the story before the MoD’s lack of interest inevitably trickles down to your alien-believer on the street, and the whole UFO story goes cold. That’s how it works, right? Picking up from The Sun:

Norway’s skies lit up last week with this incredible unearthly looking spiral of light. The phenomenon was dubbed ‘Star-Gate’ – as the world’s top scientists and the military lined up to admit they were baffled.

I’ll stop you there, My Sun – I don’t think top scientists and the military were all that baffled. In fact, while this phenomenon was an interesting mystery to begin with, it was all but over before it began – it’s almost a shame to say it, but gone are the days and weeks of wild speculation between seeing this kind of site and finding the cause. I think there was a time-elapse of around 2.6 nanoseconds between the mystery and the reveal in this case. I guess The Sun must have interviewed the world’s top scientists and military (leaders, I presume) in that nanosecond. Good journalist works fast, time is money and all that. I’m sure that’s it. Still, those bastions of real reporting continued:

And this is not the first mysterious sighting to wow UFOlogists in 2009. In the same year that the government inexplicably axed the MoD department that investigates UFO threats and sightings – despite record levels of sightings in the UK – we have seen flashing orbs, hovering crafts and spooky lights in the sky.

Again, just to interject – the MoD ‘inexplicably’ axed the MoD department? I take umbrage of that – I have an explanation for closing the UFO hotline: there are no aliens. No extra-terrestrial UFOs. In fact, the calls to the hotline were so alien-free, I’d have it renamed the coldline. What we did have, though, was a fair bit of cash being pumped into a department that, during a recession, was ineffective as a threat-early-warning system, but incredibly effective as a waste-our-time-and-funding-with-inane-reports-of-Chinese-lanterns-which-you’re-positive-are-UFOs system. Which is less economically justifiable during the harsh winter of post-Moneygeddon Britain.

So, on to The Sun’s amazing UFO!!!!1!1!! list. And coming in at number 9, the new entry you heard at the top of the show – the Norwegian spinny spiral thingy, which we now know for certain to be a Russian missile. So far, so terrestrial.

Number 8 in the immensely overdone and cliched charts metaphor is titled by The Current Bun ‘The Empire Strikes Barack‘. I suspect they thought of the title first, and were just dying for the first opportunity to use it (I can’t complain, I do exactly the same thing). This was, apparently, the alien encounter captured on film during the inauguration of President Obama, back in January. It’s an oldie, but a… well… shit effort, frankly. Listeners to the SGU (ie everyone who reads this blog, listens to any podcast or simply has ears) might be familiar with this story – if you can call it a story. Personally, I’d call it an insect/bird/bat, flying relatively near the camera, thus looking larger than actual size. This explains 1) the movement of the blurry shape, 2) the shape of the blurry shape, 3) the fact that it is quite clearly an insect/bird/bat, 4) the fact that nobody was screaming, pointing to the sky in horror, running to the hills or offering themselves up as slaves to our new intergalactic overlords (everyone knows the smart move is to get the aliens on side, then take them down from within. Textbook). What I particularly like from the story is the way The Sun quotes ‘UFO experts’. Which is like asking homeopaths if magic water can cure illnesses – I think we can see how a degree of bias might have crept in on their answers there.

So, to number 7, and the shockingly-titled ‘5..4..3..2..1 Thunderbirds a UFO!‘ My money’s on this one being a case of story first, then title at the very last nano-second. There are two elements I find particularly weird about this effort – the first being that it was newsworthy, given the photo’s unremarkable nature. The other element that I find bizarre, is the emphasis in The Sun’s opening sentence:

UFO experts went into orbit in February over this amazing photo of a “Thunderbird” flying high above BOURNEMOUTH.

‘UFO yaddah yaddah yaddah… experts, orbit, February whatever… amazing photo, Thunderbird flying, sure, old hat… Fuck me! Bournemouth! That MUST be newsworthy!’

Number 6 is just plain weird – given that the story is specifically on the amazing photos and videos taken over the last year, the decision to include the story in their ‘Turb-ulence‘ report is particularly bizarre. It shows a turbine (hence the crunching pun in the title, naturally)… photoshopped with the famous silhouette of Elliott and ET on the flying bicycle. I guess the pun-barrel isn’t the only one that gets scraped back at Sun HQ.

