Hot Chocolate, ‘No Doubt About It’: Britain’s UFO flap year

Hot Chocolate
‘No Doubt About It’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 2 on May 18, 1980

1. A cloud of white and green and flying ships

For many in Britain, the prevailing mood in January 1980 was thank heavens that’s over. The 1970s has been a challenging decade, climaxing in the Winter of Discontent, an unusually cold winter made worse by widespread strikes. Even the binmen and gravediggers had downed tools, and Britain had become a frozen, stinking mess. Thatcher came to power in May of 1979, and many hoped that she would lead the country into a brighter, more optimistic 1980s.

Although not everyone had a bad time in the 70s. Songwriter Steve Glen thrived during the decade, scoring hits with big names like Racey, Kandidate and Linda Lewis. Now the 80s were here, and he was established at Rak Records, home to Britain’s biggest funk band, Hot Chocolate. 

Glen was on his way to a meeting at Rak to do some work with another of their bands, The Toys. It should have been an ordinary night. But what happened to Steve Glen was beyond extraordinary: 

“I was driving on the Hendon Way with my writing partner Mike Burns and he pointed up in sky and said ‘what’s that up there?’ I nearly drove off the road. I was producing The Toys at the time and the band was following behind us in a van. I veered off onto West Heath Road and stopped by the Leg Of Mutton Pond. It was right above us. It was massive – about four or five houses wide and when we got out to have a look, an orange cloud came out of it.”

‘Close encounter with a hit song’, Watford Observer, 2011

Glen and the others staggered into the Rak Records offices and told everyone they’d just seen a UFO. 

One of the first people they met was Dave Most, the brother of Rak Record’s founder, Mickie Most. Dave believed them. He’d seen a UFO himself once, and he firmly believed that we are not alone. They decided to tell the world about it in the medium they knew best–a song. 

Plenty of pop stars had claimed to have alien encounters in the past, although few had created songs about their experience. Elvis Presley and Reg Presley both saw UFOs in their lifetimes, with the latter becoming a devoted UFOlogist in later life, but neither produced any notable songs. John Lennon once claimed to have seen a squadron of flying saucers buzz the UN building in New York, but only gave it a passing mention in one song (‘Nobody Told Me’).

Glen, Burns and Best decided to write lyrics that would end all speculation. They were sure about what they say. So sure that they name the song ‘No Doubt About It’. 

The song became a huge hit for Hot Chocolate, one of their last major forays into the Top 10. And it might seem strange now to think a funk ballad about UFOs was such a success. 

But something else had happened in the UK at the end of the 70s, shortly before the Winter of Discontent. All over Britain, people were seeing UFOs. 

2. What was this ship from outer space?

1978 was what UFO watchers call a “flap year”–a period when there is a huge spike in the number of sightings. Here is a graph of sightings per year based on MoD data released in 2007. Look at how the line shoots up after 1977.

The 1978 flap is often blamed on one specific person: Steven Spielberg. His film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, told the story of a UFO sighting and the government’s attempt to cover it up. The film opened in the UK in spring of 1978 and was the second-biggest movie of the year, beaten by another film about spaceships, Star Wars.

(Third place went to Superman, featuring a mysterious alien that flies around and gets mistaken for a bird or plane.)

In Spielberg’s defence, UFO mania had been around for a few months before Close Encounters. On February 4th, 1977, a group of schoolchildren in Broad Haven in Wales were playing outside when they saw a cigar-shaped object land in a nearby field. A silvery, humanoid figure emerged for a moment, and then the vehicle took off again. 

The children told some adults who assumed, naturally, that they were lying. But the kids refused to relent and took their story to the police, who also though they were making it up. Eventually, the school headmaster put pressure on the boys to tell the truth. Their story remained remarkably consistent under pressure, to the point where the headmaster became convinced that they’d witnessed something. 

