The Voice Box: UFOs, UFC, Aliens & Armbars - The Truth is Out There

MMA announcer Michael "The Voice" Schiavello of HDNet Fights takes a look at the similarities of UFOs and the sport of MMA

I recently commentated the King of the Cage: Vengeance event high up in the snow-capped mountains of Mescalero, New Mexico, 9,000 feet above sea level. Mescalero is about an hour’s drive from a very famous little town you’d have to be a Tibetan Sherpa to have not heard of – Roswell. Being a self-confessed geek of all otherworldly who consumes every fragment of information available about the UFO phenomenon, alien abductions and extraterrestrial beings, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pay a visit to Roswell for two nights and get my alien on.

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The first thing you notice about Roswell is that there really isn’t that much to notice at all. Had a flying disk not allegedly crashed on a farm some 30 miles north of Roswell in 1947, I dare say this tiny town would not be mentioned too often in conversation. The 50,000 or so people who call Roswell home (a figure that doubles in the first week of July during the annual UFO Festival) rely heavily on curious tourists like yours truly to drop coin in the town’s several alien-themed souvenir shops, restaurants and hotels. Indeed along Roswell’s Main Road, you can’t turn in any direction without seeing something unearthly. Streetlamps are ornamented with almond-shaped alien eyes; giant alien blow up dolls adorn shop windows; alien foot prints lead the way to souvenir shops; you can purchase bottles of alien table wine and alien beer at the bottle shop (Alien Amber Ale it’s called, marketed as ‘the beer Uncle Sam has tried to keep under wraps for years’); and even the local McDonald’s restaurant is shaped like a giant UFO.

Venture into any of the many souvenir shops and you will encounter a shopkeeper who is only too happy to talk your ear off and give you an instant lesson on the Roswell UFO crash, New Mexico’s long history of rocket and missile testing, and alien sightings and abductions. While many will dismiss these people as cheesy, their knowledge of the local area and the entire UFO culture impressed the heck out of me. More than that, their sheer passion for the subject instantly gravitated me toward them and had me spending hours on end sitting in these shops listening to their limitless knowledge delivered with incredible zeal. In many ways the fanaticism these UFO enthusiasts demonstrated for their subject of interest mirrored the fanaticism I see in many MMA enthusiasts. I can’t help but to draw three striking comparisons between the UFO buff and the MMA buff:

1. Insatiable passion and continual hunt for information: Just as the UFO enthusiast is always on the hunt for sightings and photographic evidence, so too are MMA enthusiasts constantly populating internet forums and scouring headlines on a plethora websites, not to mention reading magazines, watching television shows and listening to podcasts and radio shows.
2. Easy targets: Despite being easy targets for popular criticism, UFO buffs maintain an unbridled joy for UFO research. While mainstream media is quick to label many UFO sightings as hoaxes, misinterpreted weather balloons or military aircraft, UFO enthusiasts know better and maintain their firm (and educated) stance in the face of media adversity. MMA enthusiasts can no doubt relate to this given that MMA (in particular the UFC) has been (and remains) an easy target for mainstream media who label MMA as nothing more than a blood sport or a glorified street fight between bar brawlers; a human cock fight or little more than a toughman contest. In the face of this criticism, MMA enthusiasts remain true in their love for the sport and educated to the fact that MMA is indeed a sporting contest of the highest order between two multi-disciplined athletes.
3. Fear of the unknown: Despite the overwhelming propagation of UFOs in popular culture, including movies, television and books, those who believe in UFOs and follow their beliefs with passion are greatly scorned and looked down upon by those who fear what they do not know. Likewise despite the growing presence of MMA in popular culture, many MMA fans remain derided by members of the general public who fear what they do not know. People fear both change itself and the very symbolism of change. UFOs symbolize a technology greater than ours from an existence more technically advanced than ours. MMA symbolizes the death knell of traditional combat sports and a new breed of athlete, a new breed of fan and a new sporting stage and form of entertainment that arouses something very primal – a feeling or state that many try to suppress.

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On my first night in Roswell, while walking to dinner along Main Road at around 5.30pm, I spotted a peculiar small flying object traveling at a great speed. At first I thought it to be a balloon, as it seemed only a couple of feet long and shaped like a party balloon. However as the object grew nearer it took on a visibly metallic appearance, almost dull gray or brushed aluminum in color. Its shape became more ellipsoidal or ovoid. It was traveling too fast to be a balloon and in a straight line though with a wobble or rocking motion.

