Our main article was Martin Kottmeyer's 'Break a Leg', which examined the pattern of UFO narratives, to discover the dramatic structures which shaped them. Martin comments: "The tip-off was all the chases. Chases are staple items in our fantasy lives. It is a formula element to most action-adventure television... the reliance on chase sequences is understandable: it is a quick, easy way of heightening tension... In ufology it is a simple matter of observation that chases are absurdly commonplace." He gives a list of saucer chase 'mayhem' that rivals any James Bond movie sequence.
Other aspects of the UFO story mirror dramatic and literary conventions, including the roles of the witnesses and the 'ufonauts' themselves, which in most cases conform to a limited group of pre-existing dramatic persona that even preceded the UFO era.
Peter Rogerson's 'And the dogs began to howl' looked at what he called the "off-campus" history of the haunted house. He notes that in his work as a local history librarian one of the most frequent enquiries he receives is someone wishing to check the history of their house, to see who may have died there, or what stood on the land previously. These are people who feel that their house is in some way haunted as a result of an event that has intruded into their home-space from the past
The historical event has made the space in which it has happened an "inappropriate location for the mundane activities of life", and any subsequent attempts to introduce "mundane activities" will be disrupted by the echoes of the event. Peter's argument is complex, and the article repays reading in full.
Arch-sceptic Steuart Campbell occasionally graced the pages of Magonia, and in this issue he sets out his argument that UFO reports are almost entirely the result of astronomic mirages. (This article is not currently online.) While it's certainly true that many reports can be explained in this way, he goes beyond this to state "Astronomical mirages can explain so may UFO reports, especially the most intractable ones that I can claim that the UFO problem is practically solved!" He asserts that cases such as Father Gill, Travis Walton, the Hills and Socorro are all based on astronomical mirages, and continues: "A scientific hypothesis has been found which explains UFO reports..."
Of course this is nonsense. There is no 'scientific hypothesis' which explains UFO reports because UFO reports do not represent one single class of phenomena, but there seems to be a need, by believers and skeptics alike, to produce such an all-encompassing hypothesis, whether it is the ETH, mirages, or plasma phenomena (a previous favourite of Steuart Campbell, after he dropped the demonic explanation. There is, of course, no single explanation of UFO cases because 'UFO cases' do not exist except as a sociological construct. And there you are, just in by the end of September - unless you're anywhere east of Central European Time of course!