Number 5 - a cool photo of a hot-air balloon crashing into a house, that’s only slightly spoiled by the reflection in the window of the interior lights of the photographer’s room. Or so it seems to me. Taking into account the angle the photo is taken from (clearly high enough up to be a second floor window), the grey skies outside which would well have required interior lighting and the shape of the ring of lights being consistent with a ceiling arrangement, ‘UFO all hot air’ seems a dud story to me. In fact, even the quotes from the photographer seem to be cherry-picked and unconvincing:

Darryl, 47, said: “It’s surreal. I wouldn’t have believed my eyes if I’d seen it.”

This could clearly apply as much to the sight of a crashing hot air balloon as to a mystical ring of lights. Lame story, The Sun.

Number 4, and another lovely video, not to mention another unforgivable pun (I see a trend here: poor evidence, poor wordplay). ‘Oo Arr Not Alone‘, so titled because… well… I have no idea actually. Which may be the biggest mystery in this article, given that the mysterious cylindrical object appears to be a Solar Balloon – essentially a binbag, sealed at one end, heated in the sun (the astronomical body, not the tabloid newspaper) until it takes flight. Weren’t these supposed to be the best 2009 had to offer in terms of UFOs? There’s not been a single case where the supposed UFO hasn’t been easily explainable with a plausible and logical scenario, and that’s before you consider that articles 3 (‘Life… But Not As We Glow It‘) and 2 (‘Shock And Orb‘) are quite clearly chinese lanterns.

Eight stories down, eight explainable non-phenomena – what will be the final piece of The Sun’s 2009 dossier on why the MoD ought to have kept the UFO hotline open? Ladies, gentlemen and little-green-guys-who-flew-in-on-the-last-Chinese-lantern/solar-balloon/living-room-light, I give you: ‘Great Scot, It’s Spooky!‘ Yep, another Chinese lantern. If I were BT, I wouldn’t be expecting a call from the MoD to reconnect the hotline any time soon.

Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (to give it it’s full title), confirmed research into the other-worldly communication was currently underway, and that the aliens were in the process of answering 30 questions beamed out into space by scientists. And their chosen method of communication? Did they beam their answers directly into Filipov’s brain? Did they use their advanced technology to create a universal translator and speak Bulgarian to the lucky scientists?

Did they hell. They left a series of 150 crop circles, around the world. Including the dragonfly circle left in Yatesbury, Wiltshire, earlier this year. It’s never easy, is it? Poor Bulgarian scientists. But Filipov holds out hope that he won’t always have to be jetting around the world looking at pretty patterns in the grass (patterns that could be made, say, by someone like… say… anyone who wanted to). Apparently he holds out hope that in the future people will be able to  establish contact with the extraterrestrials through the power of thought. That thought presumably being ‘Oooh, look at that pretty crop circle pattern’.

He told the novinite newspaper:

‘The human race was certainly going to have direct contact with the aliens in the next 10 to 15 years. Extraterrestrials are critical of the people’s amoral behavior referring to the humans’ interference in nature’s processes.’

Here we have a classic meme – when reports are in about aliens coming to visit us, the message always centres around stopping man doing whatever happens to be the biggest threat to the planet at the time. At the moment, climate change is the very real threat we’re facing, and the aliens confirm it. In the sixties, the aliens came down to warn us that the cold war and the nuclear arms race was going to destroy the Earth – it’s a shame at the time they didn’t mention anything about climate change, they could have really given us a head start on a real problem. Pesky near-sighted aliens.

Adding to the story, Mr Filipov said:

‘They are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time. They are not hostile towards us; rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them’ – Source: The Register

Presumably we’ve only grown enough to be contacted via grass patterns. I wonder at what point they’ll move from leaving pretty shapes in farmers’ fields to direct thought-to-thought communication. It’s going to be a real shock when they do, I can tell you! Perhaps they’ll work up to that point slowly, perhaps communicating through smaller greenery areas until they’re leaving tiny shapes in window-boxes. I’d appreciate that. They’re like cosmic topiarists.

Mr Filipov added that even the seat of the Catholic church, the Vatican, had agreed that aliens existed. Which is nice to know – not only does the Pope have a direct line to God, but it seems he can communicate with other otherworldly beings too. Good work, Ratzy.

