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. |