The history of reports of ‘flying saucers’ and ‘UFOs’ is fraught with alleged conspiracy theories and cover-ups, claims by believers and de-bunks from non-believers.
Are people really seeing things in the sky that can’t be explained? And if that is the case, does that necessarily mean they must be of extra-terrestrial origin?
Whether we believe in the idea that alien craft are visiting Earth or not, it’s a fact that there are numerous eye-witness accounts from across the world in which people claim to have seen something beyond belief in the sky.
Find out why people believe in UFOs and the objects commonly reported as UFOs.
So what happens when you take a scientific, empirical look at reports of UFOs and flying saucers?
What patterns emerge, and do they tell us anything about the cultural or geopolitical trends at the time the reports were made?
Greg Eghigian is Professor of History and Bioethics at Penn State University in the United States and has written a book called After The Flying Saucers Came.
It’s just that: a history of UFO reports and what they can tell us about belief in the extra-terrestrial.
We spoke to Greg to find out more about the flying saucer craze.
What made you decide to look into the history of flying saucers?
I’m an historian of science and medicine by speciality, and over the years have looked primarily at the history of how scientific and medical establishments and governments have understood ideas, feelings, people and thoughts that were marginal, or deemed to be outside the mainstream.
I was led to the topic of flying saucers and UFOs in part by those interests, though it does deviate from what I normally work on.
I was always fascinated with this stuff when I was growing up.
I was a really voracious reader and consumer of anything about aliens and outer space visitors and things like that, though that interest waned as I got older and I grew interested in lots of other things unrelated to this.
But I was talking with a colleague of mine, an historian who was working on a book project that involved looking at the renaissance of the occult right after World War II in Europe.
I asked her: “was that whole flying saucer thing a craze in Europe at the time?”
She said “I don’t know, you ought to look into it and write something about it.”
And I just dismissed it out of hand.
But one summer I was ill, so I couldn’t do traveling as I normally do, and I started going through digital databases of newspapers in Germany in the late 1940s and 50s.
And bam: all these headlines about flying saucers.
I wrote an article on it and I thought there must be so many historians who have done work on this.
I found one. One sole book on the history of the subject in 1975 by a historian who, by the way, later becomes a subject in my own book because he becomes a true believer and a major figure in the alien abduction phenomenon.
And that’s how I got hooked. I thought, okay, I’m diving in.
You don’t have to believe the reports are true in order to factually catalogue the history of it, do you?
No, I come at this from that very perspective.
I make it very clear from the start, I’m not here to try to present evidence that aliens have been visiting us.
But I also don’t come from the perspective of the debunker who’s here to tear down every opinion.
I wanted to take the general ethos of most historians and say, I’m here to chronicle the way we’ve come to think about and talk about and debate this subject.
Especially in this day and age with a lot going on when it comes to discussions about exoplanets and SETI and things like that.
It seems to me it’s the time to revisit that history and think about how we got to the point where we are now.
Does it all begin with Roswell?
No, it doesn’t begin with Roswell! In fact, Roswell is a blip, a really minor blip. It’s a very tiny footnote.
When you look at it in the wider perspective, it actually starts a little earlier than that with a private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold, who’s flying around Washington State, around Mount Rainier, looking for a crashed plane.
And he sees these strange pan-shaped objects flying at high speeds.
He comes back, lands on the ground and tells people he’s seen some weird stuff, and reports it to the authorities and also the media.
And the media starts asking him questions about it. They ask him, how did these things fly? How would you describe it?
He said they flew like a saucer might if you skipped it over water.
And a very enterprising journalist knew a headline when they saw one and called them flying saucers.
Within 6 weeks, a survey said 9 out of 10 Americans had heard the term flying saucer.
Roswell pops up as a story for about 2 days and then disappears and is never heard of again, until you get into the late 1970s and early 80s.
When you hear a report like that from a pilot, someone who’s an expert in aviation, do you find yourself struggling to remain neutral?
Yeah, reports like that pop up all the time and there are lots of head scratchers.
And there are times you read something and you say, this doesn’t pass the sniff test.
When you’re talking about historical cases where you can’t talk to anybody anymore, you’re left saying, geez, I wish there was a little more information about this, or I wish somebody had a camera at the time.
But when you hear seasoned pilots, for instance, who are very knowledgeable, talk and describe things that they see, that is really arresting and it makes you pause.
The great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung put it really, really well. He said “things are seen in the sky, but we don’t know what”.
And even the authorities, whether it’s the UK Ministry of Defence or the United States Air Force, all have historically fully admitted there are cases we can never explain.
They make us scratch our heads; we’re sort of left with a big question mark.
