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The Great British UFO Hoax

McAvennie

McAvennie

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Mar 13, 2003
Messages
3,998
Anyone see this on C4 after Wife Swap on Monday?
The UFO looked shoddy and lame-o up close but it was a rush job. Makes you wonder how easy it'd be with more time, effort, finance and purpose. US government, I'm looking at you here.
Are they (or some of them) man-made? I begin to lean slightly that way after seeing this.
 
Making a UFO-like balloon is alot easier to create and control than a powered, heavier-than-air vehicle. There have been various attempts, but all have failed in one way or another. There is one camp that says that UFOs are all man-made military aircraft (i.e. see 'Man-made UFOs - 1944-19944, 50 Years of Supression' by Renato Vasco & David Hatcher Childress), but their arguement isn't very convincing IMHO. It tends to drool over military and aerospace technology, whilst ignoring how it's developed in a conventional sense.
 
I'd have like to see a few more reactions from the people on the ground who saw the thing. Of the clips they showed there seemed to be quite a bit of disagreement as to what they'd actually seen, and one person at least had started to see the second, non-existent UFO. I felt they rushed that bit of the programme.

The UFO was in the great tradition of British TV special effects such as Dr Who and Blake’s 7 built on a tight budget and a tight deadline, highly ingenious, but perhaps not completely convincing
 
JerryB said:
Making a UFO-like balloon is alot easier to create and control than a powered, heavier-than-air vehicle.
Click to expand...
As I may have mentioned before, who (In their distant youth), hasn't made a convincing hot air balloon out of pieces of good quality wrapping-style tissue paper, coat hanger wire and cotton wool dipped in methylated spirits?

At night, as the balloon floats over open country, lit up by the eerie and lambent glow of the burning meths, how long before an unsuspecting observer is phoning the police to report an UFO?

Much hilarity and the need to stay low (and schtume) ensues, as the police alert the military services. :madeyes:
 
who (In their distant youth), hasn't made a convincing hot air balloon out of pieces of good quality wrapping-style tissue paper, coat hanger wire and cotton wool dipped in methylated spirits?

At night, as the balloon floats over open country, lit up by the eerie and lambent glow of the burning meths, how long before an unsuspecting observer is phoning the police to report an UFO?

Or just a penlight hanging from some helium balloons?

To me, I think they tried too hard;
the folks round Avebury are so zonked that a netfull of helium balloons with or without lights would have fooled them; the well known fallibility of the observer would take care of the rest.

If a small craft was built, then reported as hundreds of feet long, that would have demonstrated something;
as it happens, one witness got the diameter correct, but the other estimates varied widely.

How many of the unexplained UFO's round the world are tiny lashed together hoax models, reported as gigantic because of the well documented difficulty of estimating size and distance in the sky.
 
I think the major problem with the hoax was that it did just look like a balloon. It moved just like a balloon but if they'd worked out some way to make it dart about and change altitudes quickly I think a lot more people would have been convinced.
 
Well most people were fooled to be honest;

if it had been less convincing, not more, it still would have fooled a lot of people.
Most people are just not used to seeing strange moving objects in the sky and almost always describe them inaccurately.

I don't know if it would have convinced me, but if it had, I wouldhave cr&pped meself.
 
Timble said:
I'd have like to see a few more reactions from the people on the ground who saw the thing. Of the clips they showed there seemed to be quite a bit of disagreement as to what they'd actually seen, and one person at least had started to see the second, non-existent UFO. I felt they rushed that bit of the programme.
Click to expand...

I'm with you completely on that score. I was fascinated with the view that it was 'a black bowl with grey mist at the top' (caused by the shadow on the bottom, and the top blending with the colour of the sky) - just goes to show how people view things differently. They were so convinced! It's funny how people find it easier to believe it's come from outer space than a warehouse in north London.

It would also be good to see their reactions when told it was a hoax - when were they told? When they saw the trailer for the programme on tv? That'd p you off!

It'd be interesting to see if some people continued to be convinced that they had indeed seen a ufo, even when the hoax was explained to them. Like that chap from the Troggs who insists crop circles are caused by aliens and that the alien autopsy was real, even when experts of special effects explain how it could've been done.
 
The So-called Great British UFO Hoax? did anyone here of it before the program? It made National news apparently, spain america thats great and all but did actually anyone see it on the tv?????:confused:

To me it looked like a program about a bunch of naughty boys having a laugh and then they spliced a load of differant programs together to make it look real! Ha ha haaaaaa.:D
 
Here's a review of some 'classic' British UFO hoaxes, again from the West Country (what is it with that area?).

"Two balloons were launched, as usual in complete darkness, about 1 minute apart. The weather was perfect - clear and with just the faintest wind blowing – and the balloons carried their winking lights majestically and in tandem across Salisbury plain."

"The BBC interviewed the watchers who again claimed it to be the best sighting they had ever made, some saying that the UFOs had been communicating with their “random yet intelligent” flashings and that the “explosion of light” was in response to the rows of flashing torches and motorbike headlamps."
 
PintQuaff said:
...The So-called Great British UFO Hoax? did anyone here of it before the program? ....
Click to expand...

They'd been on about if for a couple of months at least before the programme over in UFO Magazine...not too amused about it.
 
So it has been seen in ufo magazine, but no reports yet of anyone seeing the news. I expect the magazine gave the program alot of free advertising;) Still it looked alot of fun doing that be it real or not:D
 
All I can add to this is to say that while watching the programme I thought "I don't remember that being on the news!". Nobody I've spoken to about it remembers it either
 
Yeah, you're right - no-one I know remembers that either (and as most of them know of my interest in this stuff someone would have mentioned it the next day, you have thought).

IIRC the News they cited was ITN..and it was a Ch4 docu...hmmmm...

Perhaps the prog itself was the hoax? :)
 
It was an entertaining programme, watching some boffins solve technological problems to a project. But how much did it all cost? How secret was it? I mean, when they wanted to buy the micro-sized power genertor, did the supplier ask about its end-use?

Oh, and sending it over a UFO "hot-spot" and then wondering if people would be fooled was an idiotic question. People see what they expect to see, so most of the UFO spotters seeing it would see ... yes, class? That's right ... a UFO!

If they'd found another rural flightpath (allowing for safety with accidents and crashes) over a small town or village not normally associated with UFOs then I wonder what the witnesses would've said then.

A fun project but hardly the stuff of legend!
 
Surely it WAS a UFO to the people that saw it, seeing as they didn't know what it was?
 
There's recently been a better-quality video version of this classic programme uploaded onto YouTube (the audio is imperfect, but imagery is everything for this strategic deception):

I always loved the flawed technical compromises that generated this craft...and it certainly displays all the underfunded fudge-factors underpinning so much of British ingenuity.
 
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