Arles photography festival review: who needs big names when you’ve got cute animals and alien abductions?

On 16 June 1963, a mechanic from Albuquerque named Paul Villa was allegedly invited – via telepathic messages from an alien crew – to photograph their spaceship. The result was an image of the flying object in the sky. Villa’s account is similar to that of a Swiss man, Billy Meier, who saw his first flying saucer aged five, and has taken more than 1,400 photographs of them since. One of Meier’s flying saucer photographs features in the famous poster that hangs in Fox Mulder’s office in the X-Files. Added to Meier’s image are the words: I Want to Believe.

We Are Not Alone: Alien Images is one of the standout shows of Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles this year, the world’s most prestigious photography festival. The show draws on dozens of examples from private and public archives that present visual “documents” of UFOs, unexplained phenomena and close encounters with aliens. Most of the photographs were made between the 1960s and 1980s, when reports of UFO sightings were at a peak – and in the US, the place that boasted the highest number of UFO sightings in the last century. Of course, all of the pictures turn out to be the result of rudimentary tricks (dangling a dish on a string in front of the camera), cases of misidentification or uncanny accidents of the analogue film. They might be amateur and faked, but they still pull you in thanks to their fascinating, idiosyncratic storytelling.