NIGEL WATSON listens to ASSAP’s Robert Moore outline the gradual decline of a field of study
FROM DRAGONS TO DRONES
Robert Moore at the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) ‘Seriously Strange’ conference, held at the University of Bath on 3 and 4 September 2022, discussed his FoxFire project, which outlines the main eras of British UFO activity and research.
The first ‘ancient UFO era’ consisted of UFOs reported before 1947, including mediæval and early modern accounts of ‘fiery dragons’, ‘flying ships’, multiple Suns and the airship scares of the early 20th century.
The second ‘flying disc era’, running from 1947-1959, was a period when the public and officialdom tried to come to terms with the subject. Sightings were made by RAF pilots and the writings of US contactee George Adamski had an important influence on the perception of things seen in the sky. Adamski’s book Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), described the craft flown by Venusians as a domed disc with portholes and three spheres on its underside. This type of craft was sighted and photographed throughout the UK, and Cedric Allingham describes an encounter in Scotland that was much like Adamski’s in his book Flying Saucer from Mars (1955). This was no doubt a hoax by TV personality and astronomer Patrick Moore and contains a very unconvincing photograph of a humanoid Martian.
In the 1960s, the civilian British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) came to prominence, and this third era was dominated by the Warminster ‘Thing’. Although UFOs and other paranormal events at Warminster waned in the 1970s, the nearby Cradle Hill is still a fondly remembered place to skywatch.
The impact of the writings of the likes of John Michell, Jacques Vallee and John Keel, who regarded UFOs and aliens as being related to fairies and intelligent beings who have manipulated our perceptions throughout history, led to an interest in high strangeness cases by the end of the 1970s. This fourth era included abductions and close encounters of the third kind. The rejection of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) led to British ufologists favouring the psychosociological hypothesis as embraced by John Rimmer’s Magonia magazine.
The fifth era began in the 1980s with the Rendlesham Forest incident, more abduction cases and Jenny Randles’s concept of the ‘Oz Factor’, whereby witnesses seem to enter a different zone of reality when they encounter a UFO.
The ‘triangle of dreams’ came about in the sixth era that took us to t
