As you will have seen from our news pages – posted in the early
hours of 17 August, the morning after the skywatch – a certain
amount of excitement gripped numerous people who had been at Avebury
on skywatch night of 16 August - thanks to a sighting of a 'flying
saucer'.
 Four
members of the APRA skywatch party (James
Hill, Tim Field, Jason Hawkes and Brian James) were sitting outside
the Red Lion pub, when one young man was agitatedly drawing people's
attention to ‘something really strange up there’ - leading to 20+
people making their way over the road to see what the commotion was
about.
We
immediately saw it was a disk-shaped balloon that was unsteady on
the breeze - the electric motors could already be heard. This
disk then proceeded to fly over the village of Avebury, complete
with flashing LED lights on its rim - the sound of the electric
motors struggling to move the sizeable helium balloon were so
obvious it wasn't true!
It
has to be said this was larger than the commercially available
saucer-balloons - being around 6-7m in diameter, and at the time we
though it had been built by some students somewhere for the prank –
it had presumably been taken to its launch site over on Overton Hill
in the white transit-type van that came chasing through the village
a few minutes later, obviously trying to track the balloon. As it
passed over Avebury, the pilots had regained more control, and set
the disk spinning, while at the same time turning on a small
spotlight, which was then visible every few seconds as that part of
the rim came round – which is a slightly ‘reverse’ way to create a
spinning light effect!
To complete the prank, a 'film crew' arrived on the scene
remarkable quickly, though complete with only prosumer digital
camcorder gear, not anything close to broadcast quality digital.
This crew then went around the Red Lion interviewing the
'witnesses' to the night's events - I wonder why they were being
lead round by the same young chap who had been trying to get
people's attention to the saucer in the first place... Curiously,
this camera crew managed to avoid coming over to interview the APRA
team until last, and obviously didn't get what they 'wanted '.
Tim Field questioned how they came to be at the scene so quickly,
and the two people from "CTV" were very vague, saying they were
Marlborough based and had got a phone call – and had miraculously
got to Avebury within two minutes! Interestingly, when we met up
with another group of people later on, we found out that this film
crew had told them they were based in
Swindon, so not a very consistent story...
All in all a fairly
elaborate attempt at a hoax, by people who were just a little too
eager to get people involved, and to get them interviewed on camera.
OK, so what was the background to this attempted hoax?
The story goes back several months, and two programmes
commissioned by Channel 4, and produced by Chrysalis Television.
Back in June APRA was contacted by Chris Harries of Chrysalis, who
was then seeking people who would be willing to be interviewed for a
planned documentary - tentatively entitled The Believers - on the subject of witnesses who had their whole
idea of UFOs/aliens changed by their first sighting – I gave Chris’s
contact details to several people who I thought might be interested,
but curiously none of these proposed interviews came to fruition.
At the time, Chris mentioned a second documentary that was also
being planned, but he declined to give details – now we know why…
Chrysalis had actually been commissioned to produce a second
documentary that had the working title of How to Build a Flying
Saucer. This project was pretty detailed and complex, with a
motion-picture SFX crew engaged to build and fly the saucer. The
construction of the saucer cost a mere £50,000 – so this was no
student prank and apologies are due to the makers for originally
thinking otherwise. Having said that, it just goes to show how much
money would be required to build a convincing saucer! Flight SFX
specialists Cutting Edge Effects (who have worked on Bond movies –
such as Goldeneye and A View To A Kill)
planned and built the 10m diameter saucer, based around a carbon-fiber
skeleton covered with a Mylar skin, and the balloon was filled with
helium. Originally, the ‘saucer’ was planned to have more powerful
engines that it ended up with, but due to weight considerations, CEF
had to fit smaller electric motors – with the results that we saw on
the night. The ‘saucer’ was radio-controlled, and required 7
‘pilots’ strategically placed along its intended route to take
control and fly the craft safely – I don’t know its all-up weight,
but I appreciate they didn’t want it crashing into people or
property (the insurance claims would have been interesting!) – the
craft was fully inspected by the CAA for this flight. Having seen
previews of footage that will be screened in A Very British UFO
Hoax, I can agree with the views of some of the production team
that the filmed footage "looked convincing"’ – but perhaps that is
the key, in that a film SFX crew created something that look ‘right’
on camera, but they didn’t create something that looked ‘right’ to
the naked eye at the time – which is what film and TV SFX is all
about.
Why did they fly it over Avebury on this night – well,
because they were guaranteed a likely audience with a publicised
skywatch going on, so APRA and its colleagues can take something of
a compliment here… That’s not to say of course that on any night in
the summer they wouldn’t have found a likely audience in the Avebury
area, as it is of course something of a magnet for UFO spotters,
crop circle spotters, ghost watchers and New-Agers to name but a
few.
