The classic Victorian ghost story – the ghost story to end all ghost stories – began in April 1882 when a retired army captain of Irish extraction, Frederick William Despard (53), his 46 year old second wife Harriet Ann (nee Nixon), ‘a great invalid’, and his teenage children, 19 year old Rosina Clara, Edith Sophia was about to turn 18, 15 year old Henry, 13 year old Lilian, 12 year old Mabel, and their little brother Wilfrid, 9, moved house. 
Some UFO stories have been exposed as hoaxes, and others can easily be explained as hoaxes. It is often difficult, though, to persuade most ufologists that a particular story is a hoax, because, as they want to believe the story, they fail to notice or deliberately ignore false assertions or logical contradictions in the story as it is presented to them. Sceptics, on the other hand, too often seem to take the view that the details don’t really matter, and that if the alleged witnesses had obvious motives for hoaxing then that must be the explanation.
Over the past half a century there have been hundreds of books, to say nothing of articles, purporting to solve “The UFO question”. The answers vary (and conflict, of course), but they are usually alike in that they consist of something that could easily be summarised in a few words, whether “They come from Zeta Reticuli”, or “Weather balloons”. The bulk of this writing is polemical, the author wanting to convince the reader of a particular theory, and selecting and arranging the material accordingly.