At a 2024 UFO conference in Philadelphia, one of the attendees presented a photograph of what appeared to be an enormous light emerging from some clouds over Romania. He claimed it resembled ‘the mothership from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’.

Others who examined the image more closely soon realised that it was in fact a ceiling light reflected in a window.

Author Danny Lavelle 

What’s more, there was even the outline of a head of hair, presumably belonging to the person who had taken the photograph.

The British journalist Daniel Lavelle has travelled around America exploring the country’s obsession with all things alien. And it really is an American obsession.

There are more UFO sightings there than anywhere else on Earth, with 41 per cent of the population believing that extraterrestrial beings have visited our planet. The trend began just after the Second World War, when the US fear of Soviet spies was at its height: the red scare prompted thoughts of little green men.

Top billing goes to the ‘Roswell incident’ of 1947, when (according to some) an alien spaceship crashed in the desert outside the New Mexico town, and the government began a decades-long cover-up. Or, if you believe the government itself – and of course millions don’t – the object was actually a secret balloon designed to detect sound waves from atomic bomb tests by the Soviets.

In 1994, the authorities admitted they had allowed UFO theories to flourish as a cover for their real activities.

Whatever the truth, Roswell certainly knows how to cash in on the attention. Even its McDonald’s is shaped like a flying saucer. Other famous sightings include ‘Gimbal’ and ‘Go Fast’, two pieces of footage taken by military pilots off the coast of Florida in January 2015.

The former seems to show something saucer-shaped in flight, while the latter depicts a disc-shaped object apparently flying just over the ocean’s surface at incredible high speed.

 Around the time these videos were released, President Barack Obama told James Corden on the Late Late Show that things were happening in American skies that his government couldn’t explain. You can imagine what this did to the debate.

But just because you can’t explain something, it doesn’t mean it’s come from outer space. That’s why the US Department of Defense prefers the term ‘UAP’, or ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’. (‘UFO’ now has connotations that can, shall we say, cloud scientific debate.)

President Barack Obama told James Corden on the Late Late Show that things were happening in American skies that his government couldn’t explain

T he explanation doesn’t have to be a ceiling light – all sorts of factors can come into play, such as the ‘Fata Morgana’ effect, a mirage that appears just above the horizon when layers of the atmosphere differ in temperature.

It can make it seem as though an object, such as a ship or even a whole city, is floating in mid-air.

Lavelle is careful to treat everyone he interviews with respect, being as neutral as possible in testing the evidence. Indeed, he admits that part of him wants to find proof of alien visitors – it would be the biggest journalistic scoop ever.

He works his way through claim after counter-claim, with even the same witnesses sometimes changing their story from one day to the next. For instance, American soldiers at a US base in Suffolk’s Rendlesham Forest say that they touched a craft that landed there in 1980, before it shot up and flew off at incredible speed. Or rather they have since said that – their reports written the following day don’t mention getting close to the object, just that they saw lights in the sky appearing at five-second intervals.

It has been noted that nearby Orford lighthouse operated at precisely that interval.

Some people even think they’ve been abducted by aliens.

Terry Lovelace was 22 in 1977 when he and a friend went camping in Arkansas and thought they saw a huge craft in the sky. Terry then fell asleep but awoke later to see, in the mid-distance, small grey beings with thin bodies and bulbous heads.

‘Don’t you remember?’ asked his friend. ‘They took us, and they hurt us.’ Terry didn’t remember – but later, after he underwent hypnosis, a memory did appear.

At the time, both men were found to be seriously dehydrated, to the level where it can cause hallucinations.

The only point at which Lavelle’s straight face deserts him is in a conversation with Eesha Patel, a ‘starseed’, the name given to people who believe they are alien souls inhabiting a human body.

As she explains her ‘Pleiadian form is humanoid and my Lyran form is actually a feline lion … I’ve got a jellyfish type of energy,’ Lavelle bursts out laughing.

‘“Sorry,” I said, once I’d regained control of myself … “This is really challenging you from a paradigm-shift perspective,” Patel said flatly.’ Laughter might be the easiest reaction but Lavelle is determined to write a more interesting book than that – and he has succeeded. Of course, he concludes that ‘there is absolutely no evidence that aliens have visited us’.

W ho thought there would be? Instead, the book’s value lies in what it reveals about the people who believe: ‘I’ve learned more about human beings and their cultural obsessions on this journey than I ever will about aliens.’

One of Lavelle’s theories concerns the decline of conventional religion: maybe ‘a belief in aliens or higher non-human beings from mysterious worlds could fill that God-shaped void’.

What’s more, such a process would explain ufologists’ anger when people question their claims: ‘It’s like those beliefs are wrapped up in people’s identities in the same way that religion is – anything that threatens to contradict them is batted away furiously.’

There is also the brain’s tendency to perceive a pattern (and therefore meaning) where it doesn’t exist. Just as people see Jesus’s face on burnt toast, so they prefer an outlandish explanation for sightings in the sky.

Apart from anything else, it makes life interesting: ‘A belief in aliens, like a belief in ghosts, might be woven from hope, curiosity, comfort, a yearning to be special and countless other feelings.’

Chris Russo knows about this. He and a friend shot footage of five bright lights in formation over New Jersey in 2009. After 15 minutes, the lights suddenly disappeared. Some chose to interpret this as a UFO flying off at incredible speed. Russo chose to interpret it as the moment that flares (attached to helium balloons) had run out of gas.

And he should know – he was the one who had released the flares in the first place as a hoax to further his project of debunking pseudo-science.

Some people, explains Russo, will always reject the simple truth and ‘go automatically to the most out-of-this-world – no pun intended – explanation’.