Interview with an Alien
Danny Wallace may
be as annoying as a Big Brother contestant, but at least he gets the UFO
subject on our TV screens. For a show titled Interview With An Alien,
this hour-long production was peculiarly bereft of the promised ET
chit-chat.

What the show
did do, though, is take us through some excellent UFO stories,
complete with compelling witness testimony and some excellently-made
reconstructions.
Using captions
and titles utilising Star Trek fonts, it could be argued that the
producers are subliminally suggesting that UFOs are the stuff of science
fiction, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt as we explore the
evidence presented.
Danny
Wallace tells us that over 80 million Americans believe that UFOs are
extra-terrestrial craft. Our first port of call is Pahrump, Nevada, home
of the Art Bell Show, which broadcasts on Coast To Coast AM radio to
millions of listeners every night. Art Bell and his wife tell us of his
own sighting of a giant triangle that glided over them one night.
On March 13th, 1997,
the UFO community was set alight by the Phoenix Lights. We hear from
several eyewitnesses, including a policeman, who claim that what they saw
were not aircraft flares, as the official explanation informs us. Of
course, we have an astronomer who declares that what was seen that night
could not possibly have been an alien spacecraft.
We
are then presented with an incredible sighting from Lebanon, Missouri, in
which six people, five of which are police officers, observed a huge,
triangular craft moving across the sky. We hear actual police radio
conversations and watch an impressive reconstruction. At first, the police
thought that the initial report, from a truck driver, was a joke, until
they saw it for themselves. The actual officers appeared on camera to
describe what they saw.
It’s this kind of
report that is extremely difficult for sceptics to dismiss and the
producers of this show didn’t even try. We are told of the event and the
programme moves on.
Wallace
stands on the Greenwich Meridian and tells us about the famous Kenneth
Arnold sighting of 1947, which brought us the term, ‘flying saucers’, even
though what he saw was described as crescent-shaped in appearance and only
moved ‘like a saucer skipping across a pond’.
This early wave
of UFO sightings brought about intense interest from the military,
culminating in special projects charged with the task of finding out what
people were seeing.
We are reminded
of the 1948 Eastern Airlines sighting, in which the pilots and one
passenger reported seeing a 100-foot long object with windows travelling
at about 700 mph. Such reports from respectable witnesses are also
difficult to dismiss.
We
are then told of UFO sightings by other pilots, both civilian and
military. All of these men are reputable and none of them can explain what
they saw. The reports caused such a stir that the US Air Force was forced
to admit that they thought that the Earth was being visited by
extra-terrestrial spacecraft.
Unfortunately,
General Hoyt Vandenberg disagreed and accused the pilots of being
‘oddballs’. The sightings continued, however, and 1952 became the year in
which the largest amount of reports ever were collected. We had the famous
Washington Flap, which forced the CIA to set up the Robertson Panel, which
concluded that UFOs should be stripped of their mystery. This was to be
done by marginalising the phenomenon and subjecting it to ridicule to such
an extent that people would no longer take reports seriously.
Fortunately this
tactic did not work for a minute and reports continued to flood in. The
public was still fascinated by the concept of aliens and Hollywood went on
to cash in on this buzz by producing classic movies such as The Day The
Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds, Earth Vs. The
Flying Saucers and This
Island
Earth.
Such
interest forced the USAF to set up Project Blue Book to investigate the
continuing sightings of unidentified flying objects. Essentially a public
relations exercise, Blue Book ran until 1969 and its goal was to debunk
UFO reports by any means necessary. One of their top investigators was Dr.
J Allen Hynek, an astronomer from Ohio University.
We are reminded
of Blue Book case# 12548, in which a UFO was sighted on October 24th, 1968
at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota. Airmen on the ground saw a
brightly-lit object hovering above the ground. A B52 was flying in the
area and was diverted to investigate. The crew clearly saw a structured
craft
and they appear on camera to describe their experiences. The co-pilot, an
Air Force captain, is certain that what he saw was an alien spacecraft.
The navigator picked it up on his radar scope and we are shown photographs
of the actual blip as it paced the aircraft. When it vanished from the
scope, they turned the aircraft in an attempt
to
locate the UFO visually. They saw it hovering close to the ground. It was
described as at least 200-feet in diameter, hundreds of feet long, glowing
yellow, with a metallic cylinder that was attached.
The crew of the
B52 and sixteen ground witnesses attested that they saw a UFO that night.
Blue Book came to the astonishing conclusion that what they actually saw
were nothing more than stars!
When
the Air Force closed down Project Blue Book in 1969, after the Condon
Committee decided that UFOs were of no scientific significance, Dr. Hynek
was bemused by their findings. He had become a firm believer that there
was something to the UFO enigma that warranted continued study.
Next
up is the most famous UFO incident in history – the Roswell crash. We are
told of the debris collected by Major Jesse Marcel of the Roswell Army Air
Field and how it was decided that it was a crashed flying saucer. Then the
story was changed and the world was told that it was nothing more than a
downed weather balloon. Marcel, however, was adamant that what he saw and
handled was not debris from any balloon.
Wallace,
however, seems convinced by the official explanation that what was
recovered was from a top secret project, codenamed Mogul. He clearly
insinuates that the UFO aspects to the case were part of a huge
money-making scam, from books to videos to the townspeople of Roswell
themselves cashing in on their city’s new-found fame.
The final segment
of the show is devoted to alien abductions. It is obvious that Wallace and
the producers have no real interest in this phenomenon and that they think
that anybody who says that they have been abducted is suffering from
hypnogogic dreams or are victims of unscrupulous hypnotherapists.
We
hear from Bud Hopkins and several abductees, all of whom are absolutely
certain that something out-of-this-world happened to them, in many cases
with terrifying results.
Academics such as
Susan Clancy pour scorn on Hopkins’ hypnosis methods and tell us that
abduction ‘memories’ are nothing more than dreams. They try to dismiss
them by saying the experiences are akin to the old tales of incubi and
succubi, but our modern minds interpret the imagery as alien in origin.
Of course, the
sceptics conveniently forget about abductees that are taken from cars or
elsewhere when they are wide awake!
Finally, we talk
to astronomers about the possibilities of life ‘out there’ and that most
scientist think that there is definitely intelligent life somewhere else
in our galaxy. Frank Drake and Seth Shostak discuss their SETI (Search for
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) projects. Drake tells us about a signal he
picked up that turned out to be an aeroplane. The famous ‘Wow!’ signal
doesn’t even get a look-in.
Wallace ends on
the positive note that while scientists and believers may be diametrically
opposed in their interpretations of UFOs, they both share the overwhelming
desire that one day actual, open contact with aliens will be made.
While
Interview With An Alien (why the heck did they call it that??)
improved greatly on Wallace’s previous excursion into the UFO field in his
Conspiracies series, you still got the impression that he thought
it was all a load of nonsense. Something to laugh at. Something that
doesn’t deserve serious attention. He glosses over the hard-to-explain
reports, not even trying to provide an alternative theory, but grabs into
the stuff he can easily dismiss and ridicule, such as Roswell and alien
abductions.
However, like I
said earlier, he gets UFOs onto the TV screens of the nation and he
presents them in an entertaining, high quality format, so I really
shouldn’t grumble – much.
© Steve Johnson -
2005
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