Ultimately, the boys were rewarded with the highest form of official endorsement–a feature on John Craven’s news programme for children, Newsround: 

Broad Haven had even more UFO sightings in the following weeks, leading to the area becoming known as “The Welsh Triangle” (or “THE TERROR TRIANGLE” in Murdoch’s tabloids). Soon, the aliens spread beyond Pembrokeshire. Children in Macclesfield saw a flying disc buzz their their playground; several motorists in Barnston reported mysterious encounters with a silver humanoid figure who stood in the middle of a junction.  

Towards the end of 1977, aliens reached into the homes of TV viewers in South-East England. Stunned viewers of Southern Television watched as an ITN news report on Rhodesia gave way to static, before a ghostly voice said: 

“We have watched you growing for many years as you too have watched our lights in your skies. You know now that we are here, and that there are more beings on and around your Earth than your scientists admit.”

Aliens had already visited the Top 40, mostly thanks to Bowie, but The Carpenters chose this moment to send a message from the charts. ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary’, a song originally by the Canadian psychedelic rock band Klaatu, reached the Top 10 in November 77, sending a message of peace to whoever might be watching from the skies.

The lyrics of ‘Calling Occupants’ were inspired by an event in the 1950s called World Contact Day, when a group of UFO enthusiasts had tried to reach to the skies with the power of telepathy. At an agreed time on March 15, 1953, everyone focused on this piece of text: 

“Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet EARTH. We… wish to make contact with you. We are your friends, and would like you to make an appearance here on EARTH. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of EARTH. Please come in peace and help us in our EARTHLY problems. Give us some sign that you have received our message. Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality.”

Meanwhile, UFO believers had found a foothold in one of Britain’s oldest institutions–the House of Lords. Brinsley Trench was the editor of Flying Saucer Review and founder of BUFORA (British UFO Research Association). When Trench’s older brother died in 1975, Brinsley became the next Lord Clancarty, allowing him to formally put UFOs on the agenda for Her Majesty’s government. 

At first, Trench was a marginal figure, and hardly the first eccentric to inherit a seat at the Lords. But the flap year of 1978 marked a shift in public opinion, and suddenly Trench was one of the most prominent UFO believers in the world. 

Some of the other Lords were deeply unhappy about this. David Kenworthy, the former Labour politician now known as Lord Stragboli, took particular offence at Trench’s negative view of the British government and military. In particular, Kenworthy seemed offended at a story that appeared in one of Trench’s books, which suggested that an entire British regiment in World War I had been abducted by flying saucers. 

In January 1979, the House of Lords agreed to discuss Trench’s proposal to declare The Year of the UFO and to:

“call attention to the increasing number of sightings and landings on a worldwide scale of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and to the need for an intra-governmental study of UFOs”

David Kenworthy was ready to offer the official government response.. Briefing notes prepared with help from the MoD show that he was ready to go on the attack.

Kenworthy clearly believed that Trench was a charlatan, as were most of Trench’s friends (Erik von Daniken, bestselling author of Chariots of the Gods, got into UFOs after doing time for fraud). The notes for the debate include a systematic dismantling of all of Trench’s main theories. 

Although, interestingly, they still hadn’t found an explanation for what really happened to that regiment in Gallipoli. 

3. If someone tells you there’s no other form of life

What does it mean to believe in UFOs? 

With other paranormal beliefs, the answer is obvious. If you believe in ghosts, you think that dead people still have a presence in this world. If you believe in Bigfoot, you think there’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside of the Pacfic Northwest. 

But UFO enthusiasts can barely agree on the basics of their belief. Flying saucers might come from another star, or they might be from the future, or they might live in a secret city at the centre of the earth, or they might be ghostly projections from another dimension. 

