Flying saucer

For unexplained aircraft sightings, of which many are described as flying saucers, see Unidentified flying object.

For other uses, see Flying saucer (disambiguation).

An alleged flying saucer seen over Passaic, New Jersey in 1952

A flying saucer is a disc-shaped craft piloted by nonhuman beings in science fiction, reported UFO sightings, and UFO conspiracy theories. The term "flying saucer" or "flying disc" is commonly used generically to refer to an anomalous flying object. The term was coined in 1947 but has generally been supplanted since 1952 by the United States Air Force term unidentified flying objects, UFOs for short. Early reported sightings of unknown "flying saucers" usually described them as silver or metallic, sometimes reported as covered with navigation lights or surrounded with a glowing light, hovering or moving rapidly, either alone or in tight formations with other similar craft, and exhibiting high maneuverability.

History

One of the first depictions of a "flying saucer", by illustrator Frank R. Paul on the October 1929 issue of Hugo Gernsback's pulp science fiction magazine Science Wonder Stories. Although the term wasn't used before 1947, fantasy artwork in pulp magazines prepared the American mind to be receptive to the idea of "flying saucers".

Reports of fantastical aircraft predated the first flying saucers. In antiquity, mysterious lights in the sky were interpreted as spiritual phenomena. In the 1800s, many newspapers reported massive airships with glowing lights and humming engines. These are often seen as precursors to "flying saucer" and "UFO" sightings. On January 25, 1878, the Denison Daily News printed an article in which John Martin, a local farmer, had reported seeing an object resembling a balloon flying "at wonderful speed". Martin, according to the newspaper account, said it appeared to be about the size of a saucer from his perspective, one of the first uses of the word "saucer" in association with a UFO. During the 1940s, allied pilots reported encountering foo fighters they believed were advanced axis aircraft.

Origins of the term

The modern flying saucer concept, including the association with aliens, can be traced to the 1947 Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting. On June 24, 1947, businessman and amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold landed at the Yakima, Washington airstrip. He told staff and friends that he'd seen nine unusual airborne objects. Arnold estimated their speed at 1,700 miles per hour, beyond the capabilities of known aircraft. Newspapers soon contacted Arnold who provided interviews including his saucer-like description. Headline writers summarized them as "flying saucers". The circular shape of typical flying saucers may be due to reporters misunderstanding Arnold's "saucer-like" descriptions.

On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier. He reported seeing 9 brightly reflecting vehicles, one shaped like a crescent but the others more disc- or saucer-shaped, flying in an echelon formation, weaving like the tail of a kite, flipping and flashing in the sun, and traveling with a speed of at least 1,200 miles per hour (1,900 km/h). In addition to the saucer or disc shape (Arnold also used the terms "pie plate" and half-moon shaped), he also later said he described the motion of the craft as "like a saucer if you skip it across water", leading to the term "flying saucer" and also "flying disc" (which were synonymous for a number of years).

Immediately following the report, hundreds of sightings of usually saucer-like objects were reported across the United States and also in some other countries. The most widely publicized of these was the sighting by a United Airlines crew on July 4 of nine more disc-like objects pacing their plane over Idaho, not far from Arnold's initial sighting. On July 8, the Army Air Force base at Roswell, New Mexico issued a press release saying that they had recovered a "flying disc" from a nearby ranch, the so-called Roswell UFO incident, which was front-page news until the military issued a retraction saying that it was a weather balloon.

Initial Flying Saucer article on July 9, 1947 Irish Times

On July 9, the Army Air Force Directorate of Intelligence, assisted by the FBI, began a secret study of the best of the flying saucer reports, including Arnold's and the United Airlines' crew. Three weeks later they issued an intelligence estimate describing the typical characteristics reported (including that they were often reported as disc-like and metallic) and concluded that something was really flying around. A follow-up investigation by the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, Ohio arrived at the same conclusion. A widespread official government study of the saucers was urged by General Nathan Twining. This led to the formation of Project Sign (also known as Project Saucer) at the end of 1947, the first public Air Force UFO study. This evolved into Project Grudge (1949–1951) and then Project Blue Book (1952–1970).

Arnold's story incited a wave of hundreds of flying saucer reports across the country. During the 1947 flying disc craze, the public was divided on the potential cause of the saucers. Newspapers initially reported that Arnold suspected them to be experimental Soviet aircraft. A Gallup Poll found that 90% of Americans were aware of the saucer stories, 16 percent believed they were secret military weapons, and less than one percent believed they were alien craft. One report from Seattle, Washington, described a hammer and sickle painted onto a flying disc.

