Crop Circles circa 1941

Now I know I will get a bit of stick for constantly referencing The Sun, but in Saturdays edition it had a feature on all the paranormal stuff in Wales, basically as part of its new interest in UFOs. It claims that in the 1940s there were a series of crop circles in Wales. They were blamed on PoWs or something like that. I will search online but anyone got any leads on that? Curious…

The Sun still shines…

Saturday and today The Sun still has positive UFO stories. It seems there is a real flap on at the moment, and with the positive reporting I am sure more people are contacting The Sun with their stories.

Still waiting on FOIA responses. This is the hard bit. Waiting for documents and then analysing them, generating questions from them etc etc

Cardiff UFO Incident

South Wales Police have responded by saying they will respond to my request for information by July 24th. Keep watching the post-box…

The Life of Penguins

I heard a really good play last Thursday, you can probably download it as an mp3 or listen again on BBC Radio 4’s website. The synopsis is below.

Life of Penguins

By Katie Hims

Merle is the penguin keeper at London Zoo and when her sister Beth fails to make a date at the cinema she goes searching for her. Soon she realises that Beth is an ‘abductee’ and has been experiencing these alien abductions since she was a child. Could this possibly have anything to do with her disappearance? Merle soon realises that this is not some crackpot fringe idea but a real phenomenon that is happening to all kinds of ‘normal’ people.

Magic Lanterns

I predict that Chinese Lanterns will become the new ‘Marsh Gas’. These lanterns which float through the sky are being used as a debunking tool for quite a few sightings. The Sun ridiculed the lanterns theory but The Telegraph held it up as a possible solution to what people were seeing. Again, just like marsh gas, it doesn’t  hold up to serious (please note that word: serious) consideration. Quite how a Police helicopter chased a Chinese lantern from RAF St Athan, Cardiif, over to the Bristol Channel is beyond me. Quite how trained Police officers, whose observational skills and testimony can put people behind bars in a court of law, failed to tell the difference between a UFO and a Chinese lantern is beyond me. Quite how Chinese lanterns can accelerate to extreme speeds and perform manoeuvres that defy our understanding of the laws of physics is beyond me. Need I go on? I thought not…

The Sun won’t quit

Today The Sun has more photographic evidence of the UFO flap taking place. A strange object was photographed by a university lecturer which achieved front page status. The Sun also now has a UFO spotters camp positioned at the foot of the Berwyn mountains hoping to get some pictures at this legendary site. All done, again, in a very positive and serious manner.

UFOs over Cardiff? And other screaming headlines…

Despite what some media outlets will have you believe, there is a hunger for UFO related information and recent events highlight this. The South Wales Echo devoted their front page to the recent UFO sighting over Cardiff where two Police officers avoided colliding with a UFO and then gave chase. This was also reported very favourably in The Sun and The Telegraph. The Sun’s recent frontpage headline about Army officers videoing a UFO sighting showed that the gutter press can report these items in a positive light and has returned to this style of reporting having spent many years debunking the subject.

 

All this on the back of the MoD releasing files to the National Archive, and the National Archives website then sustaining a very large amount of traffic in search of these files. A visit to The Sun will yield a display of some good UFO video footage and very positively reported stories. This shouldn’t surprise us. The Government has long used the media to educate the public. Be it a topical storyline in a soap-opera, documents leaked to the press, or stories ‘placed’ within suitable publications. Are we being told something? Is this more of the controlled release of information to educate the public? Time will tell but if we look historically at opinion polls both here and in the US, the amount of people who believe in the existence of UFOs steadily increases over time so we can definitely say that some form of education is in action. Whether that education comes from personal experience, objective reasoning and research or through some other means is immaterial at the moment. The fact remains that more people believe now than ever before. These figures never show a decline.

 

The media interest in UFOs/ET does peak and trough. In the years proceeding ‘The X-Files’ and for a while afterwards there was a huge appetite in all forms of the media for UFO related information but that waned. To give a very good example a few years back The Times ran an editorial about a strange signal detected by SETI with the heading ‘ET: Go Home’. The editorial argued that humanity was not interested in whether ET existed or not and this signal meant nothing. So to have matters related to UFOlogy pushed up the media agenda shows we are maybe approaching another peak.

 

I have requested from the MoD, the Civil Aviation Authority and South Wales police copies of all the files. As soon as I get some info I will report back…