It was on the 24th of June in 1947 that Idaho businessman and private pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State when he observed nine objects flying in tandem above the hills and mountains. Reporting his sighting Arnold would describe the objects as being shaped like a pie plate cut in half with a convex front and a concave rear. He also described the motion of the objects as they flew along as ‘like a saucer skipping across water’.
So was born the ‘Flying Saucer’ craze that even today has not let up; tens of thousands of similar sightings have been reported in the years since 1947 and probably many more have gone unreported. Because very few reported sightings actually looked like saucers, most are simple lights in the sky that ‘behave strangely’, a technical term was soon created where the things would become known as ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ or UFOs.
In many ways Arnold’s original sighting was typical of a ‘good’ UFO report. Arnold was a well regarded, reliable citizen, a skilled pilot with 9,000 hours of flying time. The report he gave contained many details of the objects, their number and shape, where they were seen in the sky, their direction and approximate ‘angular velocity’. (That’s important in UFO sightings because if you don’t know how far away an object is you really cannot say how big it is or how fast it’s moving, you can really only estimate its angular size and angular velocity.) Sightings with that kind of detail are usually either solved or if they remain unsolved they constitute strong evidence that something very unusual happened.
In the early days of the UFO phenomenon there was considerable debate as to exactly what UFOs were. Right from the start alien spacecraft held the lead but secret Russian aircraft and even secret American aircraft were strong contenders. In time of course the Russians and Americans fell out of favour and today anyone who sees a UFO immediately knows it’s aliens come to Earth. Which if you think about it means that they shouldn’t really be called Unidentified should they?
Of course Hollywood has had a great deal to do with aliens going from being the favoured to the exclusive passengers on UFOs. After all how many movies have you seen where a Flying Saucer lands and out steps a Bug Eyed Monster or BEM, as opposed to many have you seen where a Russian or American steps out? And anytime a big Hollywood movie about Flying Saucers such as Steven Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ or ‘ET, the Extraterrestrial’ are released the number of UFO sightings reported triples or quadruples for the next few years.
There have been many attempts to try to solve the mystery of UFOs. Undoubtedly the best known of which is the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book of the 1950s and 60s. In fact the term UFO was coined by one of the leaders of Project Blue Book Captain Edward J Ruppelt. It is important to remember that Project Blue Book was never tasked with finding out what Flying saucers were. Its job, as outlined in their budget request to Congress, was to determine whether or not UFOs constituted any threat to the United States. Blue Book was closed down in 1969 but since the United States is still here, there has been no alien invasion you have to agree that UFOs weren’t that much of a threat.
There have also been several scientists who have attempted to study UFOs; perhaps the best known of these was the astronomer Josef Allen Hynek who acted as a scientific advisor to the Air Force from 1947 to 1969. It was Hynek in fact who developed the ‘Close Encounter’ system of classifying UFO reports. During his time with Project Blue Book and for many years afterward Hynek came to believe that UFOs were an important subject that needed much more attention and resources than the Air Force was willing to commit to. After leaving Blue Book Hynek would found the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS).
One problem with trying to study Flying saucers is the tremendous number of bad UFO sightings, you know the type, ‘I saw somethin’ in the sky… must a been one of them Flying Saucers’. Even worse are the outright frauds and hoaxes that really make any empirical study of the subject all but impossible. Think about it, a prominent, important scientist, a Nobel Laureate let’s say, decides to investigate a famous video of a Flying Saucer. He decides that the evidence is so strong that, ‘There can be no doubt that this is a unknown phenomenon’! Only to have the video’s maker go on TV and declare it to be a fake while laughing at how he fooled a Nobel winner!
When scientists make measurements they do everything they can to make that data as accurate as possible, and they assume that other scientists do the same. Any scientist who is proven to have knowingly or even incompetently published inaccurate data quickly looses all of their reputation and no one will ever trust them again.
If a scientist wants to study UFOs however they will have to trust the information provided by normal citizens, a small number of whom are only interested in publicity or sometimes even just making people smarter than them look stupid. Because of the possibility that the data coming from witnesses could be unreliable or worse, outright lies even scientists who think that there could be something interesting in UFOs won’t touch the subject and avoid making any statements regarding ‘flying saucers’.
Over the last seventy-five years there have been a large number of UFOs incidents that have become highly publicized. During the 1950s Flying Saucer reports even made headline news. Incidents such as the Lubbock lights in August of 1951 and the numerous radar contacts of UFOs over Washington DC during a two week period in July of 1952 forced the US Air Force to open an investigation into whether or not the phenomenon represented a threat to the security of the nation.