Filipov also added:

“They are very skeptical of our use of cosmetics, and artificial insemination because this is unnatural,”

I think he means the aliens there, not the Pope. Although either is plausible.

Unfortunately for the plucky Bulgarian, his colleagues at the Academy have proven to be slightly less friendly that the charming, anti-cosmetics, anti-IVF aliens – with other scientists amongst his team calling for his resignation, by drawing a lovely pattern in the shape of a UFO with a cross through it on his front lawn. OK, I made that last bit up – I presume they called for his resignation using normal language, but it seems to me he prefers a more crop-based communications system.

I’m talking specifically about a bright sparkling glow seen in the night sky over Wisconsin, USA, which left skygazers searching for an explanation. Was it a comet? Could it have been aliens? Well, no, as it turns out – it was in fact the frozen waster water from the shuttle Discovery, which was jettisoned by pilot Kevin Ford in preparation for a landing attempt the following day. Rumours that he had previously attempted the jettison but had been unable to complete the task while his fellow-astronauts were watching are not true, most notably because I just made them up. Because I’m childish sometimes.

Explaining the lights, caused by sunlight hitting the frozen waste water and sublimating the ice into water vapour, NASA spokeswoman Kylie Clem said: “It would have been a large quantity because we don’t do water dumps while docked to the station now, in order to prevent potential contamination”.

It’s definitely worth checking out the photos, they’re quite spectacular – easily the most spectacular photos of urine you’ll ever see. There’s an unusual sentence for you.

The files range from the years 1981 to 1996, and we get some cool stuff in there. We get waves of sightings recorded across Belgium in 1989 – 1990, which led to F-16 jets being scrambled by the Belgian Air Force. The F-16s obtained lock-ons with their radars but were unable to explain the phenomena. We also get a 1994 report by an air crew flying from Moscow to Tokyo, which describes a huge object entering the Earth’s atmosphere over the Arctic, creating a shockwave supposedly 200 miles long. The crew reports that the UFO came in over the North Pole at an estimated speed of 10-15,000mph. There are numerous records in the files of reports by pilots and air crews, including near-misses between UFOs and airliners.

I love this stuff. There are probably perfectly mundane explanations for all these events, but in the absence of knowing what they are, there is some great fodder for the imagination here. It’s difficult to split anecdote and exaggeration from fact, but the great thing about UFOs is that it is still somewhere in the realm of the possible. It’s edging towards the door eyeing up the woo gathering outside, but it’s still sort of in the room. And the point for me is that it does no harm to believe in fanciful explanations for lights in the sky. I’ve never been a believer (I would need a lot more than sightings before I would entertain any possibilities for real), but I’m ok with the fact that some people are. They don’t harm anyone, they just get together with friends and watch the stars occasionally. It’s not like homeopathy or chiropracty, which make false medical claims and potentially lead people into making dangerous choices regarding their health. Or psychics who take money from the bereaved. UFO hunters aren’t scamming anyone except maybe themselves, in a harmless sort of way.

Stories like the ones above genuinely interest me. Yet by and large they’re not the ones from the files that make it to the national papers. Stories like this do:

Two Staffordshire teenagers on their way home from a youth club one night in May 1995 both experienced a burst of intense heat and saw a large, inverted saucer-shaped object hovering fourty feet away. It was supposedly four houses high. They also apparently saw a creature with a lemon-like head, who said “We want you. Come with us.”

Most papers took note of other important details, like: the phone call came from the local Nags Head pub, and that same night a local farmer was spraying his crops in the same field as the sighting in his enormous, well-lit combine harvester.

Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I find reports about pilots recording near-misses between airliners and UFOs much more interesting. For one, they’re not drunk (I hope), and they’re not in the habit of reporting silly stuff.  It may have not been an alien spacecraft outside the cabin window, but at least we can have a bit of imaginative fun. Stories like this one are non-starters. Give me something with at least a hope of being possible. Feed my imagination, dammit!

The papers also picked up on waves of sightings across London in 1994. They turned out to be of a Virgin airship advertising the launch of the Ford Mondeo, a much more Earth-based vehicle.

