UFO sightings that change the discussion about UFOs in the United States

A UFO or flying saucer appears in the trailer for Jordan Peele’s latest film “Nope”, which will be released on July 22nd and will star Daniel Kaluuya (Source: Universal Studios)

Everything changed 75 years ago changed. In June 1947, commercial pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine “flying saucers” flying at 2,200 miles per hour over Washington state. The editor of East Oregonia sent this completely unverifiable story to the Associated Press News Service, and on June 26, Hearst International issued a press release that included the fateful term “flying saucers.” The story spread around the world much faster than 2000 km/h. Soon,
more sightings were reported, including debris from a crashed flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico.Some of these messages were clearly scams: It wasn’t difficult to fake a photo of a saucer if you had a hubcap, a Frisbee, or a pizza on hand. According to Shail, some sightings were “weather balloons, airships, cloud formations and experimental aircraft developed by the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War.” And if we’re completely open-minded, some sightings could include Martians flying over sparsely populated regions of Earth for fun.But one thing was certain: the excitement surrounding the flying saucer had begun.

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Interest in flying saucers increased around the same time that humans were probably visiting space – Katharine Coldiron

In 1953, Donald H. Menzel’s book about this hysteria entitled “Three Explanations for Flying Saucers” was proposed. “First of all, flying saucers are cool. We are all used to regularity. Of course we attribute the mysterious to the extraordinary.Secondly, we are all nervous. We live in a world that has suddenly become hostile. We have unleashed forces we cannot control; Many people fear that we are heading towards a war that will destroy us. Third, people value this fear to some extent. They seem to be part of an exciting work of science fiction.

75 years ago, in July 1947, the remains of a crashed flying saucer were found in Roswell, New Mexico (Source: Getty Images)

The nervousness mentioned by Menzel had several causes. For one thing, the United States and the Soviet Union were competing to become the first superpower to put a satellite into orbit: the Soviet Union won space with Sputnik 1 in 1957, says Katharine Coldiron, author of the monographic guide “Midnight Movies.” The notoriously terrible flying saucer film, Plan 9 from Outer Space. “The human imagination spins in
directions when something like a space race radically stimulates it. I think the same thing is happening with climate change: creators of all kinds are being spurred to create works about the possible end of our species, and at least in fiction we’re seeing this wave reach critical mass.

Americans also had other things to think about: unemployment, inflation, the threat of a Soviet invasion and, above all, the possibility that their cities would be destroyed by the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This fear. should focus on flying saucers, “a mysterious and entertaining phenomenon,” award-winning science fiction author Jack Womack told BBC Culture, “but not necessarily dangerous, unlike the possibility of nuclear war in .”

Flying Saucers in popular culture
Almost as remarkable as any sightings of flying saucers was the fact that so many people wrote memoirs about them. Womack’s collection of these memorabilia is the subject of his book Flying Saucers Are Real!, which includes excerpts from the books These Sexy Saucer People, Flying Saucers and Writings, and Journey to Hell in a Flying Saucer. An example is George W. Van Quaste’s book I Ride a Flying Saucer by George W. Van Quaste, published in 1952.”He’s honest enough to point out that he didn’t actually fly in a flying saucer,” says Womack, “but the Space Brothers suggested giving their creation a catchier title.” While many of these so-called non-fiction books were ridiculous, they contained they have some scientific theses. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, addressed this topic in his 1959 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.

At this point, flying saucers were flying everywhere in popular culture. It’s no surprise that the comics were full of saucers. A 1954 special issue of EC Comics’ Weird Science-Fantasy magazine stated: “EC challenges the US Air Force with this illustrated, factual account of flying saucers.” In the world of cartoons, Chuck Jones’ Bugs Bunny -Comic Haredevil Hare 1948 introduces Marvin the Martian. There he piloted a Buck Rogers-style rocket, but when Marvin visited Bugs on Earth at The Hasty Hare in 1952, he switched to a flying saucer.

The first film about a flying saucer was a low-budget independent film called “The Flying Saucer” (1950) (Source: Alamy)

In 1951, Ella Fitzgerald recorded a jazz piece written by Arthur Pitt and Elaine Wise called “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer” on . . , a satirical catalog of humanity’s hateful habits, as seen through the little green men of the title: “On a mission/I heard the politician/During the speeches/But they walked/They walked faster than they walked/Because the heat of the Air made it a flywheel.” (The song has since been simplified to a countdown song for preschoolers.) However, no medium was as fascinated by flying saucers as the cinema.

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The first film about a flying saucer, titled The Flying Saucer, was released in 1950. It was a low-budget independent thriller written, directed and produced by its lead actor, Mikel Conrad, and was publicized with the suggestion that it might be based on a true story. “What is it?” – asked about the slogan of the poster. ” Where are you from ?Have you seen a flying saucer? The following year, 1951, Hollywood released two true saucer classics. One of these was Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien messenger named Klaatu (Michael Rennie) warns humanity to “live in peace or continue on their current course and face destruction.” . His sleek, windowless saucer is the ultimate in interplanetary minimalism. The second classic of 1951 was Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World, in which
alien spacecraft were discovered in the Arctic ice.In the source material, a short story by John W. Campbell, the spaceship is “like a submarine… 280 feet long and 45 feet in diameter,” but in the film it is a flying saucer and the only surviving member of its crew is a monstrous predator. “Each of these films, in their own way, embodied the dark undercurrent of social paranoia that plagued America,” writes Michael Stein in Alien Invasions!The History of Aliens in Pop Culture. “One was about the fear of a subversive invasion, the other was about the nightmare of global destruction. »

