Happy Anniversary, Flying Saucers!

Today is the 60th anniversary of the start of the Flying Saucer Flap of the Twentieth Century. On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted a flight of crescent-shaped objects over the Cascade Mountains of Washington. His description of their flight, "like stones skipping over water," gave some reporter the notion to create the term flying saucers. Nowadays we lump sightings like Arnold's under the overall designation of "UFO," but it's the name flying saucers that caught and held the public's imagination.

Some people have speculated that Arnold saw a flight of birds, specifically pelicans, maybe geese. I don't know. I would assume that Arnold, being a pilot and retired military, would have been a trained observer, but even trained observers can have their eyes fooled under certain conditions. I can't believe he would come forward with such a story, risking ridicule, if there was even the most remote chance what he saw was a flock of birds, but what did he see? Nobody knows, but an enterprising magazine editor named Ray Palmer saw a golden opportunity to sell magazines with stories of flying saucers. The public snapped them up, feeding into the great promotional myth-machine that is American publishing.

Do I believe in flying saucers? I'm a skeptic: in religion, governments and flying saucers. I had my own experience with a flying saucer at age 9, and now believe my childish mind was tricked by suggestion from a friend. I believe that the psychology behind flying saucer devotees keeps them hanging on to a dream that someday we'll all know the truth about UFOs, and that they'll be proved right for their long-held beliefs. As for me, well, I know there are lots of things in the skies that look like other things, so let's just say that if a flying saucer lands and little gray men get out and greet us I might be persuaded to believe. It's been 60 years and despite a lot of wild stories and individual claims--and a bunch of fuzzy and easily faked photographs--no one has ever been able to prove to my satisfaction that there are flying saucers zipping around in our skies...
...or that they are from space, from the hollow world at the center of the Earth, from Atlantis, time machines from our future, on and on, etc., etc.

What I do like about flying saucers is their place in our popular culture. I've spent years collecting things that relate to them, and I'll be showing them here over the next few days.

In the earliest days of flying saucer mania, the trick was to persuade people that the phenomenon was real. There were a lot of folks back then, as now, who found the whole thing hard to believe.

The first issue of Fate Magazine, in 1948, founded and edited by the aforementioned Ray Palmer, had a very fanciful cover illustration of the Arnold sighting. Other books, by authors like Major Donald E. Keyhoe, endlessly repeated stories of alleged flying saucer sightings. Authors like George Adamski had some sort of personal agenda, and perpetrated hoaxes of contact with aliens. It was up to the individual as to how to process this sort of "information."

Flying saucers quickly found their way into popular culture. Comics were very popular in the early days of the flap, so they capitalized on the visual images of flying saucers. One comic book, Weird Science-Fantasy, had the audacity to "challenge" the Air Force! Even in those days the government was seen as the enemy of knowledge, holding back information about the mysterious craft. I'm sure this comic book got a big laugh in the Pentagon.

More later!