When Nasa held a press conference recently detailing its research into sightings of unidentified flying objects – UFOs – headlines proliferated once again about the possibility of extra-terrestrial visitors. But, as David Clarke explains, stories like this are nothing new
In May 2023, Nasa made public comments on UFO sightings revealing that the Pentagon’s UAP [unexplained anomalous phenomenon] Taskforce is currently investigating hundreds of unexplained sightings reported by military personnel.
Back in 2017, a New York Times story claimed that a secret Pentagon-funded project had been looking at reports of UFOs by US Navy pilots and military sources since at least 2007. The official US government line has always been that the Air Force Project Blue Book, which ran from 1947 to 1969, was the last government-funded investigation of odd things in the sky, and that a report from the University of Colorado concluded there was no scientific interest or defence threat.
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Since then, Nasa’s position has been that it isn’t interested in UFOs, so the 2017 story was a big surprise. Nasa has always been very reluctant to discuss the subject of UFOs. That was clear even back in the 1970s, when the US secretary of defense asked the space agency to consider reopening an investigation – long after Project Blue Book had closed – because the then president, Jimmy Carter, reported having seen a UFO [in Georgia in 1969]. Now Nasa has finally been dragged back into the UFO debate – and, as was the case in the 70s, it’s because of a groundswell of public and media fascination about the subject.
Keep your eyes on the sky
People seeing odd things in the sky is nothing new. If you look at any British newspaper published just before the outbreak of the First World War, for instance, you will find people claiming that they had seen strange lights in the sky, beams of light coming down to the ground, and elongated objects moving around that they were convinced were German Zeppelins sent to spy on the British Isles. People were anxious: they knew there was a war coming and they’d been told that the Germans would be sending airships to drop bombs on the nation.
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Resurgences in UFO sightings tell us something about the period in which they were made. There’s a clear correlation between numbers and types of reports and the release of films and TV shows about UFOs. It’s a crude metric – you can’t say it’s cause and effect – and today there’s a continual drip-drip effect, so it’d now be hard to make any correlation.
But it’s definitely the case that around the 1977 release of the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the number of annually reported sightings logged by the UK Ministry of Defence soared from a few hundred to a record-breaking 750, the highest total on record at that time. And people react to other prompts, too: whether it’s a story in a local newspaper or a Nasa public statement, those kinds of things cause people to look up at the sky rather than at their feet, and to report memories of things they ‘saw’ years ago.
What aliens look like
Our idea of what aliens look like has changed markedly over time. At the end of the 19th century, even before HG Wells published The War of the Worlds, he wrote a short story called The Man of the Year Million, satirising far-future prediction-making and describing what we might look like in the distant future. It claimed we would have tiny bodies, massive heads and huge eyes – and, interestingly, that’s how people now often describe aliens.
It’s also how they are depicted in Close Encounters and in Whitley Strieber’s hugely influential 1987 alien-abduction autobiography Communion: A True Story. It’s now burned into our minds and into pop culture. But between the 1940s and 1960s there were a range of other ideas, too.
George Adamski was one of the first of a string of people to become famous in the 1950s for his stories of being contacted by aliens. He described being met in the California desert by tall angelic creatures with long blonde hair and ski suits who came from Venus and Mars. People in South America, meanwhile, claim to have seen creatures coming out of flying saucers who were covered in hair and had bright red eyes.
Flying saucers and folklore
Our ideas about UFOs have also shifted across the decades. The idea that UFOs were saucer-shaped is partly derived from a claimed 1947 sighting by US aviator and businessman Kenneth Arnold, which came to define our modern idea of UFOs. But it’s not a straightforward story, because what he actually described seeing, while he was out flying over Washington state looking for a crashed aircraft, was a formation of batwing shaped objects. The media of the time interpreted that as looking like saucers – and, for many decades afterwards, ‘flying saucers’ were indeed that shape.
Recent headlines may suggest that we are on the cusp of a new discovery – but history shows we’ve been here many times before. These stories have come up over and over again, and that’s precisely how folklore is created – by people’s experiences needing to find an outlet, particularly at times when they’re feeling stressed or anxious about concerns such as pandemics or nuclear war. It’s a reassuring idea that, somewhere out there in the universe, there’s a superior civilisation that has survived these problems and has now come to help us.
These stories also suggest that the nasty government knows all about this and is hiding it from us – and if only we put enough pressure on them, they will finally admit that the truth is out there. But history shows us that there has never been a single subject that all the governments of the world agree on – so the idea that all the nations have got together and agreed to conceal this truth from us doesn’t make any sense.
This article was first published in the August 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine