Alien Universe (6 page)

It is interesting to read what kinds of wilder speculation appeared in the press. In the
Time
magazine article, “front-line correspondents and armchair experts had a Buck Rogers field day,” guessing that the balls of fire were a weapon remotely controlled via radio (which was dismissed as being absurd, given that the balls exactly tracked some plane’s movements), as well as other prosaic phenomenon. A few more ideas that were kicked around were that the foo fighters were intended to (1) dazzle pilots, (2) serve as aiming points for antiaircraft gunners, (3) interfere with the plane’s radar, or (4) interfere with the operation of the plane’s motor, perhaps stopping the plane in midair. But, in the context of this book, which is the view of Aliens in the public eye, it is relevant that extraterrestrial origin wasn’t one of the suggestions. Modern UFO enthusiasts point to foo fighters as the first hints of Alien contact, but this wasn’t in the minds of the people reporting bright lights in the sky. They had a war to fight. But the idea of Aliens was about to begin.

UFO 1947

June 24, 1947, was a turning point in what we collectively think when we turn our eyes to the night sky. Kenneth Arnold was a businessman and a pilot. He never flew a bomber or fighter above Europe, but he certainly encountered men in the hangar who had. Arnold was flying his private plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State when he reported seeing nine brilliantly lit objects, flying across the face of Rainier. He described them as being flat, like a pie pan, and thin enough that they were hard to see. They were sort of half-moon shaped, convex in the rear and oval in the front (
figure 2.1
). The objects moved independently, but in a line, like the tail of a kite.

Arnold was flying at 9,200 feet at a speed of about 115 mph. He judged the objects as being at about 10,000 feet and estimated their speed at about 1,800 mph, although he allowed that there might be a mistake in his estimates and so he stated 1,200 mph was a more reasonable guess.

When he landed in Yakima, Washington, Arnold told the manager of the airport, who didn’t believe him. While in Yakima, Arnold talked to other people who happened to be at the airport. Arnold then flew on to Pendleton, Oregon, where an air show was going on. He was unaware that someone from Yakima had called ahead and told people there that he had seen something odd flying in the air of southern Washington.

FIGURE 2.1
.
This picture appears in Kenneth Arnold’s
The Coming of the Saucers
to give an idea of what he saw in 1947. You will note that the term “flying saucer” does not accurately describe this shape.
Copyright Ray Palmer
.

In Pendleton, he told his story to aviator friends, who weren’t surprised, nor did they discount it. First, Arnold was known to be a man of excellent character, and, second, some of the pilots had heard similar stories while flying sorties over occupied Europe. Whether foo fighters or some new airplane being tested by the Army Air Force, the observation was a curiosity but not something to get incredibly worked up about. The most noteworthy factor, and perhaps the reason that the press became involved, was the speed that he quoted for the aircraft. Going 1,200 mph was awful fast for 1947. It’s pretty fast even for today.

It wasn’t until the next day that Arnold spoke to reporters, when he stopped by the offices of the
East Oregonian
, a newspaper in Pendleton. He told them
his story, which they regarded as plausible enough to publish and put on the news wire for further dissemination. And that, as they say, was when things got crazy. The story was picked up by United Press International and the Associated Press. Some big newspapers carried the story. The
Chicago Tribune
ran a story two days later on
page one
, titled “See Mystery Aerial ‘Train’ 5 Miles Long.” However there was no mention of UFOs or flying saucers. The report quoted Arnold as saying they were fast, reflective, and moved like the tail of a Chinese kite, as if the craft were connected by a string. It further reported that the Army wasn’t doing high-speed tests in the area.

The term “flying saucer” seems to have been coined by accident. Arnold told reporters that the nine objects he saw were flat and shiny like a pie pan and that they looked like a little fish flipping in the sun. On June 26 the Chicago
Sun
ran an article “Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted by Idaho Pilot.” However, this seems to be an addition by an editor or headline writer. Much later, Arnold recalled that he had told the first reporters he spoke with that “they flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across the water,” and this phrase seemed to turn into “flying saucer,” which was then used and reused by newspapers. However, in the early newspaper articles, Arnold is never quoted as saying the phrase; instead he maintained his description of a kite tail and flat, shiny, pie plates. Thus the term “flying saucer” seems to have been a headline writer’s creative embellishment; yet subsequent reports in the press spread the term “saucers.”

Over the course of the next month, there were hundreds of reports of flying saucers as well as many clear hoaxes. A July 4 sighting by a United Airlines flight crew was deemed to be particularly respectable and received more press coverage than Kenneth Arnold’s initial story. The saucer sightings were quite varied, with some saucers said to literally be the size of pie pans and others the size of airplanes. While the original report mentioned a silver aircraft, subsequent ones were colorful and glowing.

Scientific speculation was extensive. A Los Angeles evening paper claimed that an unidentified physicist from California Institute of Technology had suggested that the saucers were experiments in the “transmutation of atomic energy.” This was a reasonable (although scientifically uninformed) speculation for the time, coming as it did just a couple years after the public became aware of the power hidden in the nucleus of the atom. The atomic hypothesis was rejected by the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal. He interrupted a reporter who was repeating the story and said,
“Of course, I can’t prevent anyone from saying foolish things.” A little later, Caltech issued a denial that anyone from that university had said flying saucers could be some sort of atomic experimentation.

Others speculated that the phenomena was mass hysteria or akin to sightings of the Loch Ness monster. Optical illusion, persistence of vision, and other similar causes were suggested.

