In what may be remembered as the most creative publicity stunt ever attempted by an educational institution, Vancouver’s H.R. MacMillan Space Centre hovered an unmanned drone aircraft above a minor league baseball stadium last month. The drone bore a resemblance to a 1950s sci-fi movie flying saucer. A spontaneous fan video posted on YouTube earned more than 200,000 views in a month and caused rapture in parts of the UFO-enthusiast community—at least until the hoax was revealed. It turns out that the prank at the Vancouver Canadians baseball game was one of a handful of drone strikes by MacMillan against the unsuspecting people of metro Vancouver. A press release from MacMillan came clean, “The goal of the faux UFO was to create a buzz about the new planetarium viewer experience at Vanier Park. The Planetarium Theatre at the Space Centre underwent a half million dollar upgrade this summer.”
Even excepting the spike in UFO interest caused by the pranksters at MacMillan, we are quietly witnessing a renaissance in UFO interest. According to a recent Huffington Post article, the proliferation of drone aircraft is causing a “worldwide spike” in UFO sightings. A 2012 Fox News survey suggests that greater than one third of Americans believe in UFOs, and 10% believe they’ve personally witnessed an extra-terrestrial event. Perhaps the UFO sightings are the manifestation of something in us that yearns for the fantastic. Perhaps it comes from Hollywood’s endless string of space-based blockbuster movies. And perhaps it is because responsible media and academia devote so little attention to debunking the falsehoods. Occasional comic treatments of UFO enthusiasts by satirists like Chris Buckley (Little Green Men) expose the silliness of the UFO non-intelligentsia, but their books never get beyond non-enlightened Earth-centrists. But until the mothership lands in Manhattan and exposes the 75-year old government cover-up to non-believers, millions of star-gazing Earthlings will continue to be duped by pranksters like those scamps at MacMillan and other explainable anomalies. // Michael Adelberg