IT ALL began in the summer of 1947 when the pilot of a private plane flying near Mt. Rainier in Washington saw several disk-shaped things moving through the air one after another in an undulating path, “like pie plates skipping over the water.”
This report was printed in many newspapers, and was followed quickly by a flurry of similar reports from other parts of the country. Lights in the sky were said to hover, then to dart away at high speed, making zigzag turns impossible for any known aircraft. A flotilla of oval lights was seen and photographed at Lubbock, Texas. Radar operators in airports and on planes aloft began to notice blips on their screens that did not fit any planes known to be present. They traced out weird courses, and sometimes abruptly disappeared.
Numerous photographs were publicized, mostly of fuzzy lights in the dark, but a few showed sharply defined outlines of saucerlike objects in a daytime sky. A cross-country motorist took a moving picture of a mysterious group of white spots milling about over the desert near Tremonton, Utah.
The first news reports used the term “flying saucers,” and this name has come to be popularly applied to all strange objects seen in the sky. But many of the things seen do not have the form of a saucer; hence, they are more accurately called “unidentified flying objects,” or UFO’s for short.
At times the UFO’s became so numerous that thousands of people were seeing them, almost in a mass hysteria. Newspapers filled their columns with interviews, official reports, rumors and opinions. In July 1952, an avalanche of reports of radar sightings and strange lights around the airport at Washington, D.C., touched off such a scare. In Mexico City in September 1965, rush-hour traffic was jammed for several evenings in a row, and people passed the nights on rooftops to watch moving lights in the sky.
Many of the descriptions of UFO’s implied that they were under intelligent control and moving in response to observers who tried to approach to get a closer look. Sometimes police in patrol cars undertook to track down low-hovering UFO’s. They found their cars unable to keep pace, and returned terrified with tales of having been chased by their intended quarry. Military pursuit planes went up to attempt contact with visible or radar targets. One 1948 afternoon in Kentucky, an unfortunate pilot tried to catch a UFO. It rose ahead of him, and he reported that he was climbing to 20,000 feet. That was the last word from him. He was found dead in the wreckage of his plane.
Speculation
Speculation abounded as to the origin of the mysterious “flying saucers.” Was the United States secretly testing a new type of vehicle, powered by atomic or magnetic or even gravitational energy? Or perhaps some foreign power had mastered such a motive force and was flaunting its newfound prowess in United States skies. Most widely propagated, though, was the theory that visitors from outer space had arrived to survey the earth and study its inhabitants. There is no doubt that this idea is what endowed the “flying saucers” with their chief fascination. The fact that man was just preparing to venture off his earthly home to explore other worlds gave him cause to wonder if intelligent creatures elsewhere had done it before him. On the other hand, the idea was disturbing to those who believed that man is unique in the universe as an intelligent, fleshly creation of God.
Some persons claimed that the flying saucers had indeed landed in out-of-the-way places, and pointed to flattened vegetation or scorched earth at the site of the landing as proof. It was claimed that close encounters with the interplanetary vehicles had put out lights and stopped clocks and even motors of automobiles, leaving the metal magnetic and the surroundings radioactive. A few people testified that they had been taken aboard the “saucers,” one in a California desert, another on a Brazilian farm, and met the Venusian voyagers. Although their testimony was uncorroborated, there were the gullible, ready to believe. A religious aspect was introduced with the springing up of a new cult centered on the godlike supermen from Venus.
Most scientists tended to pooh-pooh the excitement. Astronomers were particularly unimpressed. They pointed out that it was their business to watch the skies, but they had not seen any “flying saucers.” Besides, they asked, where would they come from? Mars? Venus? From what we already knew of these planets it would be quite impossible for any humanlike creature to live there, since there was no air or water. And interplanetary probes, testing the atmosphere of Venus and taking closeup pictures of Mars, reinforced this opinion. Venus was found hot enough to melt zinc, Mars cold and dead as the moon. Few scientists considered the subject of UFO’s interesting enough to devote any research time to it, or even to talk about it in public. It was rarely mentioned in their journals. One astronomer took the trouble to write a book showing how mirages could produce effects like the bobbing “saucers” seen at Mt. Rainier, or the lights at Lubbock.
It seemed likely that most of the “flying saucers” being seen were merely misconceptions of ordinary things like stars, meteors, airplanes, balloons, and mirages, not to exclude hoaxes and hallucinations. But the nagging question remained: Could all the strange sights reported be attributed to such prosaic causes? Or might there be a few genuine “flying saucers,” really beyond the ability of scientists to explain?
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