More famously, the Rendlesham Forest Incident of 1980 (sometimes called ‘Britain’s Roswell’) is also in the files. This involved sightings by two military policemen of eerie, flashing green and blue lights through fog. On approach, they saw a “strange, glowing object, metallic in appearance… [with] a pulsating red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath”. This was revealed as a practical joke in 2003. The source of the lights was a police car driven by bored miltary policeman, Kevin Conde, who stuck red and green lenses on the spotlight, and then drove round in circles flashing his lights. Again, another EARTH-BASED vehicle.

Stop reporting dead news, people! Give us the unexplained stories! Alas, the more you read between the lines, the less ‘unexplained’ everything becomes, and the realm of UFOs becomes a little duller. The number of UFO sightings peaked significantly, for example, in the years 1978 and 1996, the release dates of the films Close Encounters of The Third Kind and Independence Day respectively. The X-Files’ popularity was also at its highest in 1996. Coincidence seems unlikely. Especially when trends such as this can be seen with regard to other aspects of UFO sightings. Saucer sightings, for example, only became common after a journalist misquote turned “a boomerang-shaped object skipping like a saucer” into “a flying saucer”. Similarly, stories of meeting the ‘greys’ tend to ride the coat-tails of popular culture, most notably The X-Files, and Whitley Strieber’s book Communion.

Hear this story and more on Skeptics with a K

But this doesn’t stop these reports being entertaining in their way. My favourite report in the recently released files regarded two women revellers at 1994′s Glastonbury, who claimed to see flashing, moving lights which moved towards them and communicated with them by mimicking the colours of their clothes (!?). When asked why none of the other tens of thousands of festival-goers had seen what they had seen, the women replied: “They didn’t look hard enough or take it seriously.”

Kids, this is why you should avoid the Herbal Highs tent…

But as it happens, the Merseyside UFOs weren’t aliens, after all.  I’ll let you have a moment to stop reeling from that shock revelation.  Done?  Good.  They were countermeasure flares deployed in a navy training routine.  Even the woo-tastic Telegraph is happy to go with this explanation, so it must really hold water – give those guys half an inch of wiggle room and it seems they’re the first ones to don their tin-foil hats and hum the theme tune to the X-Files.  And the BBC are not much better – ‘Do-Dee-Derr-Derrr…Do-Dee-Do-Derr-Derr-Derr…‘   As it happens, I was half-way through an ‘it’s probably something straightforward’ type post when it emerged that it was, in fact, something straightforward.  ’Oh,’ thought I, ‘that’s that then.  No need to write on UFOs, it’ll be ages before another one of those comes up.’  But UFOs, like buses and clichés, rarely come along one at a time…

So what’s this latest story then?  As the Telegraph reports:

“Campers in the Lake District were treated to a spectacular light show from a string of glowing orbs which flew in formation across the night sky.

It is the latest in a series of sightings which has baffled onlookers and excited UFO spotters across the UK” – Source: Telegraph

I for one appreciate the Telegraph taking a fine, unbiased opinion on this.  ’It’s the latest in a series of sightings’ – there’s a half-truth for you: It’s the latest in a series of pretty lame sightings.  People who believe in UFOs are described as excited; people who had no belief in UFOs were baffled – clearly stacking the deck early on in the report to favour an ‘Aliens!!!!!’ interpretation.  Let’s read on… and as Darlington-born (good lad!) Paul Haigh explains:

“[The lights] weaved in and out of one another and appeared to fade and then light up again as they soared through a clear sky…

“The lights were amazing and seemed to fly in formation, they were darting around, fading an lighting up again.

“There was never more than six in the sky at any one time, but as one faded another lit up, it was a really weird spectacle”

Lights fading or flickering?  Flying in formation?  Sounds like Chinese Lanterns/Sky Lanterns to me – mini hot-air balloons that fly up to a mile in height, for around 20 minutes or so.  They’re party decorations, like an alternative to fireworks.  Pretty, and pretty cool too.  And at £15 for 5 – pretty reasonably priced.  (Note: The Merseyside Skeptics Society does not endorse a particular brand of Chinese Lantern.  We will never become a shill for damn ‘Big Lantern’).  It’s a shame nobody in the lakes that night knew about these things during the sighting…

“There were various theories as to what they were, someone said Chinese lanterns, but they seemed much too big and moving too fast.”

