![Diagrammatic scheme of possible explanations of UFO evidence published in the British journal Flying Saucer Review in 1961. Following the 'line of least resistance,' the author came to the conclusion that the most logical and therefore best interpretation of the available UFO evidence was that '(a) UFOs are space ships, [and] (b) they come from Mars or Venus or from an Earth-like planet of another sun.' Source: Sharp, 'An Appraisal of the Present UFO Position,' 20.](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander-Geppert/publication/261854096/figure/fig2/AS:833564019003392@1575748557071/Diagrammatic-scheme-of-possible-explanations-of-UFO-evidence-published-in-the-British_Q320.jpg)
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Extraterrestrial encounters:
UFOs, science and the quest for
transcendence, 1947–1972
Alexander C.T. Geppert
Version of record first published: 29 Nov 2012.
To cite this article: Alexander C.T. Geppert (2012): Extraterrestrial encounters: UFOs, science and
the quest for transcendence, 1947–1972, History and Technology: An International Journal, 28:3,
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Extraterrestrial encounters: UFOs, science and the quest for
transcendence, 1947–1972
Alexander C.T. Geppert*
Beginning in 1947, with the first waves of UFO sightings, and continuing in the sub-
sequent decades, debates on the existence and gestalt of extraterrestrial life gained
unprecedented prominence. Initially an American phenomenon, flying saucer reports
quickly became global in scope. Contemporaneous with efforts to legitimize the possi-
bility of spaceflight in the years before Sputnik, the UFO phenomenon generated as
much sensation in Europe as in the USA. In the public imagination, UFOs were fre-
quently conflated with technoscientific approaches to space exploration. As innumera-
ble reports of sightings led to a transnational movement driven by both proponents
and critics, controversial protagonists such as ‘contactee’George Adamski became
prominent media celebrities. Incipient space experts including Willy Ley, Arthur C.
Clarke, and Wernher von Braun sought to debunk what they considered a great swin-
dle, or, following C.G. Jung, a modern myth evolving in real-time. Yet they failed to
develop a response to the epistemic-ontological challenge posed by one wave of UFO
sightings after another. Studying a phenomenon whose very existence has been non-
consensual since its genesis presents a particular challenge for historians. Posing com-
plex questions of fact and fiction, knowing and believing, and science and religion,
this article analyzes the postwar UFO phenomenon as part of a broader astroculture
and identifies transcendental and occult traditions within imagined encounters with
extraterrestrial beings.
Keywords: UFOs; outer space; extraterrestrial life; astroculture; transcendence;
evidence; Europe
What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is
the truth?
Winston Churchill, 1952.
On February 18, 1954, I met a man from another world.
Cedric Allingham, Flying Saucer from Mars, 1955.
1
Seldom can historians observe the making of a ‘modern myth’in real time, over the
course of several decades; the emergence of the UFO phenomenon immediately after the
Second World War constitutes such a case.
2
On Tuesday, June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold
(1915–1984), an American businessman piloting his private plane, reported nine shiny
‘saucer-like’aircraft flying in formation at immense speed from Mount Rainier to Mount
Adams in Washington State. Confused by his observation, the next day Arnold contacted
⁄
Alexander C.T. Geppert is Emmy Noether Research Group Director at Freie Universität Berlin.
Email: alexander.geppert@fu-berlin.de
History and Technology
Vol. 28, No. 3, September 2012, 335–362
ISSN 0734-1512 print/ISSN 1477-2620 online
Ó2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2012.723340
http://www.tandfonline.com
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the journalist William C. Bequette (1917–2011), who not only published the story on the
front page of the local newspaper, the East Oregonian, but also notified Associated Press.
‘Nine bright saucer-like objects flying at “incredible”speed at 10,000 feet altitude were
reported here today by Kenneth Arnold, Boise, Idaho, pilot, who said he could not hazard
a guess as to what they were,’their ensuing dispatch began. Almost instantly, additional
articles and further sightings by separate observers in multiple locations led to widespread
speculation as to the character and meaning of the disks seen in the skies. Within a
month flying saucers had been reported by people in 40 states. Life magazine sketched
the situation five years later: ‘For the public …the saucers provided the biggest game of
hey-diddle-diddle in history. Any man, woman or child with talent enough to see spots
before his eyes could get his name in a newspaper.’
3
Arnold’s original description of his brief, yet disturbing encounter and the dispatch to
which it led had an enduring legacy, if only for the history of concepts
(Begriffsgeschichte). A new category of referent, and associated meanings, was created:
Ever since, such ‘things seen in the skies’have been described as ‘flying saucers,’not
only in English but also in French (soucoupes volantes), German (fliegende Untertassen)
and Spanish (platillos voladores), or as ‘flying discs’as in Italian (dischi volanti). The
more technical and (at least initially) less-evocative term ‘Unidentified Flying Object’
(UFO) was introduced in 1950 by Edward J. Ruppelt (1923–1960), who served as head of
the US Air Force UFO investigation group from 1951 to 1953, the purpose of which was
to defuse public fascination with the new mystery, but to no avail.
4
Later alternatives, sim-
ilarly motivated, such as ‘Unidentified Airborne Object’(UAO), ‘Unidentified Aerial Phe-
nomenon’(UAP) or ‘engins spatiaux de provenance inconnue’(ESPI) also failed. To date,
both original terms, ‘flying saucers’and ‘UFOs,’continue to be used synonymously in
public discourse, their different meanings conflated. For historical actors, though, espe-
cially the former notion came to imply the idea of agency and active control, and, typi-
cally, advanced extraterrestrial technology. A UFO, in contrast, took on a more generic
connotation as a ‘moving aerial or celestial phenomenon, detected visually or by radar but
whose nature is not immediately understood.’
5
In the summer of 1947, however, these
terms were yet to take shape. Arnold’s report and the ensuing global clamor ushered in the
‘era of the flying saucer,’or, as others would have it, ‘the haunted decade.’
6
The emer-
gence of this new phenomenon, and its curious nomenclature, coincided with the outbreak
of the Cold War and prevalent fears of nuclear armageddon.
7
UFOs continue to excite
believers and aggravate skeptics, and, as I argue in this article, constitute an integral part
of the history of spaceflight before and after Sputnik, as well as Western astroculture.
By their very characteristics and the reactions they have incited, UFOs unsettle tradi-
tional historical analysis. The subject necessitates a careful self-positioning as to what
counts as facts and how they are situated culturally. Although the phenomenon has given
rise to a global, socioculturally heterogeneous and still active UFO movement, scholars
in the humanities have generally shied away from comprehending the genesis, develop-
ment and societal impact of such an unconventional subject, one that constantly oscillates
between fact and fiction, knowing and believing, and science and religion. The topic is
as fleeting, glistening and controversial as UFOs themselves. The handful of previous
academic studies, mainly authored by sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of reli-
gion, is characterized by an almost exclusive focus on the USA. As non-historical stud-
ies, they tend to lack historical depth, awareness of geography and contextualization.
