In June 1984, American Psychology magazine posed a question to its readers: “Do you believe in UFOs?” 50% of respondents said yes. A decade earlier, only 40% of respondents to the same question in a Roper Poll had replied in the affirmative. While it is impossible to accurately account for this apparent 10% increase in belief, it seems reasonable to speculate that Hollywood played a significant role. Spielberg’s iconic UFO movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind had been released to huge acclaim and box-office success in 1977. Inspired by the research of UFOlogists like J. Allen Hynek and fuelled by Spielberg’s own life-long obsession with flying saucers, Close Encounters was the most ufological movie ever made, and it treated its subject matter with respect and gravity. More importantly, and in stark contrast to the majority of Hollywood’s alien-themed output in the past, Spielberg’s film dared to present aliens as creatures of benevolence and wonder—not as invaders, but as saviours. Spielberg struck gold again with the alien saviour concept in 1982 with his blockbusting E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, which rapidly became the most successful film of all time and spawned numerous movies in the same vein throughout the 1980s.

Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977).

Two months after the June 1984 American Psychologymagazine reader poll revealed that fully half the country believed in UFOs, the closing ceremony of the Olympic games in Los Angeles demonstrated just how deeply UFOs and aliens had become ingrained into the American psyche—and the extent to which they had become inseparable from cinema.

The highlight of the Olympic closing ceremony that year was the staged landing of a giant flying saucer and the subsequent emergence from within of a space alien (friendly, of course) who then officially declared the games closed. In an awesome spectacle clearly inspired by the final scenes of Spielberg’s Close Encounters, the Olympic saucer communicated with the awestruck crowd below through a series of elaborate light shows, the orchestral music swelled to a crescendo, and the UFO descended to rapturous applause. It was a sight both bizarre and magnificent to behold.

Bizarrely, the event has since become the subject of conspiratorial musings in the UFO community. For years, UFO buffs have speculated that the Olympic UFO of 1984 was not a prop suspended by a helicopter, but a real flying saucer—either manmade or alien—owned by the US government and flaunted on the world stage for all to see. This idea can be traced back to Bill Cooper, author of Behold a Pale Horse, which, since its publication in 1991, has become a sort-of bible for conspiracy theorists.

In an undated interview from the early-1990s, Cooper remarks of the Olympic UFO:

“Well, it wasn’t held by a helicopter. There’s no helicopter up there holding this thing. They tell you that, but it’s not true. Can you imagine the liability that they would have if they were carrying this thing suspended on a cable underneath a helicopter over the heads of hundreds-of-thousands of people?”

Cooper then states his belief that “there was no helicopter, there was no cable,” and that the UFO was “operating under its own power.”

In his 1991 book, Cooper contended that the US government had, for decades, been working covertly with alien intelligences and that it had in its possession highly advanced technologies, including flying saucers, both manmade and extraterrestrial. He also believed that the powers that be were planning on exploiting the alien presence by staging a false flag alien invasion in order to usher in martial law and establish a one-world government. Cooper died in a shootout with sheriff’s deputies at his home in Eagar, Arizona in 2001 following charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and endangerment stemming from disputes with local residents. Many in the conspiracy community today are convinced that Cooper’s death was orchestrated by the New World Order because his work was too close to the truth.

In light of his well-established position that the global elite were planning a false flag ET invasion, Cooper’s statements about the Olympic UFO being real led many of his followers to believe that the 1984 Olympic closing ceremony was a test of public reaction to an alien landing, and a rudimentary dry-run for a spectacular and devastating false-flag event that was thought to be in the pipeline.

If you’re one of the people who believe Cooper about the Olympic UFO, prepare to be disappointed (or, perhaps, relieved).

It’s been known for years by anyone who has ever taken a few moments to do some digging (which apparently excludes most UFO conspiracy theorists) that the 1984 Olympic UFO was actually the work of the celebrated Disney ‘Imagineer’ Bob Gurr, who is credited with designing most of the original attractions at Disneyland.

“An audible gasp swept the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum… Was it real? Some of the 92,000 onlookers certainly thought so. Millions of worldwide TV viewers stared in amazement….was this really happening? Or just more of what the entertainment capital of the world does for everyday life.”