Oops, my bad again.   But they couldn’t have been Chinese lanterns, because they were too big.  And the speed they were moving!  For something so big they must have been going so fast!  Or, of course, they weren’t big.  They were just closer.  And therefore slower.  Like, say, a Chinese lantern.

“They looked as though they were being propelled under their own power rather than being blown by the wind, it was a still night.”

Lucy Gray, 26, of Leeds, said: “They seemed to be dancing around in the sky, not just racing straight across it like clouds.

“They were moving in formation, keeping a regular distance apart and they’d all shift around at the same time”

Propelled under their own power?  Sure – the power of their tiny flame, just enough to carry it’s tiny hot air balloon up.  It was a still night?  Sure – at ground level.  But at one mile up, there was clearly plenty of wind – Lucy tells us that herself when she mentions the clouds ‘racing straight across’ the sky.  Dancing around?  Sure – they’re light, and they’re buffeted by air currents.  Keeping a regular distance apart?  Sure – they could have been tied together.

“It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t explain it, unless they were aircraft on a training exercise.”

Or, Lucy, unless they were £15-worth of paper, candles and cheap fuel, tied with a string, one mile up (give or take), buffeted on the wind.

For me, the worst part of the article is still to come.  I can forgive Paul and Lucy – excited onlookers to some unusual-looking lights, giving quotes to a journalist, having a bit of a giggle. It’s all such a lark, aliens and all that.  But the journalist decides to end the whole account with the following:

“Similar lights in recent weeks have been found to be Chinese lanterns, often released during Summer weddings.”

Yes. Silmilar lights HAVE been found to be Chinese lanterns.  Pretty much identical lights, in fact, have been found to be Chinese lanterns. Pretty much identical lights, as described in the Telegraph as UFOs, have been later found to be Chinese lanterns.  So it’s really rather dishonest journalism to tack this simple explanation to the bottom of the last para, the token note of scepticism, when there are perfectly simple explanations already to hand.  Especially in a newspaper that has run 13 – THIRTEEN – UFO stories in 3 months.  That to me is an unnaturally high number, smacking of a little bit of manufacturing.

One sighting that, somehow, the UFO-obsessed Telegraph missed was the tale of the definitely-not-a-Chinese-lantern sighting over Muswell Hill in London.

This was actually something else that sat in my ‘too-silly-to-write-about’ pile for a while – struggling, bit-part and entirely-unheard-of actor Sam Lathem sighted what he described as  ’a large cube-shaped “ship” with orange lights erratically making its way across the sky’ late last month.  Sam was so spooked and amazed by what he saw that he took the time to draw a sketch.  A sketch.  He drew it.  In this day an age, when every phone has a camera and cctv cameras line the streets, he decided to sketch it.  Fishy.  In my head, he then tried to sell the sketch to the UFO, like a caricature artist in a tourist hotspot, but the UFO politely declined in broken English.  That bit’s just in my head though.

And this UFO is just in Sam’s head, I’d say.

In Sam’s own words:

“It was really strange because there was no noise and you would have thought at that distance it would have woken up everybody on the street. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Yep, it doesn’t.  But the suggestion that there was no UFO, that an actor of Sam’s standing (actually, he really looks spookily like a fat Arnold Rimmer/Chris Barrie) might benefit from a bit of niche publicity – to me that makes a whole lot more sense than an entire city failing to look up and see a cube the size of a truck hovering silently above their heads (yes, in exactly the same way a brick doesn’t).

So it’s silly season on the UFO stories, it seems.  OK.  I mean, I largely got into this scepticism lark to expose the psychics, tarot-readers and other such scoundrels who prey on the bereaved and vulnerable.  Or to help put an end to the quack practicioners of bogus treatments which erode faith in real medicine and damage the health of those who fall for the woo.  But as long as UFOs are so prominent, and tabloids cheaply sell-off their own journalistic dignity for a quick story, without second thought for the leg-up it gives to fuzzy, magical thinking – they’re back on the list.  Now, I’m off to draft-up a ‘there’s probably a very simple explanation for those lights… they’re probably Chinese lanterns… etc’ post, ready for the next sighting…