UFOs A Bit of History

UFOs are a hot topic right now. Is there anything to them except errors by people and equipment? I don't know. The new NASA panel looks like a pretty solid group of scientists, and Department of Defense is interested again. Arguably, with new hypersonic, suborbital, orbital, and energy weapons, it's vital for DoD to take a good look whether aliens exist or not.  

But they are not a new topic. Here are some of my notes. 

The U.S. armed services have been concerned, at least off and on, with UFOs since World War II. Pilots over Europe reported glowing fireballs or torpedo shapes following them. These, dubbed "foo fighters," sometimes maneuvered around the planes but did not attack (except in some wild rumors). They were widely believed to be some kind of advanced German surveillance device.

Not long after the war, the first wave of modern UFO interest started with private pilot Kenneth Arnold's report of nine shiny flying craft near Mount Rainier. (He said they MOVED like saucers skipping across water, the term the press picked up: he thought they were crescent-shaped).

That same year came the worst press release of all time, an Army Air Force claim to have recovered alien craft at Roswell, NM. Subsequent clarification that these were parts of high-altitude balloons only sparked dire warnings of a coverup. Annie Jacobsen's book Area 51 got national publicity in 2011 with an unproven and utterly absurd claim we discovered a Soviet craft crewed by deformed children from a Stalinist experiment.

UFO Photo from McMinnville, Oregon, in 1950 (public domain)

The late 1940s through the 1950s were, for UFOs, simply out of this world. There were hundreds of sightings (or many more, depending on who's counting). Some were by military or airline pilots, and the descriptions varied greatly, from saucers to triangles to zeppelin-like. A friend of my father's, flying over Japan during the occupation, reported chasing a translucent circular craft that outdistanced him. A famous early event concerned Captain Thomas Mantell, who died in 1948 while chasing a UFO over Ohio. An investigation concluded Mantell was chasing a then-secret Skyhook balloon, far above the reach of his F-51, and became so consumed by the chase he flew too high and passed out from lack of oxygen.

There was a flood of magazines, newspaper reports, conventions, serious scientific discussions, and pressures on the military, which seemingly did not know what to do with the subject and often ridiculed it. Still, some military leaders worried about advanced Soviet or alien craft, and there was a 1950 directive requiring reporting of unusual objects including missiles, aircraft, meteors, and UFOs. I don't know about what's in force now.

There were "contactees" who claimed aliens of many descriptions had talked to them. They became celebrities. I met one of the original contactees by chance in 1976. He was a nice, normal fellow, long out of "the business:" I was well read on the subject, but I would not have connected him with the contactee of the same name except that he had his old paperbacks on display.

Eminences like Dr. Hermann Oberth, mentor to Wernher von Braun, spoke up: "Of course UFOs are real, and they are interplanetary." (Pravda, on the other hand, told Soviet citizens that reporting UFOs was promoting Western propaganda.) In the 1960s and ever after there were claims astronauts had sighted UFOs. Skeptic James Oberg, originally a NASA engineer and then a highly respected freelance writer, tracked these down relentlessly and found they were of other spacecraft or debris the astronauts were initially puzzled about. NASA as a whole stayed out of the UFO business as much as possible.

The Air Force at one point in the 1950s made, then canceled a plan to put cameras in the noses of F-94 fighters kept on alert. There were a couple of reported cases of military pilots firing on UFOs, to no effect - not surprising, since the objects were likely balloons or astronomical objects. A missile officer once told me of his Alternate Command Post aircraft crew being seriously freaked out by a color-changing UFO that kept pace with them for over half an hour. The navigator finally concluded they were seeing Venus through a bit of atmospheric haze.

Speaking of missiles, there were and are claims of UFOs monkeying with missile command and control. As a former Air Force missile officer, I sympathize given the ability of these systems to throw up unexpected and strange combinations of warning lights, etc. but the aliens must have been able to manipulate encoded devices through buried and shielded cables without leaving a trace, and without any apparent point to it.

The Air Force created Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1959. It's been debated how serious Blue Book was about really digging for facts, given that the staff was as low as two men and the funding was insignificant. Blue Book DID classify a couple of dozen sightings as "unexplained." A contracted once-and-for-all study in 1968, the Condon report (The Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects), almost entirely dismissed the topic, although some of the explanations were reaches (e.g., an airliner's report of a large "ship" which smaller craft apparently entered or merged with was considered "an atmospheric phenomenon on so rare it has never been reported before or since." Well, maybe.)

The military happily washed its hands of the business and considered it over and done with.

As we know, they were dead wrong.

Some classic books of the early years include my favorite, astronomer J. Allen Hynek's 1972 The UFO Experience. Captain Ed Ruppelt's book on his years with Project Blue Book is still available, as is the Condon Report in paperback form. Psychiatrist Carl Jung (!) wrote a unique book, UFOs: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, about 1969 (not sure when the first edition was), and Paris Flammonde wrote an excellent 1971 book, The Age of Flying Saucers, which put the topic up to that date in sociological context, which of course included Cold War fears. There are hundreds of others, and new ones are coming out like shooting stars.