8
Historians themselves, for whatever reasons, have been even slower to engage with the
topic, despite its historical dimension and the fundamental questions posed by its sudden
rise, widespread popularity and, since the summer of 1947, unbroken persistence as a
336 A.C.T. Geppert
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contested, cultural phenomenon. The unclear ontological status of UFOs –‘Are Flying
Saucers Real?’astronomer J. Allen Hynek bluntly asked in the title of one of his publica-
tions –may explain some professional restraint and the widespread belief in the subject’s
inherent illegitimacy.
9
Political scientists Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall argue
that there may be an actively reproduced social taboo on taking UFOs seriously. Accord-
ing to their analysis, inquiring into the nature of UFOs constitutes a threat to the ‘ongo-
ing historical project to constitute sovereignty in anthropocentric terms.’The mere act of
inquiry invokes the taboo. ‘The UFO can be “known”only,’Wendt and Duvall deduce,
‘by not asking what it is.’
10
For historians, then, the sole possibility is to do what they
typically do in such situations: to cautiously circumnavigate this blind spot or Leer-
stelle.
11
A direct confrontation would only perpetuate the discursive deadlock between
believers and skeptics, proselytizers and debunkers, and amateurs and scientists reached
within a few years after the 1947 incident and persisting to date.
The resulting shortage of academic literature –here understood as that without active
investment in the object of its investigation –is in stark disproportion to the sheer mass
of source material that is available and steeped in controversy. In Western Europe, several
specialized UFO journals were established in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a reliable
and fully annotated bibliography, covering the four decades after 1947, lists no fewer
than 1093 English publications in book format alone.
12
Almost all of them, however,
were written in order to intervene in contemporaneous controversies and are therefore
often partisan. Believers and debunkers alike frequently based their accounts on the same
anecdotal and oft-repeated evidence; pursued overt, often conspiracy-theory driven agen-
das; and usually chose to attack either each other or address themselves, rather than oper-
ate within and relate to larger intellectual debates.
13
For what reason have UFOs proved academically so perilous? Is it apt to describe
them as a ‘sociological untouchable’? What, then, are historians to ‘do’with the
‘rumours of round objects that flash through the troposphere and stratosphere,’as C.G.
Jung sketched the situation in 1958?
14
The present essay attempts to meet such a chal-
lenge, charting a viable path along which to historicize UFOs. As the 1947 founding
myth and subsequent US-government investigations to solve the riddle, culminating in
Congressional Hearings in April 1966 and July 1968, are far better known than most
other aspects of UFO history, this article sets itself three alternative objectives.
15
First, it intends to internationalize the history of the UFO phenomenon. Neither the
phenomenon as such nor the controversies and movement it engendered were as con-
fined and exceptional to the USA as most of the existing academic literature seems to
imply.
Second, this article comprehends and analyzes UFOs as an integral part of what I
describe by the term ‘astroculture.’
16
If the overall aim is to design a comprehensive,
‘alternative’state-of-the-art cultural history of the Space Age, then not only UFOs and
contact claims, but the entire range of its supposedly obscure and sometimes-labeled
‘pseudo-scientific’features such as space mirrors, space stations and space colonies
should be seen from the vantage of historical actors, with all their varied beliefs, interests,
and actions, and integrated into the analysis.
17
This article considers UFOs in relation to
astroculture by focusing on the quarter-century after the 1947 Arnold sighting until about
1972–1973. This was the time when the international UFO controversy changed tack.
The last important wave of sightings occurred in 1973 (until the large Belgian UFO wave
of 1989–1991), and debates on extraterrestrial encounters were given a new twist with
the rise of alien abduction claims and narratives first reported in 1966.
18
Moreover, the
first phase of space exploration, the classical Space Age, came to an end, with the last
History and Technology 337
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astronaut leaving the Moon on December 14, 1972. In the West, post-Apollo disillusion-
ment and waning public enthusiasm for human initiatives in outer space, whether physi-
cal or in the imagination, were associated with the end of the postwar economic boom
and a general crisis of confidence in the future, on Earth or in space.
19
Third, this article asks what issues, especially those contrasting with professional tech-
noscience, were at stake in the periodic international controversies on UFOs. Curiously
enough, the two major technoscientific projects of the twentieth century –the exploration
and use of outer space, and the exploration and use of nuclear power –intersected at the
fringes of institutionalized knowledge. But postwar UFOs also brought to the fore a dis-
tinct issue relating to the boundary between science and belief: the extraterrestrial hypoth-
esis (ETH), which according to sociologist Brenda Denzler served as the ‘central
organizing concept for ufology.’
20
Having profited from the rise and professionalization
of science, ufology, in short, gave an easy answer to an eternal question with which con-
ventional science continued to struggle: Are we alone in the universe? Some believed
that, in the future-saturated Space Age, the age-long wait for an answer had finally come
to an end. At last, ‘they’were here.
The global invention of the flying saucer
UFOs were an American invention that soon turned into a global, particularly West-
European phenomenon. Their popularity was just as sensational in Europe as in their
country of origin, and some of the movement’s protagonists became equally prominent
expert-celebrities in other national contexts, in particular the Polish-American ufologist
George Adamski (1891–1965) and the astronomer J. Allen Hynek (1910–1986), to name
but two, each representing diametrically opposite positions of belief. Only a fortnight
after Kenneth Arnold’s contentious encounter in June 1947, the Times of London reported
that ‘disk-like objects, nicknamed “flying saucers,”’ had been seen ‘travelling through the
air at great speed, singly or in groups’in various parts of the USA and Canada. Soon
after, the German weekly Der Spiegel pointed to the phenomenon’s global character in
the first UFO article it ever published: ‘Each continent has its own saucers,’its headline
read: ‘They were seen in Denmark, in the Balearic Islands and in Australia, in Italy,
France and Ireland.’In early 1950, when more and more articles began to appear, the sit-
uation had worsened, rather than improved, at least according to Der Spiegel, which now
reported that ‘From Uruguay to Turkey, from Mexico to Austria, there was an epidemic
of flying discs.’Die Zeit found that they had caused ‘confusion, doubt, panic and hyste-
ria’in the ‘entire Western part of our globe,’and the New York Times considered it note-
worthy that ‘saucer stories [had] popped up in such widely scattered points as Turkey,
Argentina, Germany, China and Chile.’According to contemporaneous estimates, by the
mid-1950s UFOs had been sighted in 70 different countries, by the end of the decade
over every country in the world.
21
There is little reliable, non-anecdotal and statistically sound evidence as regards the
precise geographical and chronological distribution of such sightings worldwide. French
ufologist Jacques Vallée (1939–) counts four particularly large UFO waves, so-called
flaps, in 1947, 1952, 1954 and 1964, with a ‘silent decade’between the latter two. For
the USA, historian David Jacobs has identified four peaks after the beginning of the mod-
ern debate in the summer of 1947, that is in 1952, 1957, 1965–1967 and in 1973. Sociol-
ogist Denzler draws attention to a similar, but again slightly different chronology of
intensified sightings: in 1954 and three longer ones, in 1956–1958, 1965–1968 and
1973–1974. Others have emphasized a particularly momentous pan-European flap on July
338 A.C.T. Geppert
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18, 1967.
