Channel 4 Alien Investigations: Video Clip and Review

This evening, Channel 4 starts its series 'Alien Investigations' in which it examines a number of famous (amongst ufologists and cryptozoologists presumably, as I hadn't previously heard of them) cases involving the alleged discovery of 'aliens' here on our planet. Whereas advances in planetary science, biology and genetics suggest that our galaxy is likely to be teeming with life, at least of the primitive bacterial variety (it is rumoured that we me be receiving an announcement from NASA shortly regarding the discovery of signs of extant life on Mars thanks to the Curiosity mission), that is quite different to stating that we have been visited by creatures from another world. The latter cannot be ruled out of course, but the evidence to date is lacking. Whatever happens to be revealed in the programmes that comprise this series, they are ought to make for a few evenings' good entertainment, even if they do little other than shed a little more light upon the social, cultural and psychological aspects of the belief in alien visitation.

The clip below provides a flavour of the first episode.

Review of Part One

As anticipated, the programme turned out to provide the best part of an hour’s engaging entertainment, focusing as it did upon three alleged alien sightings, with two of them furnishing specimens of the alleged aliens that could be subjected to scientific examination of one sort or another. All three originated in the Americas: the first from Metepec in Mexico; the second from the Cuzco region of Peru, and the third from Montauk on Long Island in the USA.

Images of all three alleged aliens looked intriguing, and it was the stories attached to the Metepec ‘alien’ that proved to be of most interest. Eyewitnesses claimed that in May 2007 a ranch hand was startled to discover the ‘alien’ captured in on of his rat traps (which for all the world resembled a miniature early nineteenth-century mantrap). In all, there were five witnesses who claimed to have seen it alive, with the animal being described as about 19 inches long (the remains certainly didn’t seem to be that large, so perhaps they meant to say centimetres) with a hairless pink body and luminous eyes. It made a noise that nobody could identify. The remains looked interesting, and a number of 3-D scans had failed to ascertain what it was. Its spine bore some human characteristics and it possessed humanlike hands, but no opposable thumbs (the thumbs were incomplete). On the second night after its discovery, it was stated that the creature was “drowned in acid”, which seems rather cruel. Drowning is bad enough, but why also add to its distress by using acid? Another such ‘alien’ was said to have been sighted on the ranch eight days later.

Initial tests upon the Metepec ‘alien’ allegedly suggested that it may have possessed a ‘human mother’, and the ranch owner where it was caught died two months after the event in a freakish and explosive car accident. Conspiracy theorists attributed this to alien revenge, whereas the more prosaic explanation centred upon a debt that he owed to gangsters. In all, some six tests were conducted upon the Metepec specimen, a number of them suggesting that its DNA was very close to that of humans, and indeed it was, for the final test revealed it to be a marmoset. Moreover, its skull matched that of a marmoset. Towards the end of the documentary, Angel Nuñez revealed that he had faked the whole affair, using a buffy tufted marmoset. Being a primate, it should therefore not come as a surprise that its DNA was close to that of humans.

The Peruvian ‘alien’ was found at an excavation on a mountain some 70 miles away from Machu Pichu amidst ‘fragments of meteorite’. The narrator noted the widespread belief amongst Peruvians and traditional Inca culture that their origins lay in the stars. The mummy that was discovered possessed a peculiarly elongated skull together with what appeared to be adult teeth and yet an open fontanelle. A Peruvian Ufologist named Dante Dios Tambini claimed to be convinced that it was an alien, and also produced some alleged footage of a UFO (which looked as if it was simply the product of pointing a handheld imaging device at the full Moon in daylight and waving it about) and a picture of an alien (nothing more than a red blemish atop a picture of a stone shack).

The narrator noted that skull deformation of this sort had been practised in a number of cultures for at least 9,000 years in Africa, including in Ancient Egypt. Closer to home, the Huns too practised this type of skull deformation in the fifth century. The remains of the Peruvian ‘alien’ were not submitted to testing, but according to Dr Anna Williams, it appeared to be a deformed child of about the age of six, judging by the state of its teeth. This seemed a far more likely explanation than the artist’s impression of a large-eyed ‘grey’ (or ‘gray’ I suppose Americans would term them) that was provided alongside the skull.

