THE ALIEN HALF-

This month is the 50th anniversary of the sighting of the first flying

saucer — or alleged sighting. Michael Harrington says that, as The X Files prove, we earthlings have come to need them FIFTY years ago — in June 1947 — an American businessman named Kenneth Arnold was flying his private aircraft near Mount Rainier in Washington state when he saw a group of strange objects flying in the sky. He said that they 'skipped like saucers across the water'. News agencies immediately coined the expression 'flying saucers' and pretty soon strange objects in the sky were being reported from all over America and to a lesser extent from other countries. Right from the start the most popular theory was that they were space- craft from another planet. In those days Mars and Venus were the favourites, since we did not yet have conclusive evi- dence of their barrenness.

What Arnold actually saw, if anything, has never been estab- lished. He reported several more sightings in future years, which makes him sound more than a little dubious. Yet he had launched the greatest myth of the age. Today it is more potent than ever. We can see the myth working in Chris Carter's television series The X Files whose worldwide popular- ity arises from the clever way in which flying saucers, or uniden- tified flying objects, are linked with other popular myths of high-level conspiracy and paranormal pow- ers. These 42-minute television dramas are made in a semi-documentary style, with considerable pace and in an atmosphere always bordering on desperation. UFOs, conspiracies and psychic powers are the three main streams that have irri- gated the intellectual underworld of the 20th century. In The X Files, the FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully explore this underworld, which can be viewed as a kind of Jungian collective nightmare in which malevolent space aliens, unnamed govern- inent officials and serial killers with psychic powers come together in a darkening land- scape to dance a weird quadrille. Paranoia lies right at the heart of the series and its attraction. One of the obvious mysteries of The X Files, of course, is why the FBI employs two agents to look into matters the government does not want looked into. But that, as any good conspiracist will tell you, is a naive question.

Many people accept this material as more or less factual. There is an interna- tional network of UFO believers and they hold frequent conventions. A visit to a newsagent will confirm a large and growing periodical literature — the Fortean Times, Mysteries, The Unexplained, UFO and oth- ers. Every time one of them folds, a new one appears. There are countless paper- backs.

Nor is an interest in UFOs confined to nerds in anoraks. Presidents Reagan and Carter reported seeing them, though nei- ther subscribed to any theory. Lord Hill- Norton, chief of the British defence staff in the 1970s, is sympathetic to the view that UFOs are alien spacecraft. He has endorsed the works of Timothy Good, author of Above Top Secret and Alien Liai- son. Mr Good, who is a musician, appears to think that the American and some other governments are in touch with several dif- ferent races of space aliens and are keeping it a secret.

Lord Hill-Norton does not give much weight to the possibility that he would have been told if anything like this had been going on. A former Tory MP, Sir Patrick Wall, also believes that flying saucers are alien craft. Lord Dowding, chief of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, took a similar view. Unfortunately Dowd- ing also had a well-publicised belief in fairies and spirit mediums.

Nothing in a present scientific picture of the universe excludes the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life, but there is a complete absence of evidence for it. There is nothing that we can look at and analyse, only strange tales.

There are some interesting sci- /------------- entific arguments which sug- gest that life must be very rare and that we may even be alone. Yet this is not a popular view and nobody wants to hear about it.

America is the world centre of the UFO cult, although there is an amiable and in some ways more sensible British offshoot. Fashions change in space aliens as in everything else. In the 1950s and 60s the space aliens were thought to be benevolent and worried in case the human race destroyed itself with nuclear weapons. George Adamski in the best-selling Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) claimed to have had conversations with highly spiritual beings from Venus whose bogus nature could readily be inferred from their pitiful banali- ty. Steven Spielberg's sentimental film ET was the last word on it.

Carl Jung in his Flying Saucers: A Modem Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1959) con- sidered that flying saucers reflected 'a reli- gious vacuum at the heart of modern man'. They had come, Jung argued, at a time of general anxiety coupled with growing reli- gious doubt and expressed the desire for some external power to save us. Jung very likely got close to the heart of the matter, even if the aliens are not seen as saviours any more. In our darker and more para- noid time the aliens are far from benevo- lent and are frequently abducting people, especially bored and lonely housewives, and carrying out unpleasant experiments on them. John Mack, a professor of psychi- atry at Harvard University, got himself into a load of trouble by taking these stories lit- erally.