22
In Great Britain alone, altogether 2463 sightings were reported to the authori-
ties between January 1, 1959 and December 31, 1974, with particular peaks in 1967 and
1971. When asked in Parliament to comment on the unusual number of reports of
unidentified flying objects received in 1967, Secretary of State for Air Merlyn Rees
explained that they simply reflected a wave of public interest in UFOs, rather than vice
versa.
23
Statistically, it is impossible to correlate these peaks unambiguously with signifi-
cant societal events, such as war tensions or atomic tests, or spaceflight accomplishments,
such as the launching of the first artificial satellites in the fall/winter of 1957–1958, the
first photographs of the Martian surface (Mariner 4, 1965) or the six Apollo Moon land-
ings between July 1969 and December 1972. Available data is too insubstantial and unre-
liable for valid statistical analysis, with the assumed direction of causation being unclear
in the first place: Did UFO sightings lead to reports –or did reports generate sightings?
Contemporaneous critics and observers were well aware of this problem, but helpless to
resolve it.
24
Figure 1 details major UFO waves worldwide between 1947 and 1973; most reports
were made in the blackened regions and encircled areas. A concentration along the coasts
of North America, in Japan and, in particular, Western Europe is striking –mutatis
mutandis urban, densely populated and industrialized regions rather than the rural coun-
tryside. Periodic reports of UFO sightings in Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet Union,
rumored since the late 1940s and with a particular wave in 1966, were neither known
nor widely debated in the West, particularly not prior to this map’s origination in 1975.
Early on, UFOs were discussed in the West as secret weapons potentially emanating from
the Eastern Bloc, whereas UFOs in Communist countries themselves hardly played a sig-
nificant role in the Western skirmishes.
25
Thus, UFOs were not sighted in the USA alone; within weeks they proved a genu-
inely global phenomenon. They also occurred relatively early when weighed against the
sequence of events suggested by standard histories of the Space Age: two years after the
end of World War II and the outset of the Cold War, yet more than a decade before Sput-
nik, the world’sfirst artificial satellite launched in October 1957.
26
Because of the series
of atomic bomb explosions in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Bikini Atoll begun in 1945,
the threat of nuclear war overshadowed all attempts of geopolitical reorganization but it
did not, paradoxically, shake confidence in the desirability and feasibility of large-scale
technoscientific projects such as the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Belief in scenarios of
an imminent human expansion into outer space –commonly discussed using imperial-
expansionist terms such as ‘exploration,’‘exploitation,’‘conquest’and ‘colonization’–
formed an integral part of such widely shared faith in the powers of technology. Physi-
cally, outer space was empty of human presence during this decade, yet in the cultural
imagination it was more cluttered and inhabited than ever before. With gigantic space
mirrors, nuclear wonder weapons and constantly manned space stations circling the Earth
in public print discussion, this was the heyday of astroculture. In other words, the UFO
phenomenon arose at the very beginning of what has sometimes been hailed as the
‘Golden Age of Spaceflight,’and must be considered an integral element of a compre-
hensive, all-encompassing astroculture. Classifying UFOs and the heated, long-term and
never-ending controversies they engendered as ‘pseudoscientific,’peripheral or petty is to
miss their historical import.
The ‘saucer racket’(Untertassenrummel) constituted the postwar equivalent of the
interwar ‘rocket racket’(Raketenrummel), the first trans-European space fads from the
mid-1920s through the early 1930s.
27
Space enthusiasm was fostered by a small number
of influential amateur societies, established in the prewar period, such as the legendary
History and Technology 339
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Figure 1. Originally captioned ‘The global nature of the UFO phenomenon,’this 1975 map charts major waves of UFO sightings from 1947
through 1973.
Source: Hynek and Vallée, Edge of Reality, xvi.
340 A.C.T. Geppert
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Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR) in 1927 and the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) in
1933. Members included physicist and school teacher Hermann Oberth (1894–1989), sci-
ence popularizer Willy Ley (1906–1969), rocket engineer Wernher von Braun (1912–
1977) and science fiction author and techno-prophet Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), to
name but a few of approximately 100 space personae of significance. Aiming to establish
space exploration as a legitimate enterprise, worthy of public and political support, they
made outer space imaginable, socially respectable and, effectively, a central element of
European cosmopolitanism. World War II proved a significant catalyst in this process as
it palpably demonstrated the power and potential of rockets –as weapons. With regard to
the new experts themselves, it simultaneously disrupted and accelerated a process of
internationalization. Eventually, the war led to the rise of a space international, a loose
confederation of organizations and individuals through which ideas and promotional
efforts circulated. When the first UFO sightings were reported in 1947, these space
experts promptly sought to combat what they considered utterly irrational claims and a
severe threat to their own, only by then publicly accepted authority and cognizance in all
matters space.
28
In addition to appreciating its postwar geographical scope and temporal context, a
third aspect of the UFO phenomenon needs to be emphasized: belief in the possible exis-
tence and gestalt of extraterrestrial life –usually subsumed as the so-called plurality-of-
worlds debate. The question of whether humans are unique in the universe did not origi-
nate in the twentieth century, but rather stretches back to Greek philosophers, particularly
Democritus and Epicurus. It has its own centuries-old history, with the latter half of the
nineteenth century known as the ‘Golden Age of the discussion about plurality,’that is,
plurality of inhabitable planets and the statistical likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrial
life elsewhere. Yet, if UFOs indeed constitute ‘the technological wing of the E.T. imagi-
nary,’as anthropologist Debbora Battaglia has argued, they are not only younger, but also
a more frequent target of public doubt than these largely theological-intellectual
debates.
29
A causal connection between unclassifiable shapes observed in the skies and
imminent visitations from outer space was suggested early on, not the least by Arnold
himself, yet by no means taken as serious or even worthy of consideration. Alternatively,
observers brought forward at least five different theories for the new, deeply unsettling
phenomena, including the testing of secret weapons, Soviet missiles, weather balloons,
meteors, and optical illusions.
30
It was only in 1950 that the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis began to generate enor-
mous public controversy. Soon dominating all other interpretations and explanations, this
marked the beginning of a second phase of debate. Three books were published in 1950
which tried to make a case for explaining the flying saucers as spaceships, sent from either
Mars or Venus to observe planet Earth and watch its inhabitants: Donald E. Keyhoe’sThe
Flying Saucers Are Real, Frank Scully’sBehind the Flying Saucers and Gerald Heard’s
The Riddle of the Flying Saucers.
31
Although the books were as different as their authors
–Keyhoe (1897–1988) a retired Marine Corps major and aviation writer, Scully (1892–
1964) an American journalist and Heard (1889–1971) a British historian and the BBC’s
first science commentator –they were also widely read and discussed by an international
audience. Keyhoe’sFlying Saucers Are Real sold half a million copies. The German trans-
lation of its sequel, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, published in 1953, carried the dras-
tic, threatening and yet telling title Der Weltraum rückt uns näher –‘outer space is
looming’–and was reviewed in respectable journals such as Weltraumfahrt,Die Zeit, and
even the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Within half a year, six editions were sold, a
ninth before January 1955.