Gurr then goes on to answer his own question as he recounts the origins of the project and how it all came together. Originally, the ceremony was to be produced by Disney, but, when the entertainment giant was unable to furnish a budget on time, the reins were handed over to David L. Wolper (producer of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). Tommy Walker, who had been Director of Entertainment at Disneyland, was enlisted as Director of Ceremonies. It was Walker who suggested that a flying saucer be featured as the highlight of the 1984 ceremony, and it was Walker and Wolper who enlisted the services of Bob Gurr has head designer on the contract, which was won and carried out by Plainview of Hollywood.

Snapshots of the “UFO landing” at the 1984 Olympics closing ceremony.

The task was to create a flying saucer 50 foot in diameter fitted with hundreds of special lights. With only two months to go before the August 12, 1984 show night, the work began. “The wild contraption I envisioned got drawn up and built at a furious pace,” writes Gurr in his article, noting that the saucer had to carry a lot of equipment and also needed to be light enough to be carried by a Bell 314 big-lift Helicopter:

“So I made an outer ring of welded aluminium truss sections all pulled together by cables to a center triangular frame. This was inspired by the extremely light construction of the 1930s Hindenburg Zeppelin. The saucer looked like a slice out of the Hindenburg turned sideways.”

According to Gurr, the center frame of the saucer carried a 90 KVA 208 3 phase gas turbine generator, and, for its spectacular light display, the saucer used three-hundred-and-sixty 600 watt Ray Lites, a Pichel Industries 7K Xenon searchlight, plus “a whole bunch more lighting gizmos totalling 432 items using 238,200 watts… but not all at once!” The wiring alone stretched 1.5 miles. The total ready-to-fly weight was 3,689 pounds.

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during the 1984 Olympics.

Finally, after just five weeks of work, and only nine days before the show, the Olympic flying saucer was assembled and ready to fly. And fly it did—into the imaginations of the millions who watched it live, including Bill Cooper, and, in turn, numerous online conspiracy theorists who became convinced that the global elite had, that sticky August night in 1984, given us a tangible glimpse of their hidden world. The reality—that a handful of talented and determined individuals had grafted hard and fast to create a Hollywood illusion—is far less exciting than the conspiracy, but impressive nonetheless.

“But wait, what about the alien?” you may ask. The one who made his entrance in the stadium that night and greeted humanity. Shockingly, he too was of this Earth. Inside that alien costume was George Bell, a former basketball player with the Harlem Wizards and Harlem Globetrotters and, at 7 feet 8 inches, the former tallest man in the United States.

So, move on people, nothing to see here. Except, maybe, just maybe, the whole Olympic acclimation theory shouldn’t be thrown out with the rubber alien. The original contract was, of course, intended for Disney, and, ultimately, it was Disney’s chief Imagineer who realised the vision. This provides at least some food for thought in the context of Disney’s long and intriguing history with the UFO subject, which involves at least one instance of the entertainment giant working with officialdom allegedly for purpose of testing public reaction to alien reality. If you don’t already know the full story behind this, get comfy, put on your tinfoil hat, and discover The Inside Story of Disney’s Mythic UFO Documentary and Conference…

What if UFOs are trying to be seen? What if they’re desperate to be noticed? What if they’re alien long-haul truckers stuck here with a broken mothership and the only barrier between them and the their space-homes and space-children is an inability to work a can of WD40? Maybe all they’re after are some reading lessons. They’re flying around up there, going “hey look, look at me! help!” and we’re so thick-headed we shrug and say “I dunno bro, looks like a balloon.” What other reason could there be for some of the stunts these guys pull?

Take the case of this video. It purports to show a group of small UFOs “escorting” a large UFO through the skies over the Hague. If you don’t know, the Hague is the governmental seat of the Netherlands, one of the cities used for UN meetings, and home to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice (among many other fancy and important institutes of geopolitics). Imagine being so desperate for attention that you and your friends drive to the International Court of Justice—which sounds like an allegory for committing war crimes but, I assure you, it’s just a cheap joke.

Maybe the aliens would get more attention if their ships had a little more style?

If this footage is real then they clearly want our attention, but that’s a dubious claim at best. It’s a stronger case than some UFO videos (like when it’s obviously window glare or the videographer clearly hasn’t accepted that drones exist), but that’s not saying much.

