Ever since stumbling upon my first book on the weird I have maintained a broad interest in the many different facets of what can loosely be termed Fortean phenomena. Yet if I had anything even approaching a blind spot it would be the nuts and bolts, purely technological take on Unidentified Flying Objects. For some reason the entire topic just bores me rigid. Perhaps it is the John Keel in me, but the idea of little grey men trying to stealthy steal our cows while piloting ships covered in more lights than the Las Vegas strip just refuses to ring true. And I am saying that as a chaos magickian, who can usually turn belief on and off as required, though not in this case.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have never worked for NASA, the Ministry of Defence, FBI or the CIA. Matters of planetary security rarely interest me at all outside of the dangers posed by super massive impacts, and I am quite comfortable leaving the prevention of an Independence Day style invasion event to those who pull a far greater salary than this lowly working class author probably ever will. I guess you could say that the mechanical side of the UFO debate is way above my pay grade and then some, and despite having friends who are acutely interested in such technical matters I am happy to leave it there.

In my experience people get into that area for a number of reasons. For some it is an aesthetic choice, they just want to live in a world that has little green men zipping down to the farm for some fresh milk while driving hubcap UFOs, and others evaluate the available evidence before coming to conclusions based upon their own logic, faulty or otherwise. And then there are the crusaders, those who call coverup every time their government skips over the subject, or people who have experienced something weird and long for closure, anything they can find that returns stability to their lives and makes the nightmares stop.

In the grand scheme of things very few interested in such topics fall into the category of academic researchers. Those with advanced knowledge of aeronautics or hailing from former intelligence backgrounds do appear from time to time, though their pedigree tends to be suspect from the outset. While those that can provide proof of their standing, such as nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman or lieutenant colonel Philip Corso, are rarely taken seriously by either the other members of their own professions or the very laymen they are inadvertently championing. And for some Forteans, like myself, those thinkers are more interesting to observe than whichever autopsied alien is currently in the news.

What unites them all, layman and academic, skeptic and believer, and puts them firmly in the petri dish as far as good natured dissection goes is the fact that they are willing to articulate strongly held beliefs about the subject. Along with such concepts as ghosts or other assorted cryptozoological critters, the very idea of not being alone in the universe ties modern man to the sort of instinctive, tribal dances that have been with us from the very beginning. Little has changed since we sat in animal skins and gazed timidly from within the comforting glow of the fire out into the imagination fuelling blackness beyond. Whether we like it or not these ideas are a part of us, and always have been.

The little interest I maintain in UFOs does not stem from modern considerations. I find it impossible to get behind the idea that aliens are coming here in actual starships, not do I think they are living among us advancing some shadowy agenda. Well, Elon Musk perhaps. And Mark Zuckerburg. But lets not forget that before the coming of the saucers there were mystery airships, flaming clouds, magic carpets and even gods riding chariots across the heavens. We had fairy abductions prior to the involvement of the Greys, mowing devils creating crop circles in medieval Europe, demons keeping the abduces warm for the much later Martians. And in those outliers Fortean tales are made.

So no, I do not really find the wider topic of UFOs as a purely physical phenomenon all that interesting. I honestly lack belief in the idea of alien visitation to our otherwise inconsequential little blue-green orb of mud and pollution. And I say that as someone who has seen some pretty odd things over the years, including when very young. My preference is to leave the explanations up to others with more reptilian skin in the game. I focus instead on the emotional content of my own, and others, experiences. The elation, the fear, the sudden, albeit brief conviction that we are perhaps not alone in the universe. Even the disbelief of others, all this and more hold genuine poetry for the concerned observer.

Ultimately I am just a crusader for inquiry. Not necessarily into the technical aspects of the phenomenon, as for the reasons outlined previously such a debate does not interest me, but more for research about what makes us need to believe such things in the first place. Remember, UFOs do exist in their most basic form as unidentified aerial objects. But humans create the narrative, turn those lights into space brothers, Martians or Greys. And I wonder what the need to invent such outsiders tells us about who were actually are, and how being an increasingly global society has necessitated a shift wherein the mysterious tribe located over the next hill now hail from somewhere much farther away.