32
By 1954, all three books were available in French transla-
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tions. In Great Britain, it was the middle-brow Sunday Express, one of the largest circulat-
ing weekly papers, that first brought the idea of the saucers’extraterrestrial provenance to
a wider public, by pre-publishing Heard’sRiddle of the Flying Saucers in serialized form
in the fall of 1950. Over the course of two months, under the general title ‘Is Another
World Watching Us?’individual articles in the series posed questions such as ‘Where ON
EARTH could Flying Saucers come from?’,‘What makes flying saucers FLY?’,‘Are Fly-
ing Saucers manned by insects –not men?’or ‘On which of the planets could life exist?’,
with the paper’s editor declaring that he himself was by no means ‘out of sympathy’with
such an idea. Heard’s‘theory’that flying saucers were not secret weapons but piloted by
giant bees from planet Mars or one of its moons never quite caught the public imagination,
but it did add to the growth of an increasingly contentious debate.
33
The internationally most widely read of the three authors proved to be Keyhoe. After
studying the UFO material made available to him by the Air Force, Keyhoe drew the
sensational conclusion that there could only be one simple solution to the ‘mystery of the
disks’: patrolling beings from another planet, possibly Mars. According to Keyhoe, planet
Earth had been under periodic observation for at least two centuries; surveillance had
suddenly increased in 1947 because of the series of nuclear weapons tests begun in 1945
which had shaken the universe’s equilibrium. The mysterious signs in the skies had to be
read as harbingers of extraterrestrial ambassadors, alarmed by human wrongdoing that
could be observed from more distant parts of the solar system. However, attempts to
establish communication with UFO occupants was unlikely, Keyhoe claimed: ‘There may
be some unknown block to making contact, but it is more probable that the spacemen’s
plans are not complete,’he stated.
34
UFOs joined mainstream culture when, in April 1952, Life magazine published an
article suggestively entitled ‘Have We Visitors From Space?’Emphasizing the extraterres-
trial possibility without ever siding with it directly, the Life article paved the way for
other respectable publications, national and international, to engage the topic.
35
In the
early 1950s a new book genre evolved, consisting of countless volumes characterized by
a multitude of variations on the same theme, each eager to outdo its competitors by pre-
senting fresh speculations and ever vaster narratives of conspiracy. At the same time,
these books generated a counter-market of works that aimed to debunk the rapidly snow-
balling literature as complete nonsense, an Untertassenschwindel (flying saucer swindle),
arguing that the signs in the skies were natural phenomena that could easily be explained.
This discursive tension intensified when the first scientist, Donald Menzel (1901–1976), a
Harvard-based astrophysicist, entered the debate. In his 1953 book Flying Saucers, pub-
lished by Harvard University Press, he cited mundane, that is, natural, causes of the
‘apparitions,’explaining them away as mirages caused by temperature inversion. Intended
as an act of scientific analysis to prove the ‘unreality’of saucers, Menzel’s intervention
rather fueled the ongoing debate and led Keyhoe to write his equally controversial sequel,
Flying Saucers from Outer Space.
36
Thus, a double causal claim would characterize and dominate the international skir-
mishes on flying saucers throughout the next two decades: first, UFO’s alleged extraterres-
trial provenance; and, second, that their influx had been triggered by nuclear bomb tests
on planet Earth. While the former led to a revived version of the plurality-of-worlds debate
in amateur and expert circles alike, the reference to the atomic bomb was yet another sign
that, for these historical actors and the public, the Space and the Atomic Ages were inex-
tricably intertwined. According to them, the development and employment of nuclear
power constituted a clear threat for the rest of the universe. ‘The fact that the present sau-
cer incursion came so soon after the beginning of our Atomic Age convinces researchers
342 A.C.T. Geppert
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that there is a connection between the two history-making, history-shaking events,’
Brinsley le Poer Trench (1911–1995), 8th Earl of Clancarty and prominent British ufolo-
gist, stated in a Flying Saucer Review editorial published on the tenth anniversary of
Arnold’s encounter.
37
As much as the future was predicted to take place in outer space, it
seemed equally evident to le Poer Trench and other ufologists that the Space Age was
threatened by humans’self-destructive tendencies, in the form of nuclear weapons.
Yet, there was one common characteristic in which proponents and critics of the
extraterrestrial hypothesis did not fundamentally differ: their spatial imagination was lar-
gely limited to the solar system. Once they had decided that an ‘unorthodox explanation’
was better suited to interpret the available evidence than ‘simple misinterpretation of nat-
ural phenomena and wish-fulfillment hallucinations’(Figure 2), ufologists usually dis-
cussed two potential points of origin of the flying saucers, either Mars or Venus, with a
slight inclination toward the latter. Whether there was a correlation between frequencies
of UFO sightings and the planets’variable distances to Earth became a common topic of
debate, particularly during the summer of 1956 –by some reckonings a ‘flap’year –
when Earth and Mars were in relatively close proximity in astronomical terms.
38
Ironically, the international group of space experts, the space personae including
Clarke, Ley, von Braun and others, who, with their enhanced status in the postwar period,
should have been in a position to make sense of the new phenomenon and present alterna-
tive explanations to the public, did not know how to face the epistemic challenge brought
about by the ufologists. In their response to UFO reports in the 1950s, members of the
rocket societies displayed and reproduced the same kind of scientific skepticism to which
they themselves had been subjected before the war. After some internal controversy, the
newly founded West German Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung (GfW), the VfR’s self-
declared successor organization, decided to withdraw entirely from participating in the
Figure 2. Diagrammatic scheme of possible explanations of UFO evidence published in the
British journal Flying Saucer Review in 1961. Following the ‘line of least resistance,’the author
came to the conclusion that the most logical and therefore best interpretation of the available UFO
evidence was that ‘(a) UFOs are space ships, [and] (b) they come from Mars or Venus or from an
Earth-like planet of another sun.’
Source: Sharp, ‘An Appraisal of the Present UFO Position,’20.
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public debate by abstaining from releasing any official statement.
39
The BIS, the GfW’s
British counterpart, chose a more aggressive strategy, hardly concealing its discomfort.
Under Clarke’s chairmanship (1946–1947; 1951–1953), a brief, yet adamantly critical
reaction to the 1952 Life article on extraterrestrial visitors appeared in its in-house publica-
tion, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Three more reviews of prominent
UFO books followed in the first half of the 1950s. Although quick to point out that there
was ‘no “official”B.I.S. party-line’on the ‘plague of flying saucers,’the Society declared
that it
remains unconvinced that this planet is already in contact with extra-terrestrial forces –a fair
statement would be to say that we retain an open mind, tinged with skepticism! This in spite
of the fact that we should rather like to believe that spaceships were already flying in the
neighbourhood of the Earth, even if they were not our own –and in spite of the fact that, of
course, we would be the last to ridicule such a possibility.
