When They Come From Space

This is a continuation of yesterday's (June 24, 2007) blog, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the flying saucer sighting over the Cascade Mountains. It's caused interest for the past six decades.

It isn't much of a coincidence that flying saucer sightings were more numerous after World War II than before. War tends to make people hyper-sensitive. And it didn't help that our introduction to the war was by an invasion from the sky. According to some, there were UFO sightings before the war, but if there were, they must've caused no real impact. This picture purports to be from 1927. It looks fake to me. What do you say?
In 1947 especially, paranoia was rampant in America. Communism. Atom bombs. House Un-American Activities Committee. Yikes! What are we gonna do? Why, we're going to look to the skies, see if we can spot one of them there flyin' saucers. I think they're to blame.

Or they're here for benevolent reasons, or even for observation. Or they might be here for nefarious purposes, like invasion and taking over. While we worried about the commies taking over Europe, the public also got to worry about the Martians coming in and zapping our asses with ray guns. We knew how to fight the Russians. But how do you manage to fight a war with spacemen and their unknown technology?Several movies followed a theme of paranoia, but one, 1950's The Day The Earth Stood Still, showed the aliens as here in our best interest. The rest of the movies were very much about invasion from space. That wasn't anything new. H.G. Wells wrote The War Of The Worlds at the end of the 19th Century when we had even less defenses than we did after World War II.

If there's anything we're scared of, insects, global warming, serial killers or invasion from outer space, you can bet that Hollywood is there to make a movie playing on those fears. And you can bet we're going to line up at the box office, too. In 1956, Earth Vs The Flying Saucers was released. The effects were by stop-motion animation wizard Ray Harryhausen, so it's the most technically interesting of the 1950's space-invasion movies. t wasn't until Steven Spielberg's 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind that a really popular movie showed aliens coming in peace. The movie was very influential, but for the most part, though, when people thought of flying saucers at all they thought outer space, they thought aliens, they thought sinister purposes or impending invasion.

It also served their purposes to think that there was a big secret being hidden by our government. The government could operate outside of our interests. Our government had hidden the atom bomb until it was dropped on Japan, so why not hide the fact of outer space aliens? The government's own trend toward secrecy hasn't helped it, either. People with agendas can come forward with "official" top-secret documents or wild tales of riding in flying saucers, courtesy of the U.S. government. They might tell stories of meeting aliens living at Area 51 in the Nevada desert, and the government won't acknowledge the stories by saying if they're false or true.

That paranoid fear alone is enough to keep some people watching the skies.

More later!

Ciao for now.
The Mars Attacks cards were bubblegum collectibles in 1962, painted by illustrator Norman Saunders. They fit in perfectly with the invasion fantasy. Click on the smaller pictures for full-size images.