It was also during the 1950s that the first photo and first movie of a UFO were made. A farmer outside of McMinnville, Oregon took the first photo in May of 1950. Just three months later in August it was the manager of the Great Falls, Montana minor league baseball team however who made the first colour movie of two UFOs flying above the town. That film has been subjected to many years of analysis and even today represents some of the best evidence for there actually being something unknown flying in our skies.
Of course the most famous UFO sighting of them all is the Roswell, New Mexico case, which grabbed headlines across the country just two weeks after Kenneth Arnold’s report. On July the 8th of 1947 the press officer at the US Army Air Core base outside Roswell, the Air Force did not yet exist as a separate branch of the military, announced that a Flying Saucer had crashed and the wreckage was in the Air Core’s possession. Just three hours later that initial report was changed to it being a weather balloon that had crashed.
I’m not going to go into any detail about Roswell, too many lies have been told by both sides of the UFO debate for any truthful accounting of the facts to be presented now. I will just say that for the US government to have had a Flying Saucer in its possession for seventy-five years without some concrete evidence getting out is hard to believe.
Another aspect of UFO reports are the large number of people who have claimed to have been abducted and taken aboard the spaceships. One of the first such incidents was reported by Antonio Vilas Boas of Brazil in October of 1957. Probably the most famous UFO abduction however was that of Betty and Barney Hill who in September of 1961 were driving in New Hampshire when they were stopped by a huge floating disk and taken aboard by alien creatures where they were medically examined. It is worth noting that the Hills only remembered their encounter after suffering nightmares and seeing a psychologist who used hypnosis to ‘regain’ their memories making those memories suspect at the very least.
Some UFOs sightings have been so spectacular that hundreds or even thousands of people have witnessed them at the same time. Such incidents include a Football match in Florence Italy in October of 1954 when a crowd of over 10,000 fell silent as a glowing light, traveling at high speed, came to a sudden stop directly over the stadium. Another mass UFO sighting took place in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania on the night December 9th of 1965 as a fireball passed over the town dropping debris and causing sonic booms. The likely impact area of the fireball was quickly cordoned off by the military and only years later did the government reveal that the UFO had actually been an early spy satellite returning from orbit.
The interest and publicity generated by the early Flying Saucer reports soon inspired a few UFO researchers to begin to comb through the historical record. What those researchers discovered were accounts of strange sightings and even encounters going back centuries that were nearly identical to more modern UFO reports. Such incidents go back as far as the Old Testament in the bible where ‘Ezekiel saw a wheel’. The author Erich von Danikan even proposed in his book ‘The Chariots of the Gods’ that the deities and demons of ancient myth and legend were in fact extraterrestrial visitors who came to Earth in Flying Saucers and made contact with ancient humans.
The UFO phenomenon has continued until the present day. The release of TV shows or movies about aliens like ‘The X-Files’ or ‘Independence Day’ can cause an uptick in UFO sightings but they never really go away entirely, people just see strange things all the time. The publication last year of videos taken by US Navy aviators flying off of the aircraft carriers Nimitz and Theodore Roosevelt showing ‘unexplained aerial phenomenon’ has spurred new interest in flying saucers. However those same videos also highlighted the problems with the whole study of UFOs because they really provide no better evidence of just what the unknown objects are than did the Great Falls, Montana colour movie made back in 1950. That’s the plain fact, we really have no better evidence of what UFOs are than we did in the 1950s. All we really have is a large number of reliable, often trained observers who see something, and occasionally take pictures of something flying in the sky that they don’t recognize. Scientifically we’ve been stuck at the same place for seventy years.
Still the recent, much publicized Navy videos have even prompted congress to take action. On the 17th of May the House Intelligence Committee began a series of hearings into UFOs in general and the UFO reports from military personnel in particular. Some of the hearings are scheduled to be held in public but others are going to be closed door for reasons of national security. Of course the true ‘UFO believers’ are going to claim that the real evidence is in the closed door hearings and the public sessions will be nothing but a cover-up. Still, you know that once congress gets involved they’ll have the whole matter sorted out in no time…yea right!
Personally I’m confident that there is something out there, some unknown phenomenon. But I’m also confident that it is a natural, not extraterrestrial phenomenon. And I also think that this phenomenon should be studied scientifically, which is why I’m glad that Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is setting up a project to gather new data about UFOs. I wish Dr. Loeb the best of luck but to be honest I don’t expect the question of UFOs to be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction during my lifetime, if indeed ever.
