The rational explanations for UFO sightings

If the science behind alien craft isn’t really panning out, what explanations are there for people that have seen UFOs? The University of Sheffield Hallam’s David Clarke investigated the Rendlesham Forest Incident of 1980, one of the UKs most infamous UFO ‘sightings’...

David - There are so many things that people see and report as UFOs. It's impossible when you go through them to sort of say 'right when you've eliminated all those things and I'll just give you a few of those balloons, plastic bags, drones.' I mean there are just so many things. How is it possible when you've cleared all those out of the way to say, ah, right, yes, we've got rid of all them. So there is now this thing called the UFO and there's nothing else that we can say about that other than the fact that because we can't explain it, it must therefore be some exotic thing from another galaxy that's come to visit us. That makes no scientific sense at all. Just because you can't explain something doesn't mean you have to then jump to the most exotic, far out explanation for that thing. And you can't say that 2% that's unexplained or 1%, whatever you want to call it, has got to be aliens. It's simply insufficient information. Or when you actually look at a lot of those cases in that residue, it's often the case that these are the cases that someone has come forward 30 years after the event and said, 'oh, I was involved in some case where the military tracked something on radar. duh-de-duh.' And when they try to find the actual paperwork, because it's so long after the event, most of the people involved either can't be contacted, are dead, there's no documentation. So it's an interesting story. We can't obviously explain it, but because it happened so long ago, we're just going to have to leave it on file.

Will - And before the advent of high definition cameras and all these images that we're getting nowadays, we relied on asking people that had claimed they'd seen it. And with that comes perhaps, shall we say, the fallibility of memory.

David - Absolutely. What we are dealing with here are people's accounts of things they've seen in the sky. And they're often, vast majority cases, one person, the number of cases where you've got a large number of people who don't know each other, who all saw something in the sky at the same time that can be triangulated, is vanishingly small. And you've got the UFO mythology, which pervades all aspects of human society. You cannot find anyone anywhere on this planet who hasn't heard of UFOs. All of that feeds into this, and there is this will to believe that you can't escape from.

Will - And what about this story that's come out in the last few days, this military whistleblower who's claiming that the US military has these technological crafts that are non-human and we've had them for decades. I mean, how do you reconcile that? Does he believe what he's seen?

David - I'm not saying he's making this up, but when you actually pair down what he said, he's saying that he worked high up in military intelligence in the USA and basically they've got all these, I think, 12 or 13 crashed alien craft. And all this has been kept from congress and it's been kept from the UAP task force, which the Pentagon are pouring millions of dollars into at the moment. It's being kept from NASA. Nobody in either of those organisations knows anything about this. So it's some huge high level cover up. And how useful would it be, you know, to sort of imply to your future adversaries such as Russia and China that you have got captured technology from aliens that you back engineered, don't mess with us. So you can see how the intelligence services for them, it's a relatively easy task to sort of prime journalists and drop stories into the media that are just repeated uncritically because there's this general will to believe in them. And no one sort of stops and looks back in history and says, 'hold on a minute. Haven't we heard this story before? Didn't it come to nothing back in 1950? Didn't it come to nothing back in 1997?' Because at the end of the day, there's only so long you can keep saying the government has got a crash flying saucer. Well, we're talking about scientific evidence. Where is this stuff?

Will - Are there also physical explanations that could feed into what people experience? Are there exceedingly fast technological aircraft that people may mistake for these unexplained phenomena?

David - Absolutely. There are obviously things that the military are testing. Prototype aircraft, drones, all kinds of things. I mean, you saw what was going on in North America back in February with the Chinese spy balloon, for instance. Where did that come from? You know, suddenly it was all over the media. And then we learned that there'd been two or three similar events that had happened during when Donald Trump was president that had never even been mentioned. But I would say that those types of let's call them secret projects and that form a tiny percentage that can't be explained. The vast majority of sightings are of ordinary things seen in extraordinary circumstances. And I've seen, when I've been out, for instance, late at night in the peak district, I've seen lights and I've thought, what the hell is that? And it's an ordinary aircraft coming into Manchester. It's just because of where I am in my altitude, the atmospheric conditions. And even someone who is knowledgeable about this subject, it's easy to be fooled. And also if you don't resolve what you see at the time, you see it, as soon as that moment's gone to explain it and to find a logical explanation, you then go on to tell your friends in the pub, 'oh, I saw some strange lights in the sky.' And it becomes a UFO story. And every single case has got that kind of background. If you had enough time and energy and resources to pour into this subject, you could find some conventional explanation. But it is like, to a lot of people, it's magic. And people don't want that magic taken away. They want something to believe in. And as a folklorist, I just think, 'well, do I want to take it away from them. If people want to believe in this stuff, it's harmless.' If it makes people feel that there's something else out there in the universe that's keeping an eye on us and is coming here to rescuers or something, this is part of the UFO belief system, then fair enough. But if we want to look at it scientifically, it does resolve itself into a lot of ordinary things.