I took two quick photos with my Canon Power Shot SX200 IS. For the first shot I zoomed in as close as I could to the object. On the second shot I took it without zoom and captured a tree in the foreground to offer a picture with another object in sight. Unfortunately the battery in my camera died after these two shots and I was unable to take any more pictures. The next day I went to the souvenir store and asked the clerk about the strange object I had shot the night before. I didn’t have my camera charger so could not charge the battery to be able to show him the picture but described it in as much depth as possible.

“You certainly saw something,” he said with an excited smile. “I’d love for you to email me the photo when you get home. We see strange things in the sky all the time here. I can usually tell you if what you saw was a weather balloon or a missile or a military craft or simply the way the light refracts off buildings or mountains, but it sounds like you’ve taken a picture of something really strange.”

When I returned home to Melbourne, I processed the picture and blew it up as large as possible. The clerk in the photo store who helped me process the shot stared at it in awe and said, “Mate, that’s a UFO! That’s a UFO!” When I told him I had taken the photo in the sky over Roswell he went into a spin and quickly called over his colleague. She took a look at the picture, shrugged her shoulders and said, “Pfft, it’s a balloon.”

“But it’s not a balloon,” I said. “Look at these black patches. Look at this little protruding bit on the top. Look at the overall shape of the object. How is that a balloon? Plus I saw the way it was traveling and—”

“It’s not a UFO,” she cut me off rudely, unwilling to listen to what more I had to say. “UFOs are bullshit. They don’t exist. This must have been a balloon or someone doing a hoax.”

I opened my mouth to retort but she walked off and served another customer.

Now for the point I want to make: swap my UFO for the UFC. Swap the stubborn and uneducated female clerk at the photo store with a friend or a colleague of yours who dismisses the UFC as nothing more than a human cockfight or a glorified street fight. You can tell them all you like about how a UFC athlete actually competes in a hybrid of several Olympic sports -- wrestling, boxing, Judo and Taekwondo – and how fighters are among the most well conditioned athletic specimens on the planet. In the same way UFO buffs will tell you that Roswell 1947, the Lubbock Lights 1951, The Belgian UFO Wave between 1989 and 1990 (143 witnessed accounts on the first night) and even Jimmy Carter’s hand-signed 1973 UFO sighting are just a few of the multitude of eye-witness events that add credence to the reality of UFOs.

Let me advise you, however, no matter how much you try to convince them, entrenched stubbornness is a hard thing to relinquish.

I guess what tipped me over the edge in writing this piece was the reaction to the UFC after the promotion’s first ever show in Australia on February 21. The negative reaction from local media, not to mention the negativity of those sheep that blindly followed the media’s opinions and don’t bother to form their own, truly disappointed me. These Lemmings did not have the capacity to watch the UFC and study its rules, regulations and athletes but rather formed their shallow anti-UFC opinions after watching a clip of Stephan Bonnar’s cut on the nightly news or seeing a photo of it in the paper. They dismissed the UFC as “barbaric,”“no rules fighting” and “an ugly bunch of uncivilized nonsense,” as one person put it to me. Mind you this same person is a rugby fan – a sport in which participants wrap masking tape around their heads to save their ears from getting ripped off. He is also a fan of Australian Rules football, a sport in which you’re allowed to run full steam at a player’s back, dig your knee into his spine (illegal in MMA), and propel your entire body weight off of his spine to catch a ball!

I wanted to argue with this person. I wanted to sit him down and show him UFC 110 and highlight the grappling brilliance of George Sotiropoulos; the striking power of Cain Valasquez; the never-say-die spirit of Michael Bisping and Wanderlei Silva; and the faultless sprawls of Mirko Cro Cop. But as my fellow UFO buffs well know, as do my fellow MMA enthusiasts, you can’t win them all.

We live in a world where people are quick to dismiss the UFC and UFOs as a bunch of malarkey and remain too stubborn, proud or too hung up in their own hypocritical moral boundaries to acknowledge or even try to appreciate the aesthetics of something unconventional. Instead of declaring war and trying to convince the knockers to step out of their precious bubbles, I choose to let the sport of MMA fight its own battle. The fact that MMA is the fastest growing sport in the world, both in participation, the number of promotions and most of all in terms of television viewership, allows the sport to not wage battle against the naysayers from the trenches but rather charge at them full bore with a loud and proud battle cry that will only continue to grow louder and prouder.

Yet despite the knockers who will always exist in their precious bubbles, MMA continues to boom as the world’s fastest growing sport, just as more and more eyewitness accounts of UFO’s and stories of alien abductions come to the fore.

By Michael Schiavello
ProFighting-fans.com MMA Guest Writer

Michael Schiavello is the voice of MMA and K-1 on HDNet and a regular correspondent for InsideMMA. He commentated the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and The Contender Asia reality TV series. He can be found online at: www.thevoiceofficial.com and at Twitter "SchiavelloVOICE."