40
Despite their stringent efforts to debunk what they considered a very remote possibility
or, worse, excesses of irrational belief in obvious quackery, internationally recognized
space personae such as Clarke and Ley did not succeed in formulating a concise alternate
standpoint that would resonate with the public to the same degree. Fearing that their own
newly won respectability might be endangered should the public now associate them
‘with the cranks and crackpots who were spearheading the cult,’they resorted to humor-
ous polemics to maintain the necessary distance. ‘U.F.O.s tell us absolutely nothing about
intelligent life elsewhere in the universe; but they do prove how rare it is on Earth,’read
one of Clarke’s numerous aphorisms.
41
Similarly, Ley for his part acknowledged deep
puzzlement when describing the quick succession of one UFO book after the other as an
even greater mystery than the saucers themselves: ‘Unfortunately nobody has a simple
answer [as to what they are] so the flying saucer books keep coming,’he noted in one of
his many book reviews. Frequently peppered with UFO questions after his public lec-
tures, Ley tried to explain that he did believe in visits from outer space, ‘maybe to-mor-
row, maybe in a century,’while remaining convinced that the flying saucers just were not
‘it’:‘If they have a common cause at all they most likely represent a natural phenomenon
which has escaped us so far.’
42
A common resolution on UFOs, planned to be released at
the fifth annual congress of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), the associa-
tion of the world’s space societies, held in Innsbruck in 1954, did not materialize.
43
With
the self-made space experts at a loss to present a clear, substantive explanation, the global
debate on Unidentified Airborne Objects –as Clarke insisted on calling them –entered a
third, even more spectacular phase.
Contact
In the years immediately following Arnold’s encounter, from 1947 through 1953, the
UFO controversy grew and differentiated. The first and most radical transformation was
the double shift from seeing strange things in the skies to ascribing them an out-of-space
provenance, and, second, from observing and reporting to actually encountering the
extraterrestrial other, as the infamous ‘contactees’of the 1950s and 1960s claimed to
have done. Over the course of these six short years, UFOs had invaded popular culture,
most notably music and feature film, to such an extent that a critic in 1952 lamented how
outer space had already ‘come of age.’
44
A year before, Ella Fitzgerald had sung of ‘Two
Little Men in a Flying Saucer,’and two figurative science fiction films were released,
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both capitalizing on the visitors-from-space theme, albeit from opposite perspectives.
Together, Robert Wise’s jolting The Day the Earth Stood Still and Howard Hawks’hor-
ror-prone The Thing from Another World effectively created a distinct subgenre of science
fiction films, the saucer movie. In 1953, these films were followed by George Pál’sWar
of the Worlds, Jack Arnold’sIt Came from Outer Space and William Cameron Menzies’
Invaders from Mars. Fred F. Sears’Earth vs.Flying Saucers, a 1956 saucer movie that
thematized the global character of the alien mania like no other, even claimed to be a fil-
mic adaptation of Keyhoe’s bestseller Flying Saucers from Outer Space. Although all
Hollywood-made, they were widely shown and discussed elsewhere, particularly in Wes-
tern Europe, as evidenced by comprehensive press reviews.
45
What conditions had to be fulfilled to transform belief into knowledge? If the debate
on the UFOs’reality had, from its beginnings in 1947, revolved around questions of wit-
ness credibility and material evidence, the distance between claims asserted and proof
presented now widened more than ever. After Arnold’s encounter and the establishment
of the ETH’s discursive dominance after 1950, the year 1953 marked the beginning of a
third phase in the already convoluted transnational UFO skirmishes. A similarly radical
and highly controversial shift would only re-occur in 1966, when contact stories were
given a new twist with the rise of ‘alien abduction’claims and strongly sexualized space
narratives.
46
Much to the disdain of Keyhoe, Hynek and others who considered themselves ‘empir-
ical’ufologists, as they sought to legitimate ufology by basing it on hard evidence and
controlled observation, an increasing number of so-called contactees rose to stardom dur-
ing the 1950s and 1960s. They claimed to have had face-to-face contact, personal com-
munication and direct interaction with beings from another planet, a so-called ‘close
encounter of the fourth kind’(CEIV).
47
Soon, their ‘contactee stories’comprised a best-
selling subgenre within the already flourishing UFO literature. The Polish-American
author George Adamski (Figure 3, nos. 183 and 184) became the preeminent star contac-
tee and international media celebrity. Propagating spectacular space travelogues in best-
sellers such as Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), co-authored with the British author
and musician Desmond Leslie (1921–2001), and its 1956 sequel Inside the Space Ships,
Adamski soon gained a worldwide following.
48
His legion included Queen Juliana of the
Netherlands (1909–2004), previously rumored to be under the spell of a faith healer. On
the occasion of a trans-European lecture tour organized by a British UFO association dur-
ing the summer of 1959, Adamski was even granted a private, scandal-ridden audience at
Palace Soestdijk, her summer residence, before speaking to a gathering of 1200 about a
recent 12-hour trip to Venus. Adamski’s subsequent reading tour through Europe came to
a sudden halt on May 29, 1959 when students in Zurich organized protests, accusing him
of fraud. Adamski, on his part, accused the Europeans of not being sufficiently welt-
raumbewußt (space-minded) before returning to the USA.
49
In his publications, lectures and media appearances, Adamski went to great lengths to
describe his extraterrestrial encounters. During a UFO-hunt in the Californian desert on
November 20, 1952, he claimed to have made personal contact with a man from another
world, a ‘space brother.’In the sequel, Inside the Space Ships, he told of subsequent
excursions through the solar system on board alien Orthon’s‘Scout Ship,’aflying saucer.
During their rides Adamski was not only introduced to other interplanetary travelers from
Venus, Mars and even Saturn, but his hosts also showed him the dark side of the Moon,
still unseen and unexplored, only to find it vegetated and inhabited.
50
Entirely unper-
turbed by his repeated extraterrestrial encounters, Adamski described them as short, slen-
der and convinced vegetarians, perfectly capable of conversing in English. Asked to
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Figure 3. Tableau of various ‘extraterrestrials’(Planetarier), some complete with their mundane
contactee partners, as compiled by German publisher Karl Veit (1907–2001) in 1961. Image no.
184 is a photograph of the Polish-American UFO-celebrity George Adamski (1891–1965) standing
next to a painting of Venusian ‘Orthon,’also to be seen on image no. 183 (full body drawing
together with two footprints). No. 190 is the photograph of a ‘Martian’that the infamous British
author Cedric Allingham –possibly a pseudonym of popular astronomer Sir Patrick Moore –
claimed to have taken after their encounter on February 18, 1954 in Lossiemouth, Scotland.
Source: Veit, Planetenmenschen besuchen unsere Erde, 172.
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explain the aliens’human-like appearances, he referred to the two species’common ori-
gins: it had been the Venusians, Adamski explained, that had originally populated Earth,
hence the resemblance –a thought that rose in nuce to even greater popularity in the late
1960s, when Erich von Däniken began to capitalize on it as the key idea of his so-called
ancient astronaut hypothesis.
