UFOs: THE SECRET EVIDENCE
9pm - Channel
4 (UK)
Thursday 13th
October 2005
In UFOs:
The Secret Evidence, defence journalist, Nick Cook, embarked upon a
globetrotting quest to find answers to an enigma that has puzzled
humankind for over sixty years.
Whether one
agrees with his conclusions or not, this two-hour documentary, afforded a
prime-time airing and pulling in 2.8 million viewers, clearly demonstrates
that the UFO subject is far from dead.
From
the outset, it became clear that Cook was on a mission to try and prove
that the last sixty-odd years of UFO sightings were nothing more than
observations of advanced and secret human technologies. He began in
the war-torn skies of Europe and sightings of what were to become known as
‘foo fighters’. We were treated to some dazzling visual effects of World
War II bombers being ‘buzzed’ by zipping, orange lights.
We
were taken to a top secret, Nazi laboratory where, according to Cook,
experiments in anti-gravity had taken place. Wartime aerial photographs of
the facility were shown, with a structure known as ‘the flytrap’. Cook
showed us this enigmatic, ring-shaped construction up close, as well as
conduits from where it was said to have drawn power. It was claimed that
this was where anti-gravity tests had taken place.
After the war,
Operation Paperclip hoovered up many of the scientists from this lab in
the Wenceslas Mines of Poland, among others, such as Werner Von Braun from
the V-weapon facilities at Peenemünde
on the German Baltic coast, and thus began the American technological
march into space and its domination of the skies of the world.
No film
concerning UFOs would be complete without a mention of Roswell and this
one was no exception. Cook interviewed Duke Gildenberg, who had come to
the conclusion that the Roswell crash of 1947 was nothing more than a
balloon from a project in which he was involved called Skyhook, in which
high-altitude balloons with advanced surveillance platforms were sent
aloft to check out what the Soviets were up to. Cook was not convinced,
however, and his search for evidence continued.
The Washington
DC ‘flap’ of 1952 made the headlines of that year, when unexplained lights
were seen over the US capital and jet fighters were even scrambled in vain
attempts to intercept them. Government and military officials fell over
themselves to assuage the fears of the American public by explaining that
UFOs were of no defence significance and that there was nothing to worry
about.
We were then
taken on a whirlwind tour of America’s development of supersonic
reconnaissance aircraft, starting with the U2, famously shot down over the
USSR with Gary Powers at the controls in 1960, and progressing to the A-12
and its offspring, the SR-71 Blackbird. Cook went to great pains to
explain that to the untrained eye, these fast-moving, high-altitude
aircraft could quite easily be mistaken for extra-terrestrial spacecraft.
Following the
Washington flap, the Air Force instigated Project Blue Book in an attempt
to, publicly at least, get to the bottom of the UFO enigma. Cook failed to
point out that Blue Book was simply an extension of the earlier Projects
Sign and Grudge. Mention was made of J. Allen Hynek’s involvement with
Blue Book and clips were shown of him trying to explain away a UFO
sighting as meteors, much to the lady-in-question’s amusement.
On April 24th
1964, New Mexico patrolman, Lonnie Zamora, was in pursuit of a speeding
vehicle near Socorro when his attention was caught by a bright flash in
the sky. Fearing a nearby dynamite shack had exploded, he ceased his
pursuit and pulled off the highway.
An
impressive CGI sequence showed us what Mr Zamora had seen. Unfortunately,
the ‘flying saucer’ they had so expertly recreated bore little to no
resemblance to the elongated egg-shaped craft described by the local
policeman. The only similarity was the depiction of a pair of white-suited
figures beside the landed craft.
Duke
Gildenberg, the man who had debunked the Roswell crash as a top secret
balloon package popped up and said that what Zamora had seen was in fact a
test of a NASA Surveyor space probe set down by helicopter. He told us how
the depressions found in the area were the same as those left by the
probe’s landing pads. He also explained that the technicians for the
Surveyor project wore white tunics. Well, that’s that mystery solved! Not!
Nick
Cook hopped on a plane and jetted across the world to Moscow next, to
interview a pair of former high-ranking Soviet military officers about the
‘Petrozavodsk Incident’ of 1977. At that time, a Red Army unit described
an encounter with a bright object in the sky that flashed beams of light
down to the ground and had the appearance of a huge jellyfish. The object
then sped away at high speed.
The incident
created such a stir in the USSR that KGB chief (and later Soviet premier),
Yuri Andropov, ordered all military units to watch the skies and report
all UFO activity over the Soviet Union.
Cook’s Moscow
contacts, Colonel Boris Sokolov and Dr Yuliy Platov, declared that what
those soldiers had seen that night was nothing more mundane than a missile
test and the light was the rocket’s fiery exhaust. Sokolov explained that
Soviet scientists at the time had been engaged in a great deal of
technical research that could account for some of the things seen. Again,
Cook tantalised us with the notion that it was American stealth technology
behind the Soviet UFO sightings.
Things
took a turn towards the macabre next, when Cook briefly examined cattle
mutilations. He interviewed Edmund Gomez, who had lost many of his herd
over the years and believed that it was not aliens abducting and
mutilating his cows, but some secret, human agency using helicopters,
disguised as UFOs with banks of lights, lifting the animals to some
unknown locations, removing organs and then returning them by literally
dropping them out of the sky. Of course, Cook failed to mention that not
only cows are mutilated and I’d like to know how a helicopter using straps
and chains would lift a field mouse, fox or rabbit, not to mention why!?
A
face-to-face interview with Travis Walton followed and we learned about
his abduction and subsequent reappearance after several days. After giving
Walton a good chunk of the program to recount his experience, Cook waved
it aside by comparing it with contactee reports from the ‘paranoid’ 1950s
and explaining abductions as some sort of quasi-religious ‘need’ for
people to have something to believe in!
Cook rounded
off the program by highlighting documents from the McDonnell Douglas
Corporation which seemed to indicate that those high-profile defence
contractors believe that some UFOs are actually alien craft and
that we should attempt to learn how they work.
This
led nicely to Tim Ventura’s work with ‘lifters’. These are bizarre,
triangular constructions that use high-voltages channelled through wires
in the airframe to lift it from the ground. The intent of Cook was clear –
that the propulsion experiments of the Nazis in World War II have come
full circle and we are on the verge of a great breakthrough in propulsion.
The implication, as I read it, was that top secret projects could have
utilised such methods of propulsion, even as far back as the 1940s.
Cook
left us with Project Aurora and an intriguing satellite image of a
contrail leaving Area 51 and heading out over the continental USA and out
over the Atlantic, indicating a speed in excess of eight-thousand miles
per hour. With this, Cook finally affirmed his belief that most UFO
sightings are very terrestrial and not the products of advanced
extra-terrestrial civilisations. He had to admit, though, that some
UFO cases defied explanation and that, after all, we may not be alone in
the universe.
UFOs: The
Secret Evidence
was a fascinating programme and Channel 4’s decision to allow airtime to a
two-hour documentary about what is really a fringe subject proves that the
opposite is quite clear. UFOs are not the sole purview of the
alternative media. Serious programmes about UFOs can draw good
audiences. The UFO phenomenon is far from dead.
© Steve
Johnson - 2005
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copyright of Channel 4 and Oxford Film & Television Productions and are
used here solely for review purposes. |