How do you approach a topic like this as an historian?
There are a couple of things that it’s important to keep in mind.
One is that the language that’s often used in the UFO world, if you will, is often very sloppy.
Just think of something like the term ‘UFO’: Unidentified Flying Object.
Even though it sounds precise, it was meant to replace ‘flying saucer’, because ‘flying saucer’ was seen as a kind of biased term.
‘UFO’ is biased in its own ways.
Is that really an object? Flying implies piloting and it implies design.
It’s fair to say the same thing holds true with the distinction between sightings and reports.
A sighting is an experience that someone has, but we know that the vast majority of people who see something odd never say anything, not to officials, to the media, the police or the Air Force.
Something has to lead somebody to actually report it to some institution – it might be a UFO group, it might be authorities – and they then write it down in some form.
It could be in a messy form, it could be a police officer who’s ho-humming it all the time.
So what I’m interested in is reports, these documents that we have.
They oftentimes aren’t very detailed. So as an historian we are ultimately left with trying to work with records and documentation.
That can be a recording, that can be an interview, but it oftentimes it’s self reports and also reports by others.
How do we discuss reports of flying saucers? How have different institutions and different groups grappled with it?
And how have they made that into something that they see as worthy of a conversation, and sometimes worthy of some sort of action on the part of people who can take action?
Do you find any narrative consistency throughout reports of UFOs?
What’s interesting is that’s one of the things that changes.
When you look particularly in, say, the first decade or decade and a half of the phenomenon, there is a lot of diversity, in terms of what’s reported.
The most common thing that people see are lights. Maybe it’s different colors. Maybe they flash off and on, but lights: very vague, very blurry.
Not much more detail than that.
You hear people talking about cigar-shaped things, saucer-shaped things, globes, hexagonal objects.
But you really see the diversity when people say they actually saw the occupants of these vehicles.
In the 1940s and 50s into the early 60s, it’s a very wide range, very diverse group of beings that are talked about.
Everything from little men under four feet tall, sometimes as small as under 12 inches.
Other times they’re large, hairy monsters that sort of look like Sasquatch.
There are robots, there are males, there are females, there are androgynous beings, there are bulbous heads.
Some are absolutely gorgeous and look like fashion models, all sorts of things.
What happens over time, and this is what’s interesting to me, is that those images start to winnow down, and there becomes a kind of a homogeneity to it all, kind of a standardisation, if you will, in descriptions.
And that to me, in part, is something that signals a role that culture is increasingly playing in terms of helping to shape those images into images that are familiar to everyone.
Did you find correlation between the language that’s used at the time of a report and current movies, songs, popular culture?
Well, again, what I love about this history is it confounds every preconception I had.
I, like most everybody else, was ready to think there must be so much influence of pop culture on UFO sightings and reports and the way people describe things.
And in part there is. There’s no question that the pulp science fiction of the first half of the 20th century had a direct impact on the early alien visitor story, the way people engaged with it.
It’s not a surprise that most all of those first few years of people pushing the UFO narrative, there seems to be inspiration from the pulp science fiction world.
But where you see something that doesn’t quite connect that way is with film.
The idea has been always that films must have a real profound influence on, say, upticks in the number of sightings.
And that doesn’t really bear out. You have a very big wave of sightings and reports in the United States, for instance, in 1952.
But there’s no major big UFO film from that time period that takes place.
Or you could take something like Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters.
I talked to one of the folks who leads one of the big organizations that were looking into UFOs at the time, and I asked him about it.
And he said, what we saw at the time was not an uptick in new sightings.
People weren’t seeing UFOs right after the film, but what they did see an uptick in was the number of people coming forward saying “five years ago, or three years ago, I saw something that seemed like that”.
So it triggered that.
And we know from the UK, for instance, that following Spielberg’s film E.T., there was actually a downward movement in the number of UFO sightings.
So it doesn’t neatly map on to popular culture as much as we like to think at times.
You hear people say it’s not a coincidence it all kicked off during the Cold War and Space Age.
I definitely would argue that the Cold War plays a critical role in this.
The UFO as we know it is unimaginable without the Cold War, and it’s a spectre that haunts the entire history.
People are constantly making references to UFOs.
For instance, in those early years, one of the questions that comes up is, okay, the flying saucers are here, they’re aliens.
Why are they here in 1947, 1948? Why now and not five years earlier, 500 years earlier?
And the argument that starts being put forward is, well, the aliens have seen the atomic bomb explosions.
They’ve seen that we have unlocked the key to atomic energy and they are scared.
They’re either scared for us or they’re scared of us, but they realise we have reached this level of civilisation that makes us a qualitatively different species.
