The truth is still out there…probably

In December 1992 I blew half of a redundancy package on fulfilling a long-held dream of visiting the United States for the first time and, specifically, the West Coast. Los Angeles had been an aspirational part of my childhood, having grown up watching TV shows like The Rockford Files, The Six Million Dollar Man, CHiPs and even The Dukes Of Hazzard - all filmed in and around Los Angeles - and I wanted to see the same blue skies that had clearly been absent from Britain during my youth. 

After arriving in LA, I embarked on the customary trip up Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco, via Big Sur, Monterey and Carmel, before venturing north-east to the magnificent Lake Tahoe. Heading south again, with the Sierra Nevada mountains - California’s snow-capped spine - to my right, I followed the course of the Owens River down “scenic” Hwy 395 until the small town of Lone Pine (frequently used by Hollywood as a filming location for Westerns), where I turned off and headed towards Death Valley, the permanently in-drought, sub-sea level desert basin that regularly records insane temperatures (last week it was 54C). As a stopover for Las Vegas (more direct, less scenic routes are available), I stayed the night in the sparse town of Stovepipe Wells, near the border with Nevada. 

Picture: US DoD

With nothing much else to do for the evening, I switched on the somewhat rickety TV set in my motel room to see the proprietor of a regional station berating his viewers in the independent American local television convention of an “editorial”, lecturing on why, to his annoyance, so many people in the south-western desertlands claimed to have seen UFOs (as opposed to anywhere else in the United States). His blunt argument was that the region is home to a lot of military activity: Lockheed’s so-called ‘Skunk Works’ facility at Palmdale, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, had for decades been turning out secretive experimental aircraft designs, like the F-117 stealth fighter and more recently, the F-35 Lightning II, while another US Air Force facility in Palmdale produced the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, arguably the nearest shape in the sky to something resembling a UFO. 

A relative stone’s throw, as the crow flies, from Stovepipe Wells and into Nevada in a significantly more inaccessible desert basin is Area 51. This, it should be remembered, is the hub of more or less every conspiracy theory to have ever existed about UFOs, including the widely-held belief that it is home to crashed extra-terrestrial craft being reverse engineered by boffins. Officially, Area 51 doesn’t exist, but it isn’t denied, either. The US military runs daily flights from and to Las Vegas, 80 miles to its south, for workers to commute there. The point of all this, is that Mr. TV Proprietor is probably right: the vast desert region of the American south-west is an ideal environment for the military to play with new technologies, so it’s quite likely that people living in its sparse communities - many, intentionally ‘off-grid’ - are going to see things the authorities would rather were not viewed too widely.

This, then, brings me to the long-awaited US government report, published yesterday, which has taken a serious look at what it calls “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”. The report, by the Pentagon’s ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, has investigated sightings dating back to 2004 and made by the US military (as opposed to whacked-out cranks living in the deserts), which have evaded rational identification. These sightings have included flying objects, often captured on camera by military aircraft scrambled to investigate them, which have displayed no obvious means of propulsion or flight surfaces, and have appeared to use technology unknown to US science or any scientific community for that matter. One such sighting occurred aboard the US Navy cruiser USS Princeton in 2004 when several crew witnessed a white oblong-shaped aircraft - which they dubbed “Tic-Tac” for its resemblance to the mint - darting around at high speed. “This was not just another flock of birds or a balloon or swamp gases,” Sean Cahill, a Princeton crew member at the time, told Greg Millam of Sky News this week. “We knew that this was a craft that was outstripping our arsenal, and that was in 2004.” Cahill felt he was witnessing history. “But I think that there's even more out there that we need to see and understand,” he said, adding that the US military’s apparent nonchalance at the time was proof that these things existed as part of secret official projects. But with no explanation then or since, he now believes that the phenomena present very real national security concerns.

What is significant about the US intelligence report is that, while the sightings aren’t claimed to be evidence of little green men joyriding about our planet, it doesn’t categorically rule it out, either. The nine-page report, which is a public extract of more comprehensive, classified information provided to Congress, describes 144 military UFO sightings of which only one could be fully explained. Critics have already been quick to claim that the 144 might be the tip of the iceberg, and that observations by members of the military often go officially unreported for fear of being branded crazy or unfit for duty. This reminds me of the air traffic control scene in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind:

Air Traffic Controller: TWA 517 do you want to report a UFO, over?

TWA517: Negative, we don’t want to report.

ATC: Air East 31, do you wish to report a UFO, over?

Air East 31: Negative, we don’t want to report one of those either.

ATC: Air East 31, do you wish to file a report of any kind to us?

Air East 31: I wouldn’t know what kind of report to file, Center.

ATC: Uh...Air East 31...uh...me neither.