The attempt at a successful ‘hoax’ started to fall down
pretty early on the night, as the flight crew had technical
difficulties in getting both height and control from the launch, so
it was flying too low, and not entirely under full control. As we
have already noted, the light wind carried the sound of the electric
motors all too easily, so it was a bit of a giveaway. From our
perspective, we’d rumbled the ‘hoax’ even before we’d seen the
‘saucer’ – or as the report that went onto rense.com commented, when
we "bothered to get up out of our seats"!
The key mistake the production crew made was to have the
young chap outside the pub so obviously orchestrating the attempt to
gather as many witnesses as possible – his repeated urgings of
“Come and look at this – there’s something really strange
up there..” was unrealistic and staged – had this chap really
been seeing something strange and otherworldly, he would have been
too engrossed watching to have been able to wander about urging
people to look. When we ‘bothered’ to get up and go and look,
we immediately spotted it was a balloon, and commented as such to
others who had come across the road to see* – this was the trigger
for ‘Plan B’ from Chrysalis, as confirmed to me by the documentary's
director Sean Doherty, who was there that night as the 'interviewer'
of the film crew. As soon as they had been rumbled, they got
the ‘film crew’ in quicker than planned, so as to get a much mileage
as they could from the other witnesses before we cynics put too much
negative spin on the assembled crowd.
* I have only
recently been told that a contingent from SUFOG were there on the
night, and equally dismissed the hoax, but unfortunately they didn't
make themselves known on the night.
I guess our contingent of researchers rather put this case
away to bed a little too early, as we really should have done more
digging on the night, and not just passed this off as a student
prank. Anyway, Brian James posted our analysis of this hoax, along
with photos of the ‘saucer’ on the APRA website on his return from
the skywatch in the dawn hours of the Sunday morning. We then
waited to see who else was going to break this ‘story’ – one way or
another.
The Swindon Evening Advertiser of Tuesday 19th
August carried photos and a story of how one witness has deduced
this ‘saucer’ was in fact a microlight being flown by two men – APRA
immediately contacted the paper to correct this incorrect analysis,
but unfortunately they never ran our own version of the night’s
events.
Next up was Channel 7 News in Australia who carried an item,
rather ignoring all the hoax factors, and this in turn was picked up
by Jeff Rense’s website rense.com, who seemed to get hold of a lot
of true facts about the hoax attempt – some of this detail seemed to
genuinely surprise people at Chrysalis when I told them of this
around 4 weeks later. The Daily Mirror of 21st August
carried a news item (by now a week out of date!), and both Sky news
and ITV news featured light-hearted items on the event – so
Chrysalis’ ‘requirement’ of seeing how much coverage and interest
they could generate had been achieved (In fact Chrysalis had to
persuade Channel 7 News to re-shoot the item so it could be included
in the documentary A Very British UFO Hoax, so in some ways
the Channel 7 news item footage seen in this documentary is 'hoaxed'
in itself!)
When news of the background to the event started to be made
public, APRA were getting frustrated, as claims were not really
true, such comments by Danny Cohen, of Channel 4, who said "We were
trying to see whether we could build a convincing looking spaceship
and in that regard undoubtedly we succeeded. Dozens of people saw it
and couldn't quite understand what they had seen. So I think it did
work…”
Clearly they hadn’t fooled the four APRA people there that
night, so Brian James started mailing both Channel 4 and Chrysalis
to reinforce our ‘side’ of the interpretation of the event. Fair
play, as Chris Harries got back to us with the invite for us to be
interviewed again for the final documentary, as they were now
putting various angles on how the ‘hoax’ had been both perceived and
received by various people who had seen it, and those in the media
who reported it – if nothing else it as an interesting exercise in
observing human observation and the human belief system.
Unfortunately the shooting schedule didn’t allow for all
of the APRA
contingent to be involved again, but Brian did go up to Chrysalis’s
offices in Islington to put across the ‘cynical researchers’
viewpoint – it remains to be seen how much of this objective angle
is put across in the final cut of the documentary that airs tonight.
It also remains to
be seen just how the subject is portrayed in this documentary, as it
is to be something of an amalgam of How to Build a Flying Saucer
and The Believers. It should be pointed out here that
the documentary that was mooted to be shown as The Believers
was not simply portraying events and sightings as 'real - it
was to have been a very cynical look at the human belief system, and
those who believe such events with no attempt at objective analysis,
so in some ways it might have been entitled "The Gullible"..
Special thanks to both programme developer Chris Harries and
Director Sean Doherty of Chrysalis,
for allowing the researchers to at least state their objective
viewpoint. |