Starting June 26 and June 27, newspapers first began using the terms "flying saucer" and "flying disk" (or "disc") to describe the sighted objects. Thus the Arnold sighting is credited with giving rise to these popular terms. The actual origin of the terms is somewhat controversial and complicated. Jerome Clark cites a 1970 study by Herbert Strentz, who reviewed U.S. newspaper accounts of the Arnold UFO sighting, and concluded that the term was probably due to an editor or headline writer: the body of the early Arnold news stories did not use the term "flying saucer" or "flying disc." However, earlier stories did in fact credit Arnold with using terms such as "saucer", "disk", and "pie-pan" in describing the shape. (see quotations further below)

Years later, Arnold claimed he told Bill Bequette that "they flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across the water." Arnold felt that he had been misquoted since the description referred to the objects' motion rather than their shape. Thus Bequette has often been credited with first using "flying saucer" and supposedly misquoting Arnold, but the term does not appear in Bequette's early articles. Instead, his first article of June 25 says only, "He said he sighted nine saucer-like aircraft flying in formation..."

The next day in a much more detailed article, Bequette wrote, "He clung to his story of shiny, flat objects racing over the Cascade mountains with a peculiar weaving motion 'like the tail of a Chinese kite.' ...He also described the objects as 'saucer-like' and their motion 'like fish flipping in the sun.' ...[Arnold] described the objects as 'flat like a pie-pan and somewhat bat-shaped'." It wasn't until June 28 that Bequette first used the term "flying disc" (but not "flying saucer").

A review of early newspaper stories indicates that immediately after his sighting, Arnold generally described the objects' shape as thin and flat, rounded in the front but chopped in the back and coming to a point, i.e., more or less saucer- or disk-like. He also specifically used terms like "saucer" or "saucer-like", "disk", and "pie pan" or "pie plate" in describing the shape. The motion he generally described as weaving like the tail of a kite and erratic flipping.

For example, in a surviving recorded radio interview from June 26, 1947, made by reporter Ted Smith, United Press correspondent in Pendleton, and aired on KWRC, the local radio station of Pendleton, Arnold described them as looking "something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear." His motion descriptions were: "I noticed to the left of me a chain which looked to me like the tail of a Chinese kite, kind of weaving... they seemed to flip and flash in the sun, just like a mirror... they seemed to kind of weave in and out right above the mountaintops..."

Kenneth Arnold's report to Army Air Forces (AAF) intelligence, dated July 12, 1947, which includes annotated sketches of the typical craft in the chain of nine objects

Flying saucer reporting declined by the end of summer. Newspapers had reported hoaxes by those looking to profit from the saucers and the Roswell incident which was quickly retracted as balloon debris. In the July 7 Twin Falls saucer hoax, a widely reported crashed disc from Twin Falls, Idaho, was found to have been created by four teenagers using parts from a jukebox.

Throughout 1947, the saucers became increasingly associated with the idea of extraterrestrial life. In a 1950 interview on flying saucers, Kenneth Arnold said, "if it's not made by our science or our Army Air Forces, I am inclined to believe it's of an extra-terrestrial origin".

Early alleged photographs

One of the McMinnville UFO photographs from 1950.

Magnification of second McMinnville UFO photograph from 1950.

By 1950, the term flying saucer had become synonymous with purported extraterrestrial spacecraft. The McMinnville photographs were reported as alleged photographs of alien spacecraft.

Many of the alleged flying saucer photographs of the era are now believed to be hoaxes. The flying saucer is now considered largely an icon of the 1950s and of B movies in particular, and is a popular subject in comic science fiction.

Explanations

A lenticular cloud

In addition to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, a variety of possible explanations for flying saucers have been put forward. One of the most common states that most photos of saucers were hoaxes; cylindrical metal objects such as pie tins, hubcaps and dustbin lids were easy to obtain, and the poor focus seen in UFO images makes the true scale of the object difficult to ascertain.

Another theory states that most are natural phenomena such as lenticular clouds and balloons, which appear disc-like in some lighting conditions.

A third theory puts all saucer sightings down to a form of mass hysteria. Arnold described the craft he saw as saucer-like but not perfectly round (he described them as thin, flat, rounded in front but chopped in back and coming to a point), but the image of the circular saucer was fixed in the public consciousness. The theory posits that as the use of the term flying saucer in popular culture decreased, so too did sightings.

Long before the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947 and the adoption of the term "flying saucer" by the public, depictions of streamlined saucer-shaped aircraft or spacecraft had appeared in the popular press, dating back to at least 1911. In particular, commentators like Milton Rothman have noted the appearance of the "flying saucers" concept in the fantasy artwork of the 1930s pulp science fiction magazines, by artists like Frank R. Paul. Frank Wu, a notable contemporary science fiction illustrator, has written:

The point is that the idea of space vehicles shaped like flying saucers was imprinted in the national psyche for many years prior to 1947, when the Roswell incident took place. It didn't take much stretching for the first observers of UFOs to assume that the unknown objects hovering in the sky had the same disk shape as the science fictional vehicles.