The problem is, the experts still do not know what’s being reported, because the technology they believe they’ve been looking at is beyond current understanding. “It’s clear that we need to improve our capacity to further analyse remaining observations,” one official is reported by the Wall Street Journal as saying. In the report, there were 18 cases of objects with ‘unusual” movement or flight characteristics, with objects apparently defying physics and current parameters of aircraft mobility. Some have offered the more logical explanation that  these objects might be experimental Chinese or Russian vehicles, especially given the two countries’ military interest in hypersonic propulsion, but the UAP report doesn’t appear to conclude that either nation is involved in the unexplained sightings. Instead, it continues to categorise sightings with more rational explanations, such as birds and balloons, or even atmospheric phenomena, although it does also include categorisations for “foreign-adversary systems” and “other” encounters.

© Simon Poulter 2013

That won’t dissuade tin foil-hatted types convinced that the events in Roswell weren’t more real and more sinister than explained at the time, or since. The crash, in July 1947, of an object on a ranch near the New Mexico town, has prompted years of debate. The US military at the time claimed that the object was a weather balloon. Others claim it was a “flying disc”, with even more extreme claims saying that it contained an extra-terrestrial lifeform. Whatever happened, it has certainly proven to be a tourist bonanza for Roswell, as I discovered on another US road trip, while taking a major detour off Route 66 in 2014. The grandly-titled International UFO Museum & Research Center, in a former cinema on Main Street in Roswell, is as much tongue-in-cheek as a serious attempt to document and even explain the 1947 incident. But while the museum’s somewhat comical exhibits don’t exactly give the conspiracy theories all that much credence, there remains plenty of people who are convinced that something sinister lies behind it all. Chris Jones of the Mutual UFO Network, a collective of a civilians who study reported sightings, told Sky News that the US government report only emboldens their belief. “The phenomenon has just been validated by the papers coming out that, yes, there's something out there,” he said. “No, we don't know what it is, but it's worth looking into. And that's what we've been doing for decades.”

The trouble with all this is that we partly want to believe that we’re not alone, and are partly afraid that other forms of intelligent, industrialised life, from somewhere other than Earth, exist, and with nefarious intent, too. Since biblical times, there have been notions of objects in the sky, but the history of UFOs and the possibility of aliens visiting us has always been little more than a mixture of over-active imagination and cultural paranoia. There’s no doubting that people - sane people, rational people - have seen things that can’t be explained, but the conspiratorial X-Files notion that governments know more than they’re letting on has always seemed too fanciful, at least to this cynic’s view. 

Of course, given the infinite enormity of the universe, there’s always a chance that life on Earth wasn’t just an incalculable random event, and that, somewhere else in the cosmos, organic creatures have developed the means and the curiosity to go travelling. But if they did, I’m pretty certain that they’d spend more time doing the Universal Studios tour and Disneyland than hovering over the Mojave Desert, spooking people in trailer parks.

Tech me back to all that magic

Picture: CES®

Along with vain attempts at going meat-free and alcohol-dry, one of the hardy perennials of the first full week of the new year is the gargantuan technology fest that is CES (note: not the "Consumer Electronics Show" or "International CES", as the organisers don't like either...). Every January, news feeds and column inches are filled with gadgets and gizmos getting showcased for the first time in Las Vegas that the tech industry hopes might catch on and, you know, even sell. In my day in the business, it was about launching the latest TVs, hi-fi systems and new media formats like DVD, Super Audio CD and Blu-ray Disc. As much as everyone involved would kvetch vigorously about having to give up part of the Christmas holiday to write press releases and CEO keynote speeches, then put up with Las Vegas in general and 4am visits to the Kinko's drive-through copy shop (which I once did in a limo, handing over an entire press kit through the sun roof), there is still something magical about the show, even if now viewed from afar.

Firstly, for those who've never been, Las Vegas is far from the glamour harbour it is portrayed as being. True, once it started to clean up its grubby reputation in the 1980s, and the first mega-“resort” hotels installed minibars and large screen TVs in their rooms (allegedly, against the wishes of the Mob, who wanted punters down on the gambling floors, getting rid of their life savings at the blackjack tables and slot machines), Vegas became something of an anodised version of its former self. Fun for all the family and, initially, of great appeal to the conventioneers who poured into the city in the ‘high desert’ all year round. For those visiting in January for CES, it was usual to recognise rookies as those arriving without overcoats, freezing in the endless early morning taxi queues. Just because it’s set in the vast western desert does not make Las Vegas warm in winter. But once inside the Las Vegas Convention Center, warmth of a million watts of electricity takes over, as the vast venue dazzles the visitor with its endless aisles of new toys.