Of course the US government was held to be hiding things from the start. Probably the US air force made a mistake in setting up Project Blue Book in 1948 to look into flying saucer reports. It was all quite inno- cent, but it created the ineradicable impression that the air force knew there was something going on. Actually the air force had no idea what was going on in 1947, but by 1950 had come to the conclu- sion that there was no great flying saucer mystery. But in the post-Watergate envi- ronment of the later 1970s that conspir- acism became rampant.

For example, the alleged Roswell inci- dent took place in 1947 when a farmer found some debris — probably from a secret military balloon — on his farm near Roswell, New Mexico. This was about a month after Arnold's sighting near Mount Rainier. There was quite a song and dance for a while about a 'crashed saucer', but it was soon forgotten. Thirty years later, however, Roswell was being cited as evidence of alien visitation and official deceit. In the Roswell case — which has been the subject now of half a dozen books and one feature film — aliens and their spaceship are alleged to have been spirited away and hidden by the air force. Some, like the UFO conspiracy author Stanton Friedman, have called it 'the cosmic Watergate'. American space technology, however, has a very lucid histo- ry from the space shuttle back to the Ger- man V2s acquired in 1945. It would have been different if they had had access to alien technology. Conspiracism, of course, has an indepen- dent history and is usually associated with the political Right. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was a forgery con- cocted by the old Tsarist Russian secret police and was intended to show that the Jews had a plan for world domination. Some of this was incorporated by Nesta Webster in her Secret Societies and Subver- sive Movements, first published in 1923. Nearly all the right-wing conspiracist writ- ers since then have drawn on Webster, with or without acknowledgment. She pro- pounded the theory of the Jewish-masonic conspiracy going back to ancient times. Her works were praised by such celebrities as Winston Churchill and H.G. Wells. Later she joined Mosley. Her successors, such as A.K. Chesterton (not to be confused with Gilbert), Gary Allen and Robert Eringer, have developed the model of the secret world government, consisting of bankers and big businessmen, all intent on making us subject to a world dictatorship. They belong to a masonic breakaway society called the Illuminati and are behind the so-called Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. American right-wing militia share many of these notions.

At the root of conspiracism lies the belief that the world is not a chapter of accidents but that, on the contrary, everything is under control and going according to plan — somebody's plan. In America such jour- nals as Critique, published in California, and Conspiracy Tracker, published in New Jersey, maintain a running commentary on the various conspiracies.

This mode of thought — shorn of some of its fascist implications — has been taken over by the American UFO movement. Instead of Jewish bankers it is space aliens, and The X Files mirrors their state of mind with great precision. On the wilder shores of it you will find it maintained that a secret human colony has been established on Mars because human life on Earth is going to be destroyed by a huge asteroid in the near future.

In Britain the atmosphere is far less fevered. Researchers such as Jenny Ran- dles, Hilary Evans and Paul Deveraux seem a touch uncritical at times, but they inhabit the same universe of the mind as do the rest of us. Jenny Randles, who usually keeps a clear distinction between fact and speculation, in her recent book Time Travel suggests that UFOs may be not from another planet but from another time — tourists, in fact. In general, space aliens are not much fancied in Britain and British ufologists are more inclined to put UFO reports into the category of the paranor- mal, along with telepathy, precognition and ghosts. Sceptics will certainly agree that UFO stories — and all that we can exam- ine of UFOs are the stories — should be put in that department.

Most of us at this point would be happy to shut the door quietly and silently make off. My own Boring Theory of History (BTH) states that the true explanation of any mystery is the most tedious explanation consistent with the facts. In the case of the UFOs the BTH predicts that when you have eliminated regular aircraft, irregular aircraft, balloons, the planet Venus, lunatics, liars and film producers and other conventional categories, what you will be left with is nothing.

It is a smart point about The X Files that at the end of each episode the evidence of UFOs or some other strange phenomenon always disappears, or is stolen by the chief conspirator, the dreaded Cigarette-Smok- ing Man. Mulder and Scully have nothing to show. At the end of the dream we wake up to our mundane world where things are what they seem to be — most of the time.