51
Soon similar books by other ‘contactees’followed, includ-
ing Truman Bethurum’sAboard a Flying Saucer, Daniel W. Fry’sThe White Sands Inci-
dent, Orfeo Angelucci’sSecret of the Saucers and Howard Menger’sFrom Outer Space
to You.
52
With his first-person account of an alien encounter, Adamski not only estab-
lished a model for the new genre of ‘contactee narrative’but also paved the way for a
powerful reintegration of esoteric thought into astroculture at large.
In Europe, similar contact claims followed on their heels. Independently of each other,
two Frenchmen, Antoine Mazaud and Marius Dewilde, claimed ‘to have seen and even
touched’an alien on September 10, 1954, ‘for the first time in Europe.’
53
Not only in ret-
rospect, however, the most significant and controversial case proved that of a hitherto
and otherwise unknown Cedric Allingham, who in February 1955 published Flying Sau-
cer from Mars. The book caused a stir for describing the first direct encounter case
reported in Great Britain, on February 18, 1954 in Lossiemouth, Scotland, and hence half
a year earlier than that in France. Included in the book were six photos of the alleged
UFO and one photo of the Martian, all out of focus (Figure 3, no. 190). Since the
mid-1980s evidence has grown that its somewhat obscure, elusive and afterwards soon-
to-disappear author was none other than the noted British astronomer, prolific writer and
TV-presenter Sir Patrick Moore, well known through the BBC’s astronomy show ‘The
Sky at Night,’continually broadcast since May 1954.
54
The contactees’emergence and rise to popularity after 1953 confused an already con-
voluted controversy even further. Refueling the ongoing skirmishes with what competing
ufologists called a ‘ridicule factor,’they were accused of hampering evidence-based
efforts to legitimize the subject. Thus, the contactees challenged ‘authoritative’ufologists
such as Keyhoe or Hynek in the same way as their original emergence had challenged
established space experts such as Ley or Clarke who, in turn, recommended to treat
Adamski’s model-setting book with the ‘contempt it deserves.’‘Books like Flying Sau-
cers Have Landed,’Clarke incensed, ‘do a real disservice by obscuring the truth and
scaring away serious researchers from a field which may be of great importance.’
55
It is
doubtful, however, whether such warnings had the intended impact on the public. As in
similar other cases, the unveiling of fraud and hoaxes, and the failing of prophecies did
not necessarily undermine popular belief in the reality of UFOs. Quite to the contrary,
they continued to be conflated in the public mind and the media with space travel and
technoscientific promise.
56
Evidence
In the premiere episode of UFO, the 1970 British science fiction television series about
an imminent alien invasion, Commander Edward Straker, head of a secret organization
established to impede the hostile takeover, poses the all-important question: ‘What do we
really know about UFOs?’Although he goes on to break the main problem down into
three interrelated questions –‘What are they? Where do they come from? What do they
want?’–Straker’s query points to the one epistemic-ontological problem at the core of
the UFO controversy since its very inception: the phenomenon’s reality, the kind of evi-
dence available to decide its status and, consequently, the boundaries between knowledge
and belief. Can one know of UFOs –or ‘only’believe in them?
57
In 1978, inspired by
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the success of Steven Spielberg’sClose Encounters of the Third Kind and President Car-
ter’s alleged UFO sighting, Der Spiegel devoted an entire cover story, ‘Die Ufos kommen
–Spuk oder Wirklichkeit?’(The UFOs are arriving –spook or reality?), to this very
question.
58
Over the course of more than 65 years, the UFO controversy has continued to rage,
yet a consensus as to the ‘truth’of the phenomenon has never been reached. Although
the debate has undergone three distinct transformations –in 1950, 1953 and 1966 –the
fundamental questions posed –what, whence and why? –have remained identical. At the
core of the controversy has been an argument about the constituents of knowledge. The
role of experts –eyewitnesses or proponents –is key: their reports, as well as various
forms of direct and indirect evidence such as testimonies, affidavits and observation
records; frequently photographs and drawings, less so films; and, even more rarely, puta-
tive ‘artifacts’of extraterrestrial origins (Figure 4). As evidence of UFO encounters was
Figure 4. As a postscript to George Adamski’s obituary published in July 1965, the British
Flying Saucer Review presented its readers with a combination of photographic evidence and
technical extrapolations. Comparing Adamski’s iconic photograph of a Venusian ‘Scout Ship’
(upper left; from Inside the Space Ships, 1955) with another taken by Stephen Darbishire, a
student from the Lake District, on February 15, 1954 (bottom left), the editors used engineering-
style drawings as corroborative evidence of this UFO’s existence.
Source: Flying Saucer Review 11, no. 4 (July–August 1965): 19.
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almost exclusively case-based and largely anecdotal, non-reproducible nor falsifiable,
ufologists hoped that as much could be collected as possible, even if sheer quantity could
not generate verification. When such accumulation of knowledge failed to bring analytical
clarity, other forms of collective verification were sought. Starting in the mid-1950s, the
British Unidentified Flying Object Research Association (BUFORA) co-organized so-
called ‘International Flying Saucer Sighting Days’or entire ‘Contact Week-ends.’On the
occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Arnold’s sighting in 1967, during the pan-Euro-
pean flap of that year, reportedly more than 40,000 participants from 23 countries were
simultaneously on the hunt, among them 600 British activists.
59
In 1954, French ufologist
Aimé Michel (1919–1992) introduced orthoténie, a statistical method to find a potential
structure by linking individual sightings in different locations. One person, the argument
went in both cases, could suffer from a hallucination, but if several observers witnessed
the same sighting at the same time or if several sightings could be assembled to form a
pattern, the phenomenon became intersubjective.
60
Critics, though, were hardly impressed
by proof they considered far from conclusive or compelling, usually questioning the reli-
ability of witness observations or the quality of evidence. ‘To make progress,’Hynek
declared on various occasions, ‘we must accept the fact that the UFOs do exist –as
reports.’‘If there are so many hundreds of cases of UFO landings,’another critic snarled
during a panel discussion convened by Playboy magazine, ‘why haven’t they left behind
the tiniest trace of their presence, apart from “evidence”that could have been created by
any sixth grader?’
61
Two further historical parallels, one synchronic and the other diachronic, can only be
sketched. In 1965, biochemist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) char-
acterized exobiology –the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by means of con-
sensual science, since 1959/1960 an emergent field of research –as a science ‘in search
of a subject,’a‘field of study with nothing to study.’
62
Such a labeling could also be
applied to ufology. As their respective conclusions cannot be falsified, both sought to
legitimate their activities in conditional, prospective terms, pointing time and again to the
revolutionary consequences that establishing contact with other life in outer space would
have as the ‘greatest news since civilisation began.’
63
That they both rely on the same
age-old argumentative pattern of justification accounts for some of the hostilities between
ufologists on the one hand, and proponents of SETI on the other.