The third and final case was that of the so-called Monatauk alien washed up on a Long Island beach in July 2008. Once again, a number of conspiracy theories circulated, the most favoured being that this (and two subsequent carcasses) were aliens, and another being that it was the freakish product of US military experiments in labs on Plum Island that from 1953 until 1969 conducted biological experiments focused upon the poisoning of Soviet livestock presided over by an ex-Nazi scientist just to add a little additional lurid colouration to the tale. Although the carcasses looked odd, why anyone should have thought that they might be ‘aliens’ baffled me. A number of zoologists concluded otherwise: partially decomposed racoons. Not as exciting as an extraterrestrial, but a rather more convincing explanation.

All in all, the programme illustrated the public hunger for tales of alien visitation, a contemporary phenomenon that could be said to parallel the mediaeval thirst for miracles and visions of the Virgin Mary. It would seem that our own scientific age is giving birth to its own set of folk beliefs, fuelled by a voracious media and the general public’s desire for strange and fantastical tales.

Ziggy Stardust and the Councillor from Mars

This morning got off to an otherworldly start as Radio 4’s Today Programme announced that it was the fortieth anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which in itself was a reasonably prosaic statement of fact, but later I felt compelled to check the date of the paper twice to ensure that it was not already April Fools’ Day. Why? Quite simply because of some alleged weird goings on in Whitby.

Now, Whitby may be renowned for its associations with Captain Cook, Dracula and more recently its annual Goth festival, but now it may have another addition to its hall of fame: Simon Parkes. Simon Parkes, if you were to believe his testimony, did not arrive in the town on a ship that would have been familiar to either Cook or Stoker, but on a craft of an altogether different type, one that was out of this world.

It has not been made clear whether Councillor Parkes (for he serves Whitby under the Labour flag) possesses living relatives or a wife, but if his poor mother is indeed living today, one can have nothing for her other than profound sympathy, for Parkes believes that his “real mother” is a 9ft alien. The Metro states:

Parkes believes a 2.7m (9ft) lifeform stood next to his cot when he was a baby and ‘two green stick things’ appeared.

‘I thought “they’re not mummy’s hands, mummy’s are pink,’ Mr Parkes said in a YouTube video.

‘I was looking straight into its face. It enters my mind through my eyes and it sends a message down my optic nerve into my brain, saying “I am your real mother, I am your more important mother”.’

Oh dear. Poor Mrs Parkes (the one with pink hands rather than “stick things” that is). When she no doubt was trying to look after her son as he suffered from chicken pox at the tender age of three, he remembers not this maternal affection but a

2.4m (8ft) ‘doctor’ dressed as a waiter [which] offered to help after Mr Parkes’s mother left him at home, it is claimed.

Three years later his ‘real mother’ took him on board an alien craft.

‘The reason why extraterrestrials are interested in me is not because of my physical body but what’s inside – my soul,’ he said.

Mr Parkes, a Labour member elected to Whitby town council in North Yorkshire last month, says his beliefs have not interfered with his work.

‘For many of the people who don’t experience it, it’s very hard to accept.

‘We are taught to only see and believe what we can touch, but it’s acceptable to believe in religion,’ he said.

‘I’m more interested in fixing someone’s roof or potholes.’

He added: ‘I get more common sense out of the aliens than out of Scarborough town hall. The aliens are far more aware of stuff.’

Is this man really a councillor in Whitby, or is this whole story some Brasseye style stunt? Still, as he points out, his beliefs are no more absurd than those sanctified by religions of various sorts, which can be said to differ from his beliefs insofar as they are collective rather than individual delusions, sanctioned by time, tradition and social consensus. If he does a good job at sorting out problems with roofs and potholes, then perhaps his eccentricity can be overlooked. After all, it could be argued that his beliefs are little further removed from reality than those of the Labour Party with respect to many matters.