What I don’t see is a lot of what some people have argued is the case, that bad times promote more flying saucer panics or flying saucer reports.
That seems to me a bit of a problematic argument because it seems to me prone to cognitive bias.
Pick up a newspaper from any time period you like, and outside of maybe when the Berlin Wall fell, you will see mostly bad news.
Journalists are very good at reporting bad news and sometimes have a hard time knowing how to make good news interesting!
Do you find a large majority of sightings and reports are from the US? And does that suggest it’s to do with the culture of the society?
I would say the evidence shows that the United States plays a very critical role. It’s a hub.
It’s a hub in that the news emanating out of the United States is what triggers the UFO phenomenon.
Throughout the history of flying saucers and UFOs, whenever there’s a new development, like the events occurring since 2017, it is something that gets reported everywhere else.
That said, it’s very clear within a few years that there are hubs popping up throughout the world and other places, and the influence actually goes in the other direction at times.
There are places in Europe, in South America, where you see a really pronounced concentration, not only of sightings and reports, but also activities by UFO organisations.
So I would say in Europe, Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain all played a very, very big role.
Whereas in Germany, for instance, it was a much more muted phenomenon.
In South America, Brazil and Chile, Argentina play major roles.
And my argument would be, it has to do with whether or not you have a civilian UFO organization infrastructure.
In places where that gets built up and is sustainable, that’s where you see this ability to articulate these narratives and lay out these programs to study the phenomenon, but also to have an impact worldwide on how these things are understood and viewed.
Did you come across attempts to explain the strangest cases away?
Oh, I see that all the time.
Over the years I’ve been working on this, I’ve gotten to know lots and lots of ‘ufologists’, as they’re called, UFO researchers of various kinds, and talked with people who say they’ve had experiences having contact with aliens or other kinds of beings.
It’s a pretty diverse group of people.
I think there’s a lack of appreciation just how many diverse perspectives there are when it comes to the flying saucer and UFO phenomenon in terms of how people approach it.
A lot of folks I know are not really altogether different from the people, say, over in the UK defence ministry who were very sceptical about this.
They themselves will tell you 95% of sightings, if not more, are easily explained.
And in fact, many UFO investigators I talk with, this is one of the things they do all the time.
They get a phone call or they get an email, they look into the case and they find out it’s a rather mundane explanation.
Somebody was floating Chinese lanterns or somebody saw Starlink satellites which, if you see those things in the sky and don’t know what that is, I would call that a UFO sighting.
One of the things I talk about in the book is the motivation for why people get involved in this stuff.
It’s that ability to be a detective, to crack a case.
It’s really not altogether different from your favourite true crime podcast where everybody’s invited to chime in and crack the case.
It keeps you going in the hope that maybe one day, a case is going to come along that makes you think “this is not going to go away”.
After you finished the book, was it hard to leave the subject alone?
Yeah, it is hard to leave it alone. I won’t be leaving it alone because now I get a lot of people wanting to talk with me and contact me about discussing it.
And I’m going to be working on a new project, writing a book about the controversy surrounding the alien abduction phenomenon that was particularly lively in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
So no, once you’ve met the UFOs, they don’t leave you alone!
What do you think about the argument that smartphones mean we should have irrefutable proof by now?
The ‘everyone carries a camera now’ argument is one I’ve heard a lot, and it’s actually convinced some old-time UFO investigators that maybe there is not much to this anymore.
I’ve gotten a response from other UFO researchers who say, we know our smartphones are good at taking a picture of nice food at a restaurant or your friends at a party.
It’s not a very refined or precise instrument for tracking something as complicated as a UFO.
How do you feel about more recent reports like those that have occurred since 2017 with the US Navy footage and Pentagon briefings in the US?
First of all, the fact that intelligence officials in the United States have come forward to say unequivocally, these pilots saw real objects, these are not computer glitches, these are not optical illusions, something is there.
That’s unusual. That you didn’t tend to get over the decades, that kind of admission.
And also their admission that they have maybe been derelict in taking seriously the reports of pilots, that they’ve ridiculed them, that a certain amount of peer and hierarchical pressure has really influenced people not to report things.
From my position as an academic, what I really find exciting and interesting is NASA’s intervention.
NASA getting this independent UFO panel and saying okay, we think this deserves and warrants investigation, let’s go about this in a serious fashion.
Because, you know, NASA is about civilian science, it’s not about classified projects.
So adding that legitimacy to me seems to be the really unprecedented step.
That’s the thing that I think opens the pathway for people from all sorts of disciplines to begin having conversations about what research projects might look like.
I think we’ll see over the next, say five to 10 years, where this takes us.