64
The second historical parallel arises from striking similarities with turn-of-the-century
disputes about spirit rappings, ghost apparitions and the possibility of communicating with
the beyond. Evidence produced in the nineteenth century to support the reality of a wide
array of occult phenomena included equally fuzzy photographs and testimonies by socially
respected witnesses, often choosing case-study approaches and evoking paranormal expla-
nations. Not only the translational media employed but also the fundamental questions
raised by proponents and critics in the late nineteenth century and the third quarter of the
twentieth century were identical. Were the reported phenomena real? What kind of evi-
dence was required to dispel potential doubts and attest to their existence? Both spiritualists
and ufologists were driven by the same cause of surpassing existing human boundaries and
transgressing mundane limitations by establishing contact with otherworldly powers, thus
elevating earthbound spirituality to a new, hitherto unforeseen level of existence.
65
Over the course of the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the diffusion of
space thought in general, and the UFO skirmishes in particular, continued, with positions
becoming increasingly rigid and irreconcilable. A single transgressive moment was reached
in October 1960 when ‘father of spaceflight’Hermann Oberth, one of the most respected
space experts and von Braun’s mentor, publically switched camps, to the disdain of the
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other space personae. At the ‘4. Internationaler UFO/IFO-Kongress,’hosted in Wiesbaden
and organized by Karl Veit (1907–2001), credulous UFO-impresario and president of the
Deutsche UFO/IFO-Studiengemeinschaft (DUIST), Oberth repeated claims first made in
1954 that he was no longer willing to exclude the possibility that UFOs could indeed be of
extraterrestrial origin. Having examined all existing arguments, Oberth proclaimed in front
of ‘many hundreds of people who apparently believe that the Earth has been visited by
emissaries from outer space,’as The Times wrote, that he was now convinced that flying
saucers were ‘very real,’and carrying visitors from outer space (Figure 5).
66
Propagating
the idea of salvation via heavenly technology, Oberth later repeated that ‘the UFOs are a
kind of sentinel, here simply to observe and report; because a humankind which is as gifted
as inventors and researchers as we are, yet has remained politically and morally on our
stage of development, constitutes a threat to the entire cosmos.’Although only pleading
the scientist’s duty not to foreclose any alternative explanation a priori, the shift of alle-
giance of such a historic figure and renowned space persona was alternatively considered
an embarrassment, a publicity stunt or an obscure curiosity, yet did nothing to reconcile
epistemic disputes and raise ufology’s respectability neither with the scientific community
nor the public. Deliberating a plethora of paranormal explanations while unaware of the
concomitant rise of SETI, Oberth was breaking ranks at just the wrong moment.
67
Figure 5. Hermann Oberth (1894–1989), the oft-hailed ‘father of spaceflight,’holding a model of
a UFO and explaining its working principle at an international ufology-congress in Wiesbaden,
Germany, in October 1960. The woman circled in the audience claimed to have been to Venus.
Source: Rheinbacher and Stahn, ‘Der Mann vom anderen Stern,’12–13.
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Astroculture, technoscience and transcendence
To this day, innumerable UFO sightings and ensuing debates continue to oscillate
between science and religion, knowing and believing, evidence and transcendence, apoca-
lypse and utopia, and doom and salvation, apparently neither to be resolved nor ever to
reach a conclusive ending. To repeat the question raised at the beginning: How are such
‘rumours of round objects that flash through the troposphere and stratosphere’and the
extensive debates surrounding them to be read and analyzed?
68
Where do UFOs belong
historiographically, how are they to be integrated into mainstream twentieth-century his-
tory and what can historians learn from these putatively fringe phenomena? In conclu-
sion, the present article offers an interrelated argument about the relationship between
astroculture, technoscience and transcendence from 1947 to the early 1970s.
With its rise in large-scale technologies, ubiquitous demonstrations of the power of
the military and widespread fear of alien invasion, the Cold War seems to suggest itself
as an obvious explanation for the sudden appearance of flying saucers. However, while
the threat of the atomic bomb and fears of imminent self-destruction played a central role
in contemporaneous explanations, evoking a bipolar Cold War context and employing the
notion of Cold War angst is a necessary, yet by no means sufficient condition for com-
prehensive historicization. Flying saucers and their occupants did not constitute a ‘signifi-
cant index of Cold War paranoia,’as commonly suggested.
69
Rather, the global
phenomenon of UFO sightings emerged a decade prior to Sputnik, during the heyday of
astroculture, and was from the outset intimately bound up with what contemporary
observers termed the Space Age. The Cold War triggered and intensified older and more-
encompassing fantasies of spatial invasion and conquest of extraterrestrial territories but
does not fully explain their profound sociocultural relevance and resonance at this time.
In retrospect, similarities, not differences between the various groups of ‘doers’and
activists in this field prevailed –be they ‘rocket scientists,’UFO believers or, after 1960,
the proponents of SETI –in defiance of all skirmishes, controversies and hostilities. While
the international space movement of the 1950s propagated, but also depended on con-
structing and selling credible but imaginative scenarios of the near future, ufologists were
simultaneously engaged in creating similar utopias, yet claimed that their visions were
occurring in the present. According to them, the presence of UFOs signaled that space had
already arrived. Aiming to make sense out of the infinite void that surrounds Earth, ulti-
mately, in both cases the same quest for transcendence can be ascertained, the will to over-
come the present condition and find salvation either in or from outer space, that is the
heavens. Believed by many to be harbingers of such salvation, in the unknowable UFO,
debates on technoscience and transcendence intersected as they did nowhere else.
70
Historicizing such a Space Age, in all its promises and failures, thus promises to shed
new light on the technoscientific modernity of an allegedly secularized century that held
fast to the possibility of redemption in the skies. By translocating its earthly obsessions
into the infinite vastness of the universe, postwar West-European society entertained and
acted upon the hope of retrieving cosmic transcendence. A modern myth, triggered by
and deeply inscribed into the Space Age, the UFO is a phenomenon that historians have
hardly begun to understand.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I am grateful to all
members of the Emmy Noether Research Group ‘The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture
and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century’at Freie Universität Berlin, the two anonymous
reviewers and all those who commented on earlier versions, including Philippe Ailleris, Eberhard
History and Technology 351
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Bauer, Peter Becker, Ralf Bülow, Pierre Lagrange, Robert Poole and Diethard Sawicki. Special
thanks go to Martin Collins, William R. Macauley and, as always, Anna Kathryn Kendrick.
Archival Sources
British Interplanetary Society, London (BIS)
General collection
Press cuttings
Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin (DTB)
Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung e.V.
Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Freiburg im Breisgau
(IGPP)
Ufologie: Kongressberichte und Interviews (1949–1967)
Ufologie: Materialsammlung (1954–1972)
Ufologie: Korrespondenz national/international A–Z (1954–1983)
Ufologie: Fragebogenumfrage zum Thema UFOs (1959)
Ufologie: Druckschriften zum Thema UFOs (1959–1967)
Pressearchiv (1950–1995)
The National Archives, Kew (TNA)
Ministry of Defense: UFO reports and correspondence (1951–1975)
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC (NASM)
Willy Ley Collection (WLC)
Feature Films
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Columbia, 1977.