Another report in today’s Whitby Gazette would almost seem to suggest that there’s something odd in the town’s water, such as LSD perhaps, for not only has it highlighted the sighting of a large black cat-like creature (not in itself beyond possibility; for another recent report see The Shepley Lion) on 29^th February, but also a UFO the following night

by a Staithes resident, who did not wish to be named, but claimed to have spotted a UFO in the skies above Port Mulgrave.

She said: “I was coming out of Boulby Potash last night and had just pulled up at the junction.

“I saw orange lights going round in a circle and I said to my daughter in the back of the car ‘Blimey that’s a UFO’.

With all of this weirdness going on, the locals of Whitby must be looking forward to the normality of this year’s Goth Weekend. That said, David Icke and his followers must be disappointed that Councillor Parkes has not chosen to ‘confirm’ their paranoid interdimensional Lizard Conspiracy Theory. How will the local Labour Party react?

UFOs sighted in the Headlines

Everyone enjoys a good UFO tale, and today has produced a pretty top-notch one in the form of a news conference given by a number of US airmen including Charles Halt, a former USAF Chief Colonel who was once in charge of RAF Bentwaters and was a witness of the famous Rendlesham Forest UFO incident. Many have since claimed that the airmen were spooked by beams from a local lighthouse, others however, Halt included, think that what they saw was something rather less earthly. Halt claims that the unidentified craft landed in the base’s nuclear storage area.

The Daily Telegraph quotes another participant in today’s Washington press conference, Captain Robert Salas, as saying that

The US Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it.

He claims that on 16 March 1967 a UFO deactivated nuclear missiles at the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana:

I was on duty when an object came over and hovered directly over the site.

The missiles shut down - 10 Minuteman missiles. And the same thing happened at another site a week later. There's a strong interest in our missiles by these objects, wherever they come from. I personally think they're not from planet Earth.

Was there some significance to holding the press conference today? Are they plugging a book? Is there some other agenda at play here, or are they telling the truth? I am open-minded (but as Dawkins would say, not so open-minded that my brains fall out), but err on the side of scepticism.

Now, let us for the sake of argument assume that their testimonies are suddenly taken seriously by national governments and media irrespective of their facticity: what implications would such a revelation have? Would it be used as another argument to promote globalism and a transnational architecture of governance? I suspect that the answer would be yes. Would it be a useful means of generating fear globally and thus ushering in an era of greater social and economic control by the nascent global oligarchy? It would seem so.

Leaving aside the usefulness of the acceptance of such a fact, or indeed a fiction, to those who favour the construction of a global government, I suggest that it would also tap into eschatological fantasies of both religious and secular varieties (see this link to a piece entitled 'The Coming Strong Delusion' for an example of such beliefs). The three monotheisms originating in the Middle East all subscribe to the notion of a Day of Judgement and the deliverance of humanity by some supernatural saviour. The global promotion of the acceptance of the reality of advanced extraterrestrial intelligences at work in our world could prompt an outpouring of eschatological hysteria as Jews, Christians and Muslims each await or prepare for the coming of their respective Messiahs and the Mahdi. Perhaps Ahmadinejad would look forward to prostrating himself before the Twelfth Imam in the form of a ‘grey’ from the neighbourhood of Aldebaran before enlisting his help in the battle against Dajjal? Beware their efforts in ‘cleansing’ the world of impure ‘elements’ (i.e. you and me) were any of these to get it into their heads that Judgement Day was at hand. It would have the potential to get rather bloody.

Greens would love to embrace the alien myth as this would underscore their belief in the necessity of creating a harmonious united globe, which would once again play into the hands of the emergent globalist oligarchy. So, much as I do enjoy a good UFO story, I hope that today’s report continues to be regarded as such rather than a reality, for if it is accepted as the latter, prepare yourself for the final onslaught of the real enemies of humanity: the globalists, whether they undertake it alone or with extraterrestrial assistance. Welcome to a world of everlasting helotage!

Below is a Fox News report on the story featuring an interview with one of the witnesses: