Skip to main content

UFOs Caught on Film – B J Booth ***

As a teenager I was fascinated by every weird and paranormal thing that you could watch a TV programme or read a book about. I revelled in Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. And though books on Borley Rectory probably made ghosts my all time favourite, they were closely followed by UFOs. What was not to love about spacecraft from another world?
There’s no doubt that back then I would have loved this smallish landscape format hardback stuffed full of UFO pictures or, as the subtitle puts it, ‘amazing evidence of alien visitors to Earth.’ As an adult, though, I have serious doubts.
I have no axe to grind about the existence of UFOs. I am sure they do exist in the sense of being unidentified flying objects, though I very much doubt that they are extra-terrestrial craft because of the impossibly large scale of the universe. Even if you did achieve faster than light drive, there is just so much of it, the chances of a backwater like ours being regularly visited is tiny. But I am afraid I found many of the comments in the book naïve in the extreme. I have no reason to believe that the author is deliberately deceiving the reader – and yet what he has written bears very little resemblance to logical analysis.
To a healthily sceptical eye, many of the pictures look to be fakes. Like many other people, I suspect, I went through a phase of mocking up flying saucer pictures in my teens. I didn’t do this for any personal gain – I never sent them to newspapers or published them in any way, I simply did it for the fun of it. I liked flying saucers. I used two techniques. Some were plastic models, suspended from near-invisible fishing line and sufficiently out of focus to conceal the fact they were models (today this would be even easier to do with modern photo editing techniques). Others were pictures of a metal hubcap, thrown into the air and photographed, spinning, in flight.
One of the problems with the hubcap technique is that it tended to fly, and so to be photographed, at an unnatural angle – yet time after time these “unexplained and inexplicable” shots in the book are of fuzzy, out of focus hubcap-like objects at the same kind of angle as I found so irritating when I tried to fake my pictures. Two others look just like old fashioned outdoor suspended electric lights with the cable either out of shot or retouched out of the image. Others look like nothing more than a clay pigeon, or a bird or the sun. It’s only the way the text describes the shape as having UFO-like characteristics that makes us see a flying saucer.
Worst of all, the book includes the “classic” photo of a collection of UFOs over the Capitol building in Washington. There is nothing in the text to suggest that this picture has long since been debunked. And yet if you take a look at the whole photo, rather than the cropped image in the book showing just the building’s dome and nearby sky, it is entirely obvious what has happened. The UFO formation is an identical mirroring of a formation of lights running along in front of the building. It’s nothing more than lens flare, absolutely, definitively. Yet there is not a word about this in the book.
I have no problem with a book leaving things open to the reader, but where there is evidence against a photograph it really ought to be presented. Without this, the book is more fan fiction than science fact. It was fun to see the photos and speculate as to how they were taken. I enjoyed the enthusiastic commentary. But this shouldn’t be taken as a persuasive document that UFOs are visitors from another world.
I did, incidentally wonder how what was primarily a picture book would hold up on the unformatted environment of Kindle so I downloaded the opening sample – I would say, if you want this book, definitely go for the physical version. The Kindle version just doesn’t do it justice.
Hardback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...