Reiver Country Books, 2024. ISBN 979-8333063991 [pbk] 318 pp.
I thought this book would be heavy-going at first and indeed it was: that is, until I went back to Graeme Rendall’s introduction at the beginning to remind myself of the stated objectives of his endeavour. For it is here that his own story as a reader of UFO literature emerges, including his immersion in the UFO literature of the 1960s and 70s, and it is here, too, that we learn of his desire to write a new book on the French 1954 wave as an English language addition to the decades-earlier studies by Aimé Michel and others. By his own admission the author wanted also to adopt the homage style of those early 60s and 70s studies that had entranced him so, whilst resisting the temptation to theorize; leaving that, instead, to the reader.
And theorize I did; largely because the wealth of detail Rendall presents turns out to be just so darn fascinating. It is like stumbling over a treasure trove; a goldmine. And although any kind of quantitative analysis may be lacking here it is more than made up for by both the quantitative and qualitative possibilities for future studies that the book presents; based solely on the myriad reports it contains.
Example: about half-way through it occurred to me that I could compare any emergent patterns disclosed by Rendall’s reports with Jacques Vallee’s decades-old work on the 1954 wave’s UFO landings. As is well known, Vallee showed himself early on to be fascinated by the 1954 wave’s ‘close encounters’, recognising as early as the mid-1960s that they could be revealing contours and characteristics that might in turn lead to key insights into what the UFO phenomenon, essentially, was and is. Michel had already done this, of course, but there was a key sense in which Vallee went deeper, plotting 200 accounts -of which 156 were French – in search of a set of ‘Laws’: both negative and positive. The conclusions are well-known and, in a sense, part of UFO lore themselves: the fact that the 1954 UFO landing sites were inversely correlated with population density, the realisation that the 1954 witnesses ‘held steady jobs, often positions of social responsibility…’, the fact that the 1954 objects had an actual diameter of about five metres, and the fact that a ‘vanishingly small’ number of the landings took place during the day.[1]
How well does all of this fit with what Rendall presents? The answer is: it fits very well indeed. For we learn from his much bigger and more detailed study that the 1954 wave sighting-claims – many of them including landings – did indeed inversely correlate with population density, that many witnesses were indeed typical, socially responsible citizens (often, in fact, going about their daily jobs), and that their encounters typically occurred at dusk, during the night, or at dawn. In fact, Rendall allows us to go further here, for his three-hundred-plus pages of presented testimony-material reveal that as the 1954 French wave went on the vehicle interference cases increased in number, red and red-orange UFO colours emerged until it seemed that they had come to predominate, and accounts of witness paralysis became, if not frequent, then nonetheless disturbingly common. His cases also confirm Vallee’s decades-old contention that cases peaked in October, whilst his meticulous attention to collecting and presenting data – including follow-up reports – reveals a depressingly high number of tall stories: from self-confessed hoaxers to journalists in search of a laugh or a good story on a slow news day. There’s a temptation to read intertextuality – or something like it – into the way that the cases Rendall presents appear, in some ways at least, to ‘morph’ over time, but that’s the beauty of what he has assembled in this book: it invites you to do stuff like this, even if it stands outside of the author’s own, clearly stated, remit.
Jerome Clark once sagely observed that: ‘Waves are like snowflakes: no two are identical.’[2] Graeme Rendall’s absorbing, minutely-chronicled month-by-month detailing of the French UFO wave of 1954 – it actually all condenses into pretty much five months – is a compelling read: both for those in search of the distinctive patterning of this particular ‘snowflake’ and for those who are merely UFOlogically curious. He presents his wealth of collected, chiefly newspaper-based testimonies virtually sans analysis, stepping back to allow the stories to reveal their own content without embellishment or adornment and it all makes for a genuinely spooky read, particularly given the isolation of many of the claimed episodes and the unearthly hours at which many of them were said to have occurred. How much, however, these tales had attained their own shapes and forms before being presented in Rendall’s meticulously-footnoted collection is, of course, another story: and a reminder that where testimonies are a researcher’s exclusive source material it is they, and not the events they purport to reveal, which should be the primary focus of that researcher’s work.
[1] Jacques Vallee, ‘The Pattern Behind the UFO Landings: Report on an Analysis of 200 documented observations made in 1954’, Flying Saucer Review, Special Issue, October-November 1966, pp. 8 – 27
[2] Jerome Clark, ‘The UFO Encyclopaedia’, 3rd edition, MI, Omnigraphics, 2018 p.1263
This review first appeared in Seriously Strange, Issue 162, Spring 2025, pp. 78 – 9