In many ways, it doesn’t matter. UFOs are a minor part of UFO lore. The one thing everyone agrees in, the real heart of UFO theory, is the idea that the government are conspiring to hide the truth. Close Encounters is all about the official conspiracy. The first line of ‘No Doubt About It’ isn’t about the spaceship, but about the official disinformation:

“If someone tells you there’s no other form of life
And you believe in that too”

UFO conspiracies are, quite literally, as old as UFO sightings. The recorded sighting happened on June 24, 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold saw a fleet of mysterious saucer-shaped objects over Washington State. A mere two weeks later, the Roswell Daily Record announced that a flying saucer had crashed in the New Mexico desert, sparking a theory that the US government has made contact with aliens.

The conspiracy theories really took off with Donald Keyhoe’s 1955 book, The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. Keyhoe laid out all of the core elements of the modern UFO beliefs: aliens were observing us and conducting experiments; this was happening with support from the US government; the government were actively working to suppress the facts.

This kind of conspiracy thinking thrived during the paranoia of the Cold War. Mere days after the Kennedy assassination, a snap poll showed that 62% of Americans didn’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. A few months later, a book called Who Killed Kennedy? laid out a new theory that was structurally similar to what UFO enthusiasts believed: sinister forces were conspiring behind the scenes, and the government were actively suppressing the truth.

Of course, one way that the government could have dispelled the conspiracy theories would be by providing proof that aliens existed. As the space race reached its climax, some NASA figures hoped that that this would be the case, that they would find something alive on a nearby planet. Even the theory of canals on Mars hadn’t been entirely disproven. As late as 1965, NASA were publishing statements like this: 

“Although there is no unanimous opinion concerning the existence of the canals [on Mars], most astronomers would probably agree that there are apparently linear (or approximately linear) markings, perhaps 40 to 160 kilometers (25 to 100 miles) or more across and of considerable length.”

Sourcebook on the Space Sciences, Samuel Glasstone, 1965

When the first rockets escaped earth’s orbit, they went with the faint hope of coming back with guests. 

That didn’t happen. In fact, it was the opposite. As inspirational as the moon landings were, the moon itself was so desolate that it made the Arctic look like Eden. Probes sent to Venus found an intensely hot pressure cooker with sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. When we finally got a close look at Mars, we found nothing but dust. 

In the mid-70s, the world finally saw pictures from the surface of our neighboring planets. The Soviet craft Venera 9 landed on Venus in 1975 and sent back pictures of a furious hostile planet with a sky the colour of mustard gas. The following year, NASA’s Viking 1 showed that Mars was another vast emptiness. Our corner of the universe was entirely uninhabited, except for us. It was existentially bleak bad news. 

If you believed NASA, that is. But what if NASA was lying?

Public interest in the space race had dwindled to nothing by 1976, but that year saw two new conspiracy theories emerge from NASA’s activities. The first theory was sparked by a former engineer who had worked (as a contractor) on the Apollo programme. His book, We Never Went To The Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, laid out the modern moon landing conspiracy, using arguments such as “the shadows are wrong”. Again, this theory followed a familiar formula: the American government were telling deliberate lies to hide something shady. 

The second conspiracy was NASA’s own fault. As an attempt to drum up some interest in space exploration, they issued a press release about an interesting photo taken by Viking 1 over the Cydonia region of Mars. The light was hitting the rock formation in a particular way, and if you squinted a little, you could kind of see a human face. Fun! 

This was immediately reported in the press as “FACE FOUND ON MARS”. The Face on Mars became–and still is–the most famous structure in the entire solar system outside of earth. Enthusiasts started “identifying” other structures, and soon the Martian Sphinx was joined by a pyramid, a city, and burial mounds–although still no canals. 

All of this was proof of alien life on Mars–and a NASA conspiracy to cover it up. The fact that NASA had been the ones who first announced the Face on Mars was just further proof of how clever and manipulative they are. 

4. Was I thrown into confusion?

Of course, in the 1970s, governments were regularly lying to their people about many things. This was the height of the Cold War, when secrecy and paranoia were the key drivers of state policy. Watergate had shown that criminals can inhabit even the highest office, while economic decline caused a loss of faith in public institutions. 