My involvement, as part of Philips’ PR team, was a combination of accompanying senior executives and facilitating the journalists who rush about the place, breathlessly attending press conferences and keynote speeches, desperate not to miss the next big thing or some CEO’s visionary statement about the future. When the chance allowed, however, it was fun to go off-stand and peruse the dazzling array of what the industry, then, had to offer. This was, however, a long, long time ago. When we launched the first hi-fi system to connect to the Internet, we were given much the same rebuke as the Wright Brothers being told that planes will never take off, so to speak. Now look at it: everything is connected.

Picture: CES®

Reassuringly, this year’s CES hasn’t gone short of traditional introductions like TVs, with the big beasts like Panasonic, Samsung and Sony pushing the boundaries of both screen sizes and picture quality. This was pretty much the story in my day, 20 years ago, but then, when we thought we’d brought about the end of days by launching a 42-inch plasma TV, now we’re seeing 75-inch QLED sets offering 8K picture quality. Which I’m told is very good indeed. We've also seen a $60,000 TV from LG that rolls up and down like a blind. Indeed, thin displays are all the rage this year, with a glut of laptops at CES with foldable displays, the new groovy thing in screen-based devices.

I’m actually quite excited to see such developments. ‘Traditional’ consumer electronics, we keep being told, are supposed to be dying, as kids prefer to stay glued to TikTok on their mobile phones, Millennials opt for YouTube and even older punters prefer Spotify to actually owning their home entertainment. This sounds Luddite, I know, but I accept that as someone who still buys LPs and CDs, and is clinging desperately to the notion of owning hi-fi separates when my iPad, loosely, offers the same thing, entertainment consumption has shifted. I’m currently in the process of moving out of my flat and into my girlfriend’s house, which means making some choices - some hard, some easy - as to what I declutter. Apart from some dodgy record company promo copies, the vinyl LPs stay; the CDs can be reduced somewhat (I don’t really need two copies of the Heat soundtrack...); and the DVDs - some ‘first generation’ transfers - can go straight to the charity shop. Only a small handful of box sets and Blu-ray collections (Bond, The Sopranos, The Godfather, natch) need remain as everything else is mostly available to stream without taking up cupboard space. There will still be a market for the gear to play all this media on, but even the consumer electronics industry has wisely embraced online distribution, progressively and seamlessly incorporating streaming services into their audio and video boxes over the last decade or so (reminding me what pioneers Philips were with that first ‘Streamium’ hi-fi system in 2002...).

In fact, while home entertainment has long been the primary reason for consumer electronics shows to exist, other tech industries have moved in. Just like the IFA, the venerable Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin (translated - “International Radio Exhibition”), which converted into a hybrid event of the domestic appliances and CE industry several years ago, CES has, too, brought together traditional home entertainment devices with the likes of 'connected' toothbrushes and - yawn - fridges (that are still not in widespread use, despite being relentlessly featured at such shows for what seems like years). In Las Vegas this week, there are other new tech trends to challenge the show’s traditional interests. Motor manufacturers have seen CES as an opportunity to showcase their in-car tech for a while now, but whereas this used to be largely about entertainment and navigation technology, the car itself, thanks to Tesla, is now more gadget than vehicle. Thus, this year we’ve seen Mercedes-Benz introduce a futuristic ‘pod car’, inspired by the world of James Cameron's Avatar, while Sony - along with traditional launches like its new PlayStation and new TVs - delivered one of the first big surprises of CES by unveiling a car, the Vision-S. Now, this doesn’t mean the Japanese giant is about to take on the increasingly consolidated car industry, but the Vision-S is an electric concept car designed to showcase what Sony is still capable of in diverse applications, from in-car information and entertainment through to battery technologies, imaging and sensors.

Health technology has been a growing part of CES for some time, too, with large tech companies shoe-horning Internet-enabled personal care this-and-thats into the Convention Center, but even cosmetics brands are getting in on the act. This year L’Oréal, Oral-B, Gillette and Neutrogena have been demonstrating gadgets. I’m not sure if, yet, the world needs lipstick that connects via Bluetooth to a mobile phone, or artificial intelligence that looks for imperfections in facial skin (my mirror does that job quite adequately), but they’re on display if that’s your thing. The spin is that this is innovation, and fair play to the wonks in these companies’ labs for ‘pushing the envelope’, as such wonks like to say. Of course, it’s almost a cliché to point out that many of these concepts will never see the commercial light of day, much like Homer Simpson-style car designs at motor events and pilotless passenger helicopters at air shows, but it’s this heady mix of the rational and irrational that maintains the 175,000 people who descend on Las Vegas every year, along with 4,500 exhibitors from 160 countries for the self-styled “global stage for innovation”. And, secretly, I’m a tiny bit jealous I’m not amongst them. Even if it would mean losing measurable years of my life in taxi queues.