A scientific and statistical analysis of 3200 Air Force UFO cases by the Battelle Memorial Institute from 1952 to 1954 found that most were indeed due to natural phenomena, about 2% were due to hoaxes or psychological effects and only 0.4% were thought due to clouds. Other very minor contributors were birds, light phenomena such as mirages or searchlights, and various miscellany such as flares or kites. The vast majority of identified objects (about 84%) were explained as balloons, aircraft, or astronomical objects. However, about 22% of all sightings still defied any plausible explanation by the team of scientists, and percentage of unidentifieds rose to 33% for the best witnesses and cases. Thus when carefully studied, a substantial fraction of reports (given the available data) is currently not understood.

Fata Morgana (mirages) and flying saucers

Main article: Fata Morgana (mirage)

Fata Morgana of distant islands distorted images beyond recognition

Fata Morgana, a type of mirage, may be responsible for some flying saucers sightings, by displaying objects located below the astronomical horizon hovering in the sky, and magnifying and distorting them.

Similarly some unidentifieds seen on radar might also be due to Fata Morgana-type atmospheric phenomena, though more technically known as "anomalous propagation" and more commonly as "radar ghosts". Official UFO investigations in France suggest:

As is well known, atmospheric ducting is the explanation for certain optical mirages, and in particular the arctic illusion called "fata morgana" where distant ocean or surface ice, which is essentially flat, appears to the viewer in the form of vertical columns and spires, or "castles in the air."
People often assume that mirages occur only rarely. This may be true of optical mirages, but conditions for radar mirages are more common, due to the role played by water vapor which strongly affects the atmospheric refractivity in relation to radio waves. Since clouds are closely associated with high levels of water vapor, optical mirages due to water vapor are often rendered undetectable by the accompanying opaque cloud. On the other hand, radar propagation is essentially unaffected by the water droplets of the cloud so that changes in water vapor content with altitude are very effective in producing atmospheric ducting and radar mirages.

Fata Morgana was named as a hypothesis for the mysterious Australian phenomenon Min Min light.

In popular culture

A small flying saucer leaves its larger mothership in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

After 1947, the flying saucer quickly became a stereotypical symbol of both extraterrestrials and science fiction, and features in many films of mid-20th century science fiction, including The Atomic Submarine (1959), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), as well as the television series The Invaders. As the flying saucer was surpassed by other designs and concepts, it fell out of favor with straight science-fiction moviemakers, but continued to be used ironically in comedy movies, especially in reference to the low-budget B movies which often featured saucer-shaped alien craft.

Nearly a year before the Flying Disc wave of 1947, pulp magazine Amazing Stories featured disc-shaped spacecraft.

However, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gave its high production value film Forbidden Planet (1956) a flying saucer called the United Planets Cruiser C-57D, presenting a plausible human exploration, faster-than-light starship of the 23rd century. The 1964 Italian movie Il disco volante featured a flying saucer, while the 1965 James Bond movie Thunderball featured Ernst Stavro Blofeld's yacht Disco Volante. In the television series Lost in Space (1965-1968), the Robinson family had a disc-shaped spaceship. Saucers appeared in the television series Babylon 5 (1994-1998) as the standard ship design used by a race called the Vree. Doctor Who has featured many different designs of flying saucer in its history, most notably the saucers used by the Daleks. Aliens in the film Independence Day (1996) attacked humanity in giant city-sized saucer-shaped spaceships.

October 1957 issue of Amazing Stories magazine devoted to flying saucers. The sightings starting in 1947 ignited an obsession with flying saucers that lasted a decade.

The sleek, silver flying saucer in particular is seen as a symbol of 1950s culture; the motif is common in Googie architecture and in Atomic Age décor. The image is often invoked retrofuturistically to produce a nostalgic feel in period works, especially in comic science fiction; both Mars Attacks! (1996) and Destroy All Humans! draw on the flying saucer as part of the larger satire of 1950s B movie tropes.

The Twilight Zone episodes "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", "Third from the Sun", "Death Ship", "To Serve Man", "The Invaders" and "On Thursday We Leave for Home" all make use of the iconic saucer from Forbidden Planet.

Exhibition model of a flying saucer (2022)

Further reading

• Adamsky, George (1953). Flying Saucers Have Landed. London: Spearman.
• Adamsky, George (1955). Inside the Space Ships. New York: Abelard-Schuman.
• Greg Eghigian: After the Flying Saucers Came. A Global History of the Ufo Phenomenon, Oxford University Press 2024. ISBN 978-0190869878

External links

• FBI Special Agent Guy Hottel's memo