But if the world’s governments were really conspiring to hide UFOs, they did an awful job. In the USSR, a mass sighting in Petrozavodsk spurred The Kremlin to launch a formal study into UFOs. In the USA, Jimmy Carter became President after he admitted he’d once seen a UFO and pledged to make public any documents about contact with aliens. 

And so, we come back to Britain in 1979, where The House of Lords is about to debate the existence of UFOs. The Ministry of Defence has provided briefing notes to David Kenworthy, aka Lord Strabolgi. If the conspiracy is as efficient as people claim, then this should have been a whitewash. 

Lord Clancarty, aka UFO enthusiast Brinsley Trench, made a long speech with details of various UFO sightings, ranging from descriptions in ancient texts to more recent encounters, such as the Iranian jet fighter that engaged a flying saucer above Tehran. Trench also laid out the theory of a global conspiracy, spearheaded by the CIA, to hide the truth about UFOs. He finished with this plea: 

“Is it not time that Her Majesty’s Government informed our people of what they know about UFOs? The UFOs have been coming in increasing numbers for 30 years since the war, and I think it is time our people were told the truth.”

Over the next two hours, the other Lords stood up and… mostly agreed with Brinsley Trench, including his claims of a high-level conspiracy. The Earl of Kimberley, a distant relative of PG Wodehouse, said: 

“It has been reported that the United States and the USSR signed a pact in 1971 to swop UFO information, but the pact stated that they were to keep the rest of the world in the dark…The people of Britain have a right to know all that the Governments, not only of this country but others throughout the world, know about UFOs.”

Other Lords said they found the idea of extraterrestrial visitors quite credible. One Lord suggested that we keep an open mind about the Loch Ness Monster too. The Bishop of Norwich refused to rule out the possibility that aliens, if they exist, might be Christian. Lord Gainford took things to the next level by claiming he’d seen a UFO: 

“It was on 31st December about 8 p.m. All right, my Lords, have a good laugh, it was Hogmanay! Up in Argyll it was a New Year’s Eve party and somebody said there was something funny flying across the sky. Fifteen of us came out to have a look, including some children. They had been drinking soft drinks anyway! The object was like a bright white ball with a touch of red followed by a white cone. In fact the whole object had the appearance of a small comet. It was heading eastwards and seemed rather low in the sky, passing over the hills between Loch Sweyne and Loch Fyne. The position from which we viewed it was outside the village of Tay-vallich in Argyllshire on the West coast of Scotland about the same latitude as Glasgow.”

Lord Hewlett, who had been elevated to the Lords after a success career in the chemical industry, laid out his scientific rationale for not believing in UFOs, adding that he’d visited the boffins at Jodrell Bank and they’d confirmed it was all nonsense. This prompted the most heated exchange of the night, with Hewlett denying that he was a CIA asset while The Earl of Kimberley made this allegation: 

“My Lords, does the noble Lord not think it conceivable that Jodrell Bank says that there are no UFOs because that is what it has been told to say?”

David Kenworthy/Lord Strabolgi rose after three hours of this back-and-forth. His speech was more muted than anticipated, sounding almost exhausted. After debunking most of the specific claims made by UFO enthusiasts, he said:

 “I can assure your Lordships that the Government are not engaged in any such conspiracy. …The Ministry of Defence examines any UFO reports received to establish whether they reveal anything of defence interest, but nothing in the reports examined has ever given cause to believe that they represent alien spacecraft. There is nothing to have a conspiracy of silence about.”

Ultimately, the debate didn’t really change anything, although it did demonstrate something fascinating about human nature. Conspiracy theories are appealing to everyone, even the most of elite of elites such as the House of Lords.

5. It wasn’t an illusion

The Top 40 has seen a few songs about UFOs over the years. There was ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’, a song about wanting to see a UFO; ‘I Ran’ by Flock of Seagulls, which is essential a science fiction story; and ‘99 Luftballons’, which is about World War III kicking off when people mistake some balloons a flying saucer. But ‘No Doubt About It’ by Hot Chocolate song is unique in that it’s about a real-life, verified encounter with a UFO.

