FEWER UFOS? MAYBE NOT, NAVY SAYS

I have had no personal experience of extraterrestrials. Never seen a UFO. Never been abducted by an alien or had an episode of “lost time.” I just write about such things in my Interstellar Rescue SFR series novels.

But I have done my research on the subject of alien visitation to our little planet—the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book investigations (1952-1969), the military’s later Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) from 2008 to 2011, Groom Lake, Roswell, reverse engineering, abductions and so on.

One thing that has always puzzled me is the rise and fall in the numbers of UFO sightings. The post-World War II era was a Golden Age of UFO encounters and alien abduction claims (thus Project Blue Book, and, not coincidentally, a surge in the popularity of science fiction, both in written form and on the movie screen). Sightings rose again during the Sixties decade of the Space Race but fell off after we reached the moon and the more mundane space shuttle program took over NASA.

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON)still received some 7000 reports of sightings every day to its website in 2018 but reported last year that reports had peaked in 2012 and dropped some 30-40 percent between 2012 and 2017. Cheryl Costa of the National UFO Reporting Center confirmed the observation, stating that after a rise in reports from 2001 through 2012, reported sightings have been on the decline.

How this can be in an age of ubiquitous phone cameras, selfies and videos is a little hard to explain. MUFON statistician David Korts reviews the photos and videos his organization receives and attempts to filter out the hoaxes, mistakes and otherwise explainable phenomena and ends up with about 50 percent of the total as genuinely “unidentified.” He still doesn’t understand the drop-off in reports.

““At this point, it’s unclear. It’s perplexing,” he said in a 2018 interview with Gizmodo reporter Jennings Brown. “I don’t know why it is. I think it’s an interesting question. That’s the kind of thing you discover by doing this kind of work.”

But perhaps the pendulum is swinging the other way. The U.S. Navy just this week issued new guidelines to its personnel for reporting UFO sightings. This was reportedly in response to a spate of recent encounters with what WWII pilots used to call “foo fighters” in the skies by Navy flyers and sailors. 

A screengrab from the NYTIMES shows what the Navy is on about.

Clearly, the brass did not intend to give these instances immediate credence by updating the procedure for filing the reports. But, given military parlance, that was about all that was clear. This was their statement, according to an article in Politico:

“There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,” the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. “For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.

“As part of this effort,” it added, “the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft.”

          

Got that? Great, carry on.

In the meantime, the procedure for us civilians is the same as it has always been. See a UFO, whip out your phone, take a video and send it to MUFON. Or run like hell in the opposite direction. Personally, I’ll choose Option #2 and live to write another day.

Cheers, Donna

*Information for this post drawn from “Our Skies Are More Watched than Ever, So Why Are Reported UFO Sightings on the Decline, by Jennings Brown,” Gizmodo.com, 7/02/18, https://gizmodo.com/our-skies-are-more-watched-than-ever-so-why-are-report-1827284430

 

“The U.S. Navy is Working on ‘New Guidelines’ on How to Report UFOs,” by Tom McKay, Gizmodo.com, 4/24/19, https://gizmodo.com/our-skies-are-more-watched-than-ever-so-why-are-report-1827284430

SF MUSIC: FROM WOO-WOO TO JUST WRONG

When we think about the music for science fiction on the screen, big, sweeping scores usually come to mind. Thus Spake Zarathustra and Strauss waltzes behind spinning space stations in 2001: A Space Odyssey; bass drums and brass heralding the arrival of Darth Vader in Star Wars; a wordless soprano over a soaring orchestra in the early Star Trek.

But there are other, more subtle uses of music in SF films and television that are no less unforgettable. Take the 1951 classic alien invasion film The Day the Earth Stood Still, starring Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal (and the robot, Gort). The film was directed by the Hollywood heavyweight Robert Wise (The Sound of Music; Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and featured, for the first time, a weird instrument called the theremin as part of the soundtrack written by Bernard Hermann. The sound was so distinctive it has defined SF ever since, even entering the common vernacular as a descriptor for something far out, as in “Oh, yeah, UFOs and all that ‘woo-woo’ stuff.”

 

A similar shiver up the spine was achieved by playing two notes over and over again on the guitar with a little echo effect overdubbed on them to create theTwilight Zone television show theme. I was only six years old when Rod Serling’s brainchild first hit the airwaves—too young to be allowed to watch. But, believe me, I could hear the theme song from my bedroom, and it scared the bejeezus out of me! My youngest daughter tells me the music had the same effect on her when I watched the reruns with others in the family. 

The intro to The X-Files—starting with six high, electronic notes—had a similar evocative effect. Weirdness is coming, the truth is out there, and get ready to hide under the covers.

But sometimes the music chosen for an SF film has more to do with the everyday lives of its characters than the strange things they must encounter (or overcome) through the course of the story. One of my favorite scenes in a great little SF film called Super 8, written and directed by J.J. Abrams (Star Trek, Star Wars, Lost, Fringe, etc., etc.) is one where the geeky young heroes gather on a hill overlooking town and sing along to the radio: “M-m-m-my Sharona!” I was way past my young teen years in 1979 when The Knack did that song, but I could still relate to those kids (whose cinematic adventure involves inadvertently filming an escaped alien while making a movie.)

Occasionally, though, the attempt to use cool music in the SF background goes wrong. This is the case with Project Blue Book, now showing on the History Channel. The show is a fairly decent fictionalization of the U.S. Air Force investigations of UFO sightings in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, most of which were conducted by a physicist named Dr. J. Allen Hynek and his Air Force “keeper” Captain Michael Quinn. Hynek, of course, has since earned a reputation as a true believer, having written several books on aliens and UFOs and the like, despite the government’s attempts to discredit him.

The show is a little slow, but interesting enough, given that episodes are based on the real incidents of Project Blue Book (pictures of which are shown at the end of each episode). The problem I’m having is that, to spice things up, the music director has old blues or rhythm and blues music playing on car radios or in bars. 

Not that anybody below a certain age would know this, but in the late Forties, you wouldn’t have heard that kind of music played on mainstream radio, or in white bars or restaurants. Blues or R&B was called “race music,” and you would only have heard it in rural juke joints, city establishments catering to African-Americans, or perhaps on urban, limited-range radio stations. Mainstream pop radio was still playing Big Band music, or maybe “hillbilly” or “Western swing” music in the South or West. By the mid-to-late 1950s, things had changed. Radio had come to be dominated by a new mash-up of R&B and hillbilly music, something that would later be known as "rock and roll."

Most people wouldn’t care, but this is my jam. I collect music from the early 50s to the 60s. So, the show getting it wrong bothers me and takes me out of the story. You all know how that is. Whether it’s the physics of your starship's propulsion or the music on the radio in the background, details are important. Best the author--and the show runners--get them right.

Cheers, Donna