I can agree with the views of some of the production team that the filmed footage "looked convincing"’ – but perhaps that is the key, in that a film SFX crew created something that look ‘right’ on camera, but they didn’t create something that looked ‘right’ to the naked eye at the time – which is what film and TV SFX is all about.
Why did they fly it over Avebury on this night – well, because they were guaranteed a likely audience with a publicised skywatch going on, so APRA and its colleagues can take something of a compliment here… That’s not to say of course that on any night in the summer they wouldn’t have found a likely audience in the Avebury area, as it is of course something of a magnet for UFO spotters, crop circle spotters, ghost watchers and New-Agers to name but a few.
The attempt at a successful ‘hoax’ started to fall down pretty early on the night, as the flight crew had technical difficulties in getting both height and control from the launch, so it was flying too low, and not entirely under full control. As we have already noted, the light wind carried the sound of the electric motors all too easily, so it was a bit of a giveaway. From our perspective, we’d rumbled the ‘hoax’ even before we’d seen the ‘saucer’ – or as the report that went onto rense.com commented, when we "bothered to get up out of our seats"!