The video shows a group of seemingly black objects flying at matched speed and in what looks like a sort of formation. One of the objects stands out as much larger than the rest, and does appear escorted by the smaller ones. Appeared is the operative word here. Perspective is a heck of a thing, and what we’re likely seeing is an object that’s closer to the camera than the others.

One person in the comments section suggested that it was a group of bats. Bats are normally known for twitchy aerial acrobatics, but some bats can soar. The Hague does have a thriving population of bats, as does the rest of the Netherlands. But whatever the video shows soar smooth, stable and effortless at a high altitude. They don’t really look like bats. Why not birds? The shapes are very dark and the larger one does seem more like a singular shape than it does a bird with wings and a tail but, once again, perspective is a heck of a thing.

This might be falling into that same old thick-headed trap, justifying the alien field trip to the International Court of Justice. After all, it is an unusual looking group of flying objects and, without the credentials or evidence to really make a judgement call here, it could be named a group of unidentified flying objects. It’s a safe bet that the unidentified part would be solved by better video quality.The next time aliens leave a crop circle for us it’ll probably be lined with HD cameras and zoom lenses.

Sprawled out over approximately 350,000 square miles of the African countries of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa is a vast expanse of arid, sandy savanna wilderness known as the Kalahari Desert. The word “Kalahari” comes from the local Tswana word Kgala, meaning “the great thirst”, or Kgalagadi, meaning “a waterless place,” and the Kalahari Desert certainly looks the part, with immense swaths of land that look like something from some inhospitable alien planet, all twisted scrub, gnarled dead trees and contorted rocks, and shifting red sands devoid of any source of water. This is for the most part a forbidding moonscape of a place, and it was long a domain that may as well have been on another world for outsiders, yet in 1885 one of the first Westerners to ever set foot within these badlands ventured out into an uncharted area of the Kalahari Desert and would lay eyes upon a great mystery that still remains unexplained.

The expedition was carried out by a American explorer and entertainer from New York by the name of William Leonard Hunt, who in his native land made a living performing death defying stunts such as tightrope walks over the Niagara Falls, as well as exhibiting African bushmen like a human zoo, and usually went by his alias Guillermo Farini or “The Great Farini.” In February of 1885, he set out from Cape Town South Africa, along with a contingent of fellow adventurers, some native guides, and his son, Lulu. The goal of the trip was not particularly noble, they were not there to map out a new realm of the planet or catalogue its new plants, animals, and people, but rather they were there to get rich by seeking out diamonds, which Farini had heard the region was brimming with. The adventurers penetrated out into an area of the desert never before seen by the outside world, and when they returned they did so with quite the tale to tell.

The Kalahari Desert

Upon his return to civilization, Farini immediately went about compiling a report of his findings, which he presented to the Berlin Geographical Society in 1885 and the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain in 1886, shortly after followed by a book on what he had seen and experienced out in those sun scorched wilds, titled Through the Kalahari Desert. One of the main events of these reports and the book was an account of coming across the ruins of some what looked to have been a once great city out there half-buried in the blood reds sands, and which he estimated to have been thousands of years old. Farini would write of this enigmatic lost city:

We camped at the foot of the mountain – near a rocky ridge, which looked like a Chinese wall after an earthquake – it was the ruins of a huge structure, sometimes sanded in. We carefully inspected the ruins almost a mile long, they were a pile of huge hewn stones, and Here and there, the traces of cement were clearly visible between them … In general, the wall had the shape of a semicircle, inside of which, approximately forty feet apart, were piles of masonry in the shape of an oval or a blunt ellly The height of a foot and a half … As all of them were to some extent sanded, we ordered all our people to dig out the largest of them (and this work clearly did not suit them) and found that the sand had protected the junction from destruction.

Excavations took almost the whole day, which caused a lot of indignation in Jan. He could not understand why it was necessary to dig out the old stones, for him this activity seemed a waste of time … We began to dig up sand in the middle of the semicircle and discovered the footwall of the twentieth wide, lined with large stones. The top layer was composed of oblong stones placed at right angles to the bottom layer. This bridge was crossed by another one, forming as it were a Maltese cross. Apparently, in the center of it was once some altar, a column or a monument, as evidenced by the preserved foundation – dilapidated masonry. My son tried to find some hieroglyphics or inscriptions, but did not find anything. Then he took a few photographs and sketches. Let the people who know better than me judge them by when and by whom this city was built.

