Flying Saucers

Series Preface

Reports of flying saucers – also known as UFOs – constitute a puzzle, for they are numerous, well attested, and hard to believe. There are tempting shortcuts to a ‘solution’ – that the sightings are real, or mistaken, or fictitious (made up) – but none of these prove satisfactory. Instead, we are brought to consider the history of sightings and the history, also, of how it became possible to regard such incidents in the terms that have become customary. Flying saucers in this fashion become a feature of the wider society, and allow an angle of approach to our modern, technological civilization: a small-scale problem that allows insight into the larger setting.

The six essays stand as independent studies. Each deals with an aspect of the life of flying saucers or UFOs: their appearance after the Second World War within the constellation of military and technological interests, their debt to early science fiction and its sources, the development of the search for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, the first adoptions of the ‘interplanetary hypothesis’ in civilian circles, the further expansion of reports, first, of sightings and, then, of abductions in the wider society, and, finally, a review of the range of forms which have appeared. Taken together, they form a thorough enquiry into reports of sightings of flying saucers.

The series as a whole makes three contributions to resolving the puzzle posed by such reports.

First, it relates three bodies of materials from the United States in the mid-twentieth century whose interactions must be taken into consideration when speaking about flying saucers. These are the science fiction milieu, the interplay of military and technical interests, and reports of sightings by members of the public; in short, stories, military work, and ordinary lives. The first contribution is to study their interactions, overlaps, borrowings and synergies.

The second is to derive the categories that are necessary to explain the convergence of these materials. Repeating patterns appear in science fiction literature, the history of Air Force intelligence in the Cold War period, the early days of NASA, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, and a wide variety of incidents and claims made by members of the public. To make sense of their common nature and to see how their interactions work, we also need to investigate some intellectual history. There is a longstanding tradition of popular thought putting new scientific discoveries and technological innovation to work for human moral purposes. This tradition was taken up by military and technical interests in the middle third of the twentieth century, using three clusters of ideas: the intimate connection between military technology and the world picture offered by modern media, the concept of ‘communication’ (and, post-War, of ‘information’) that became central in the period, and an understanding of ‘memory’ as an exact record of the past. These ideas were shared with a wider public: in the context of international tensions, hopes of communication and fears of its breakdown were given expression in the appearance of new forms of life, forms given content by the earlier longstanding history. This is the second contribution the essay makes to the topic: an investigation of the common patterns of thought necessary for stories, military work and ordinary lives to interact.

And, last, a mechanism is proposed by which these interactions occur. This is an analysis of the ways in which these ‘images’, which contain both real and imaginary elements, make their appearance compelling. I find well documented instances – in particular, the sessions in which memories of abductions are recovered – where the social mechanism is uncovered that allows the oscillation between the two elements, a mechanism that can be glimpsed at work in other sites but which cannot be tracked in such detail in the documents and other sources we have concerning advances in research, security decisions, the records of incidents and so forth. This is the third contribution.

I first came to the puzzle of flying saucer reports when working on spirit messages and similar forms of social life (such as parapsychology and psychical research) and realized that the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence was the latest expression of a long-held desire for communication with disembodied minds compatible with our own. It has taken a good deal of time and work to give substance to this insight. As will be clear from my references, there is an abundance of work of the highest quality in this broad area, on which I draw to give shape to the argument. If I have contributed anything, it is by making a systematic enquiry and by putting together materials that are not always associated, and by continuing to ask questions rather than settling for accepted answers. In this fashion, I hope to have supported readers who find these topics interesting rather than those who wish to close them down, and I also hope to have contributed in some small degree to understanding the contemporary world.

Acknowledgements

Much of the preliminary work for writing up this project was undertaken during nine months at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, where I was a participant in the programme ‘The Societal Implications of Astrobiology’, 2016–2017. I am deeply grateful to Dr William Storrar and Dr Joshua Maudlin, the Director and Associate Director, for their hospitality and guidance, to the other participants in the programme, for their friendship and the shared intellectual environment they created, and to NASA and the John Templeton Foundation, who funded the programme.

Several paragraphs of this essay are drawn from a piece which appeared as ‘The Role of Unproved Ideas in the Production of Knowledge: A Case Study’, in Re-Creating Anthropology: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination, edited by David N. Gellner and Dolores P. Martinez, Routledge, 2022: 126–137; they are utilized with the publisher’s permission, which is gratefully acknowledged.

Introduction

The first impression, when approaching the subject of flying saucers, is one of confusion and too many leads to follow up. Confusion, given the rival claims of advocates, sceptics, and mythologists. And so many paths to explore, not only reports of sightings, Close Encounters, and abductions, but also elaborations along diverse lines including ancient or lost civilizations, paranormal mental powers such as remote sensing, potential new technologies, anti-gravity devices and the like, and the suggestion of government secret operations and cover-ups. Where can one start?

Let me make two claims, both evident enough, to identify a starting point. The first is to say that technology is crucial, and that this essay concerns an investigation into the role of technology in generating images of what we call spaceships, flying saucers, or UFOs. The second is to say we should pay attention to words, and that this essay describes the emergence of the single term ‘UFO’ or ‘Unidentified Flying Object’ in the mid-1950s. These may serve as pointers, to help orientate the reader.