One of the earliest suggestions of extraterrestrial origins came from a July 6 editorial in the
New York Times
, where the idea that “they may be visitants from another planet launched from spaceships anchored above the stratosphere” was airily dismissed. Arnold did say more than once that he considered that flying saucers could originate from somewhere other than Earth. On July 7, Arnold told the media that he had received lots of mail from people offering various explanations for what he had seen, from religious ideas to claims of extraterrestrial origins. In the
Chicago Times
, he is reported to have said, “Some think these things may be from another planet.” He followed by noting that the speed at which the saucers maneuvered would induce acceleration forces that would kill humans. The story quotes further: “So, he too thinks they are controlled from elsewhere, regardless of whether it’s from Mars, Venus, or our own planet.” The ET idea had started to leak into the public arena. Arnold later mentioned the idea in a 1950 radio broadcast by Edward R. Murrow called
The Case for Flying Saucers
. He said, “If it’s not made by our science or our Army Air Forces, I am inclined to believe it’s of an extraterrestrial origin.”

By July 7, 1947, saucer reports had come in from thirty-nine U.S. states and from overseas in Australia and many locations in Europe. However, the bulk of the observations came from the U.S. northwest. Across the nation, large and organized flights of pilots would take off from an area a hundred at a time to go out and look for unexplained aerial phenomena, with no success.

Things began to get silly, with clumps of dirt being reported as crashed saucers, or the top of a furnace, or saw blades with some electrical components welded to them. Some students soldered together two cymbals, tossed it in someone’s yard, banged on the door, and ran away. An anxious inhabitant called the police and reported a crashed saucer. By July 18, the
New York Times
reported that the summer’s chic women’s hats were being modeled after flying saucers. And on July 8, a 25-year-old turtle named Flying Saucer won the eighth annual turtle derby in Chesterton, Indiana.

Eventually news coverage about flying saucers gave way to pieces that debunked some flying saucer sightings. For instance, there were examples of the
University of Chicago or Princeton University releasing high-altitude research balloons that were carrying instrumentation for meteorological or cosmic ray studies. Given the massive publicity about the saucers, it is inevitable that people would call the police and newspapers and report a new sighting. After a year or two, the media began to get a little bored with these reports, and they tapered off. But, by 1949, the military had concluded that there was something to the UFO reports and had agreed that they would put some resources into the question. This is unsurprising, considering how frequently the extraterrestrial idea made it into the papers. By far, the most common explanation for UFOs (other than imagination and hysteria) was secret weapons programs. The U.S. military knew that they weren’t launching test planes that could fly more than a thousand miles an hour, so it is inevitable that those tasked with defending a country would want to find out if some other country had a new offensive capability that they needed to counter.

Of all the flying saucer reports that began in the summer of 1947, there was one special one that has lately managed to permeate the public’s awareness more than any of the others. As you will see, the real story is somewhat different than what is commonly believed. So we turn our attention to a small town in southeast New Mexico: Roswell.

Roswell

The Roswell story is one of the best known in UFO-ology. In fact, if you’ll forgive the bad joke, you’d have to be from Mars to not have heard of it. It goes something like this. A UFO crashed outside Roswell, New Mexico. Government agents, generally known as “the Men in Black,” swooped into town and confiscated the flying saucer and the saucer’s occupants, which included actual Aliens. The saucer and Aliens were transported to Area 51. One or more of the Aliens died and subsequently an autopsy was performed. A film of the autopsy was leaked in 1995 and shown on Fox TV. This most famous of Alien reports has been the obsession of UFO enthusiasts for more than 60 years.

There’s only one problem. The fame of the Roswell incident is relatively new. It was forgotten for years. Here is what really happened.

It was the height of the Arnold-inspired UFO frenzy. On July 8, 1947, the Roswell
Daily Record
’s headline was “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” The story describes how an unnamed rancher notified the local sheriff that he had an instrument on his premises. A major from the local Roswell Army Air Field took a detail of soldiers to the ranch and recovered the
disk. After the local intelligence office inspected the instrument, it was flown to “higher headquarters” (quotes in original newspaper article). No details were released on the construction or appearance of the saucer.

The article went on to tell of another couple in town who thought they had seen a flying saucer. The saucer was supposed to be about 1,500 feet above the ground, travelling at 400 to 500 miles per hour and was estimated to be 15 to 20 feet in diameter. The man who observed the saucer was “one of the most respected and reliable citizens in town,” and he kept the story to himself. According to the article, he had decided to tell people in town only minutes before word came around that the RAAF had a saucer in custody. It was very exciting stuff to have a flying saucer in hand.

The story changed the next day. On July 9, the Roswell
Daily Record
had a different headline “Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer,” which is a cute way of saying “never mind.” The paper ran two columns, first on the local sheriff, who was fielding dozens of phone calls from across the United States and Mexico, as well as three from England, including one from the London
Daily Mail
. The paper also identified the rancher by name. W. W. Brazel, who lived on the Foster ranch, was the person who found the remnants of the “so-called saucer.”

Unfortunately for the UFO enthusiasts, the column also reported that the mysterious object found was a “harmless high-altitude weather balloon, not a flying disk.” Even more specifically, what was found was a “bundle of tinfoil, broken wood beams and rubber remnants of a balloon.” In the end, the UFO was identified as a specific type of weather balloon used to measure weather at altitudes much higher than the eye can see. The local army weather forecaster stated that they were identical to balloons he had sent up during the invasion of Okinawa to determine ballistic information for the heavy guns.