(Possibly. Although some people have doubts. Hot Chocolate’s guitarist, Harvey Hinson, once said, “I am pretty sure they didn’t see anything and they just said they did to make it more credible and interesting.”)

UFO mania continued throughout the 80s, starting with an event in winter of 1980 that’s known as “The British Roswell”, where American troops stationed near Rendlesham Forest saw some a series of mysterious lights. The incident was officially blamed on a nearby lighthouse, but that didn’t stop the News of the World printing this: 

 The 1980s also saw the extremely British phenomenon of crop circles, which were either messages from visiting aliens or a very elaborate prank, depending on your point of view. Either way, crop circles became an important icon of the New Age Traveller movement, which made them a symbol of resistance to the Thatcher/Reagan neoliberal government. 

Since then, and especially since the dawn of the internet, UFOs and other conspiracy theories have sort of coagulated into a single anti-authority belief system. The government aren’t just hiding flying saucers from you, they’re hiding everything, and everything is part of their plan to distract you from the truth. Grey aliens gave Joe Biden the secret of 5G and he put it in the vaccines because he’s working for a shadowy cabal of pedophile immigrants who want you to believe the earth is a globe. It’s all connected. 

We’ve come a long way from the days of novelty pop songs about flying saucers over Watford. 

Personally, I get depressed by the modern conspiracy theories. UFOs and things of that nature used to be fun. Reading about nighttime abuctions and Men In Black used to be entertaining. Modern ghost stories for a sci-fi age. Now, it feels like propaganda for a neo-fascist movement of people who want to tear down the government because the internet told them to. 

That said, I don’t entirely blame people for feeling like the truth has been deliberately withheld. In many cases, it has. 

One thing that wasn’t discussed in the Lords debate was that story about a regiment being abducted in World War I. Brinsley Trench wrote about it in his books but didn’t mention it. David Kenworthy had briefing notes on it, but he also glossed over the topic. 

Here is the story: A British regiment went to Gallipoli in 1915 and tried to storm the Turks. They marched up a hill, atop which were a series of mysterious clouds–not unlike the cloud-shaped object that inspired ‘No Doubt About It’. The regiment walked straight into the cloud and, according to eye witnesses, vanished from sight. The clouds than began to drift up into the sky, as if controlled by an unseen force. The soldiers were never seen again. 

Some of this is based on fact. A British battalion (not a regiment) did try to storm a Turkish position in August, 1915, and the batallion did go missing under mysterious circumstances. Other witnesses confirmed that there was an unseasonably heavy mist that day, which hid the battalion from view. 

But the men weren’t abducted by aliens. They were slaughtered. 

The truth is that the battalion had blundered into heavily fortified position, mostly due to poor intelligence. Everything went wrong that day. Backup failed to arrive on time, the unit got lost and drifted off course, and while they had hoped to have the sun at their backs, they instead found themselves blanketed in unseasonable mist. The battalion made easy targets for snipers, and the Turkish army simply executed the rest. 

A mass grave the battalion’s insignia was found in 1919, but the story was hushed up. Most of the regiment had trained in Sandringham and the King personally enquired about their welfare. Author Nigel McCrery, in his 1991 book The Vanished Batallion, speculated about why commander responsible for the fiasco chose to hush it up: 

“What was he to say? ‘Sorry, but I’ve just sacrificed them all quite needlessly in yet another botched attack?’ His best course of action, I believe, was to create an air of mystery and thereby stop any form of enquiry into their loss or his leadership.”

via this excellent blog on the topic by Dr David Clarke

The truth is that most of our world exists in a permanent fog of war. Governments don’t conspire, they just stumble from one crisis to the next, with individual actors mostly just trying to cover their own asses. 

And it’s this that makes conspiracy theories so appealing. It would be nice to discover there’s certainty behind all the doubt, in the same way that it would have been reassuring if NASA had actually found life on Mars. 

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