In The Times (London), that excellent journalist, Ben Macintyre, ask the serious question: where have all the UFOs gone? Here’s part of his answer:

Just a few years ago, the sky seemed to be littered with flying saucers and every other sort of astral crockery: strange lights, cigar-shaped spaceships, paranormal things that went bump in the night. Scully and Mulder were rushed off their feet. Now the UFOs have almost vanished. Sure, you still get a few alien abductions, especially on New Year’s Eve, and diehard ufologists are still recording close encounters of the umpteenth kind.

Since 1955 the National UFO Reporting Centre in Seattle has clocked 125,000 reports of sightings. But in recent years the numbers have dropped dramatically. The British Flying Saucer Bureau closed down three years ago after half a century of saucer-spotting. The simple truth is that the little green men don’t come calling like they used to, and they have stopped leaving circles in our crops.

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But it is also a result of human invention, and humanity’s evolving relationship with new technology. UFO sightings have declined as the internet has expanded. The web is the natural home of every crackpot and conspiracy theorist, but it also, eventually, produces a rarefied atmosphere of rationalism in which aliens and other elusive creatures cannot long survive. In the short term, the internet was a blessing to UFOs; but over time, it has all but killed them off.

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UFOs tend to appear at moment of turmoil and technical innovation, and the full-scale alien invasion started after the Second World War. On June 24, 1947, an American pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine silvery objects hurtling through the air near Mount Rainier in Washington state.

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Within a month, flying saucers had been reported in 28 states. On a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, the US Air Force recovered bits of debris from a crash site, and rumours of bodies of bug-eyed aliens quickly spread. Britain became a favoured UFO landing strip, with hundreds and then thousands of reported sightings. “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to?”, wondered Winston Churchill in a memo written in 1951. “What can it mean?”

Read the whole article.