James Hynes

My friend Roger Boylan has sent me a very cool link, to a gallery of nearly 60 classic photographs of UFOs from the Daily Telegraph, dating back (no kidding) to a photo taken in New Hampshire in 1870. Most of them, though, are grainy, blurry, unsteady snapshots from the 1940s through the 1960s, most of them in black and white, and if you misspent your childhood like I did, reading grubby little paperbacks about UFOs, you've probably seen most of them before.

I still want to believe, of course, but I have to say, looking at them after all these years, a lot of these old favorites look pretty fake to me now; more than one of them looks like somebody flung a hubcap or a straw hat or a pie plate into the air while somebody else snapped a picture with a Brownie or a Polaroid. Then, smirking like mad, no doubt, they mailed it to their local newspaper, which probably published it under the unironic, pre-Onion headline, "Area Man Photographs Flying Disc." This one, which turned up in most of the UFO books of my childhood, looks to me now like a clumsy double exposure.

The main response these pictures provoke in me now, in fact, is nostalgia, for that row of paperbacks by Frank Edwards, John G. Fuller, and others whose names I don't remember any longer that occupied the bottom shelf of the bookcase over my bed, where I could reach them without having to lift my head from the pillow. I plowed through most of them more than once, provoking a good deal of eye-rolling from my very skeptical father and some flat-out disdain from my mother, who once told me I couldn't buy any more UFO books until I'd read Huckleberry Finn. Of course, I kept buying them anyway, and didn't end up reading Huck Finn until I was in my late 20s. More fool me, I know. I should (as always) have listened to my mother.

And I don't know what it is with the big British dailies this week, but yesterday I got a similar nostalgic thrill from this gallery of photos of the Loch Ness Monster in the Guardian. In this case, the nostalgia dates from later in my life, in 1982, to be exact, during my first trip to Scotland. I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend, and like every other backpacker who ever lived, I was trying to walk it off in the remoter parts of the UK. In Inverness, I rented a bicycle from my youth hostel and cycled about ten miles down the side of Loch Ness on a cold, damp, overcast November day. Minus the monster, which of course I didn't see, the road alongside Loch Ness is pretty dreary, just a two-lane blacktop with a dank pine forest rising pretty much straight up a steep hillside on one side of the road, and the underachieving waves of the loch feebly slapping the stones of the shore on the other. If that wasn't depressing enough, the bike was too small for me and I was out of shape, so that by time I finally gave up and turned around, I was sore, damp, sweaty, and pissed off—and still had ten miles to go before I got back to the dank, overlit, and underheated youth hostel (where the warden, whose accent made him virtually incomprehensible, was always trying to pick a fight with me over Reagan and the Trident missile). The one virtue of the experience was that it finally transformed my sorrow and self-pity over my ex into a purgative anger, so that by time I pumped uphill into Inverness again near sundown (which is about 3 in the afternoon that time of year), it was her fault I was wet and cold, her fault my knees ached, and her fault that I cycled 20 fucking miles in the fucking rain on a fucking kiddie bike and didn't even see the fucking monster.  

Which is also probably just as well. The most famous photo in the Guardian collection, the so-called "Surgeon's Photo," which was long considered the canonical photo of Nessie, has since been definitively revealed to be a hoax; it's a toy submarine with a lizardy neck and head stuck on.

Yet I still get a pleasant chill up my spine, even knowing it's a fake, probably because it's so blurry and grainy and crude. The same goes for all those smudgy photos of UFOs: the photo that would convince all the skeptics would have to be crystal clear and detailed and taken in front of a small army of witnesses. It's the dodgy nature of the photos—their clumsiness, their uncertain provenance, their risibility—that makes them so appealingly mysterious. I don't think a clear, hi-def photo or video of a UFO or Nessie would have anything like the power of these pictures, which are like something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, or something from a dream. I suspect they still move people because they aren't convincing; you have to invest them with faith in the mysterious to make them work, and after you do that, of course, it doesn't matter how silly they look: they're lodged forever in that part of your subconscious that still jumps at things half seen in the dark.

I also suspect that apart from the Fox Mulders of the world and the guys on UFO Hunters, most of us don't want the mystery of UFOs or Loch Ness or Sasquatch cleared up; they're too much fun to look at on the web, or read about as a kid, or watch half-awake from the couch on the History Channel. The day the Zeta Reticulans actually land on the White House lawn, or a plesiosaur washes up in Inverness, or a Sasquatch wanders out of the Cascades and gets hit by a semi on Interstate 5, that day, all the fun will go out of them, and the world will be a little less mysterious, and hence, a little less interesting.