In 1951, Hollywood released two classic films about flying saucers: The Day the Earth Stood Still by Robert Wise and The Thing from Another World by Howard Hawks (Source: Alamy)

Given the regularity with which As flying saucers replace other earthly horrors, it will be fascinating to see what they represent. To date, Peele’s brilliant horror films have been limited to social criticism and focused on the racism experienced by black Americans. No, will this trend continue? “Peele’s decision to make a film about UFOs is not surprising,” says Mark Bould, author of the Routledge Film Guidebook to Science Fiction, “because stories about flying saucers and UFOs have always had a racist element. Alien abductions. In the late 1940s, aliens were often portrayed as too white.African Americans are the descendants of the abductees, victims of pale, technologically advanced aliens who suddenly appeared from afar, and African American science fiction and Afrofuturism often return to this brutal historical rupture. No, this is just the latest example of a mothership merger.

The end of the saucer madness

In the 1950s, flying saucer films did not always raise such profound sociopolitical concerns. These include The Devil Girl from Mars (1954), This Island Earth (1955), Forbidden Planet (1956), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) and Atomic Submarine (1959). One of the biggest was Earth vs. Flying Saucers (1956), which featured Ray Harryhausen’s typically fantastic stop-motion animation. One of the worst was the aforementioned Space Plan 9 (1957).

One of the greatest flying saucer films of the 1950s was Earth vs. Earth. Flying Saucers (1956), with stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen (Source: Alamy).

All of these videos had a saucer in common. From the director’s perspective, this iconic spaceship was a godsend as it was relatively easy to build and shoot. Unlike a traditional rocket, it could change direction without having to show that it was turning. It looked great too.

The Flying Saucer emerges in an era of new covert technologies, primarily military, including the atomic bomb… but also a wave of new consumer technologies – Mark Bould

“The advantage of the Flying Saucer design is that they are simple – “Using point abstraction,” Bould tells BBC Culture. “Its perfect symmetry underlines that it is not a natural thing, while the lack of known flight signs – no wings or engines – suggests that it is not only a technological artifact, but also an extremely advanced object.”It cements its place in the Western mythology of progress long before us.

Not that the saucer is completely out of this world. Its curved, shiny surface, behind which all sorts of complex wires and valves were hidden, reflected the most fashionable cars, ovens and washing machines of the post-war period. “The flying saucer emerges at a time of new covert technologies, particularly of a military nature, including the atomic bomb,” Bould explains to BBC Culture, “but also a wave of new domestic consumer technologies whose inner workings are becoming increasingly mysterious to the average owner… The flying saucer appears to combine the two trends that are widely visible in American skies.

The big science fiction hit of the 1950s was not an alien invasion film, but Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Source: Alamy)

The flight didn’t last long. By the late 1950s, enthusiasm for flying saucers was waning, both in terms of reported sightings and appearances on the big screen. “When it comes to flying saucer films, horror films did better than serious films,” says Mark Jancovich, author of Rational Fears: American Horror Genre in the 1950s. “And we could make horror films cheaply. What happened was that sci-fi horror films moved into the low-budget end of the market.Studios also realized that the big sci-fi hit of the 1950s wasn’t an alien invasion film, but Disney’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Then came a wave of historical science fiction films such as The Time Machine, The Curse of Frankenstein and The Lost World [starring Klaatu himself and Michael Rennie]. The Victorian setting of gothic horror films made them respectable, while flying saucers had fallen to a lower level by the 1950s. »

In the real world, however, 1961 was the year Yuri Gagarin orbited the planet and President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him to Earth.” Real space travel was so amazing that flying saucers seemed bizarre in comparison.Finally, the U.S. Air Force’s investigation of flying saucer observations, Project Blue Book, led to the publication of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects in 1969. His devastating conclusion: “The UFO research of the last 21 years has produced nothing that has contributed to scientific knowledge.”

The big science fiction hit of the 1950s was not an alien invasion film, but Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Source: Alamy)

The flight didn’t last long. By the late 1950s, enthusiasm for flying saucers was waning, both in terms of reported sightings and appearances on the big screen. “When it comes to flying saucer films, horror films did better than serious films,” says Mark Jancovich, author of Rational Fears: American Horror Genre in the 1950s. “And we could make horror films cheaply. What happened was that sci-fi horror films moved into the low-budget end of the market.Studios also realized that the big sci-fi hit of the 1950s wasn’t an alien invasion film, but Disney’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Then came a wave of historical science fiction films such as The Time Machine, The Curse of Frankenstein and The Lost World [starring Klaatu himself and Michael Rennie]. The Victorian setting made gothic horror films respectable, while flying saucers had fallen to a lower level by the 1950s. »

In the real world, however, 1961 was the year Yuri Gagarin orbited the planet and President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him to Earth.” Real space travel was so amazing that flying saucers seemed bizarre in comparison.Finally, the U.S. Air Force’s investigation of flying saucer observations, Project Blue Book, led to the publication of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects in 1969. His damning conclusion: “UFO research conducted over the last 21 years has produced nothing that would enrich scientific knowledge.”