In general, the ancient city was described as being quite extensive and immense, and Farini would speculate that some great catastrophe had wiped it and its people out, whoever they may have been. Considering that there was not known to have ever been any great civilization to have ever inhabited that region, and that it seemed to match stories the bushman of the area had long told of lost cities hiding out in the sands, the account grew a great amount of interest at the time, and the allure of some ancient lost people hidden away within the remote Kalahari proved to be romantic and irresistible.

A sketch of the Lost City

Fueled by the reports, the sketches, and the photographic evidence provided by Farini, there have been numerous follow-up expeditions to try and find the Lost City of the Kalahari, and to date there have been about 30 such expeditions launched over the years, none which have managed to find anything quite so spectacular as what Farini described, and some have come back doubtful of the truth of the story. One such prominent expedition was launched in 1964 by a professor named A. J. Clement, who followed what he believed to have been Farini’s original route and came across a very odd rock formation out in the desert that he believed was the very same one Farini had encountered and which could have been mistaken for something manmade, but which he concluded was merely an anomalous natural formation, most likely caused by the erosion of a particular type of igneous rock called dolerite. Indeed, Clement expressed doubt that the region could have ever supported such a legendary city at all, and would say of the Lost City of the Kalahari:

The climatological history of the Kalahari does not appear to have undergone any marked change for several thousand years, and it is obvious that no settlement of the size indicated by Farini could exist without perennial rivers or lakes in the vicinity. And, suitable conditions for the establishment of a city cannot have existed along any of the river courses for tens of thousands of years. Furthermore, if the age of the Lost City is assessed in relation to Zimbabwe and the ancient ruins of Persia, it is impossible to conceive of any in the Kalahari having been built more than 15,000 years ago.

Like all legends, that of the Lost City will be a long time a-dying, and doubtless there will still be some who are disinclined to let the matter rest in spite of all the contrary evidence. And possibly this is just as well, for there is something rather sad about the destruction of a legend.

Clement was right in the sense that there are many who have not let the legend die, and are still convinced the legendary city really does exist, with expeditions continuing all the way up the present and using new technology to help them. One recent search was carried out in 2013 by a crowd-sourced research project using Google Maps, called the Marcahuasi Project, which found anomalies in the desert that could be indicative of walls of the lost city, but it is still unknown if the images are of an ancient city, more recent abandoned irrigation circles for crops formed by the native tribes, or merely a natural formation.

Farini’s expedition in the Kalahari

Even more recently still was an expedition in 2016 by the Travel Channel series Destination Unknown, headed by explorer and host Josh Gates and equipped with state of the art technology such as aerial scans and radar. They managed to find some unusual rock formations that resemble walls and ruins, but again it is unknown if they are artificial or if they were really what Farini wrote of. One of the problems with locating the Lost City is that the area is just so remote and inhospitable, and this coupled with its sheer size makes it a formidable task to try and locate these alleged ancient ruins among the endless sands and desert scrub. Not helping matters is that Farini did not give very detailed descriptions of the actual location, and this is further exacerbated by the fact that the ruins are supposedly half buried. One member of one of the many expeditions that have tried and failed to find the city once lamented:

It’s all very vague. When you see this desert, you will understand that you can wander among the sand dunes for months and not even come close to the places where the lost city is located.

The Lost City of the Kalahari described by Farini has gone on to become a legendary, almost mythical place in the same realm as places like Atlantis, and there have been many theories as to its existence. Some think it is a real place, perhaps a city once built and abandoned by its creators due to a great drought or even that of a thriving lost civilization. Others, like Clement, think it is likely just misidentified natural rock formations. Still others point to Farini’s showman background, and claim that the whole report, the sketches, and even the photographs were likely faked, that it was all a big hoax. Considering that Farini is the only one to have documented the city in any appreciable way, and the vast stretches of harsh terrain involved, if there really is a city out there then it is very possible that it will remain buried and hidden, as it has for thousands of years and just might for thousands more yet to come.