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Directed by Robert Wise. 20th Century Fox, 1951.
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. Directed by Fred F. Sears. Columbia, 1956.
Invaders From Mars. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. 20th Century Fox, 1953.
It Came From Outer Space. Directed by Jack Arnold. Universal, 1953.
The Thing From Another World. Directed by Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks. RKO,
1951.
War of the Worlds. Directed by Byron Haskin, produced by George Pál. Paramount,
1953.
Notes
1. Winston Churchill to Lord Cherwell, July 28, 1952, TNA PREM 11/855; Allingham, Flying
Saucer from Mars,11.
2. Jung, ‘Ein moderner Mythus.’
3. Quoted after Lagrange, ‘Ghost in the Machine,’227; Darrach and Ginna, ‘Have We Visitors
from Space?’, 81.
4. At least so he claimed in 1956: ‘UFO is the official term that I created to replace the words
“flying saucers”’ (Ruppelt, Report, 1).
5. Clarke, ‘Flying Saucers,’97; Ailleris, ‘Lure of Local SETI,’5–6; Jacobs, UFO Controversy,
3–4; Sagan, ‘Unidentified Flying Object,’368. It is for this reason that I continue to use both
terms as they are commonly referred to, even if –as some believe –they might be falsely
over-homogenizing a multifaceted phenomenon, discredited by their close connotation with
science fiction and hindering a ‘serious’approach to explaining their provenance. The Oxford
English Dictionary (2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989, vol. 18: 807) defines a ‘UFO’as ‘an
unidentified flying object; a “flying saucer”;’and a ‘flying saucer’as ‘the fanciful name given
to various unidentified disc- or saucer-shaped objects reported as appearing in the sky’(ibid.,
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vol. 5: 1121). Interestingly enough, the most reserved and least essentialist definition forms
the basis of the infamous 1968 Condon Report, named after physicist Edward U. Condon
(1902–1974), the director of the US Air Force-funded University of Colorado UFO Project
(1966–1968). Here, the major criterion was not the inexplicable objects in the sky themselves
but rather the observational reports which they stimulated, thus avoiding any interpretative
presumptions or reality claims: ‘An unidentified flying object (UFO, pronounced OOFO) is
…defined as the stimulus for a report made by one or more individuals of something seen in
the sky …which the observer could not identify as having an ordinary natural origin, and
which seemed to him sufficiently puzzling that he undertook to make a report of it to police,
to governmental officials, to the press, or perhaps to a representative of a private organization
devoted to the study of such objects’; see Condon, Final Report of the Scientific Study of
Unidentified Flying Objects,9–10, 481, here 9.
6. Waldron, ‘After 25 Years’; Trench, ‘Editorial.’For Arnold’s own account, see ‘IDid See the
Flying Disks!’and The Coming of the Saucers, co-authored with science fiction author and
editor Ray Palmer (1910–1977).
7. With regard to a chronology of events, two further points must be made: First, the question
of whether similar aerial phenomena reported prior to 1947 (for instance, ‘airships’in the
United States in 1896–1897, ‘foo fighters’in Western Europe in 1944 and the Scandinavian
‘ghost rockets’in 1946) could or even should have been classified retrospectively as ‘UFOs.’
This matter, while oft-discussed by ufologists themselves, lies beyond the scope of this article
as I do not address questions of the phenomenon’s‘realness.’Second, the so-called Roswell
incident, a reputed UFO crash occurring in New Mexico on July 8, 1947, just a fortnight after
the Arnold sighting, is often taken to be a second foundational moment but wrongly so. ‘Ros-
well’only became an ‘incident’in 1980, with the publication of Charles Berlitz’and William
Moore’sThe Roswell Incident, and did not invade popular culture before the early 1990s. See
Saler, Ziegler and Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell,16–17.
8. See, in chronological order, Jacobs, UFO Controversy; Dick, Biological Universe, 267–320;
Peebles, Watch the Skies!; Dean, Aliens in America (here 204, n46); Saler, Ziegler and Moore,
UFO Crash at Roswell; Denzler, Lure of the Edge (xvii; 192, n20); and Bullard, Myth and
Mystery. Recent edited collections include Lewis, The Gods Have Landed; Partridge, UFO
Religions; and Tumminia, Alien Worlds. But see Lagrange’s work on France; Grünschloß,
Wenn die Götter landen, on Germany; Clarke and Roberts, Flying Saucerers, on Great Brit-
ain; and Cabria García, Entre ufólogos,creyentes y contactados, on Spain. For a comprehen-
sive –and in many ways exemplary –review essay of the major sociological, psychological
and psychiatric approaches to the UFO phenomenon which, however, lacks any historical
dimension and/or geographical focus, see Saliba, ‘UFO Contactee Phenomena.’
9. Hynek, ‘Are Flying Saucers Real?’
10. Wendt and Duvall, ‘Sovereignty,’607, 612 [my emphasis].
11. Coined by literary scholar Wolfgang Iser in 1976, a Leerstelle –literally an ‘empty spot’–is
a textual gap, a vacancy which needs to be filled by the reader; see his Akt des Lesens, here
284–85.
12. See, in chronological order, journals such as Ouranos: Revue internationale pour l’étude des
soucoupes volantes et problèmes connexes (Paris, 1952–1967); Flying Saucer Review
(London, 1955–); Weltraumbote: Unabhängige Monatsschrift zur Verbreitung der Wahrheit
über die ‘Fliegende Untertassen’genannten ausserirdischen Raumschiffe,zum Kampf gegen
die Atomspaltung und für die Vorbereitung des neuen,geistigen Zeitalters (Zurich, 1955–
1961); Le Courrier interplanétaire: organ trimestriel de l’Union Mondial d’Avancée Humaine
(Lausanne, 1955–1969); UFO Nachrichten (Wiesbaden, 1956–1988); Phénomènes spatiaux
(Paris, 1964–1977); and BUFORA Journal and Bulletin (London, 1964–1989). Rasmussen,
UFO Literature; other useful bibliographies include Beard, Flying Saucers; Smith, Extrater-
restrial Intelligence; Catoe, UFOs; and, above all, Eberhart, UFOs and the Extraterrestrial
Contact Movement.
13. There are, as always, exceptions. They include, most famously, Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riec-
ken and Stanley Schachter’s 1956 pioneering study When Prophecy Fails and C.G. Jung’s brief
1958 book ‘Ein moderner Mythus.’To a lesser extent, see also Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
55–68; and Schäfer, ‘Flying Saucer Story,’both written with an educational and somewhat
polemic impetus in mind. In the summer of 1948, only a year after the Arnold sighting, Herbert
Hackett, author of the first sociological analysis published, came to the conclusion that the flying
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saucer was an ‘excellent subject in that it is almost wholly a manufactured concept, lasting for a
short period of time, and, so, easy to study’; Hackett, ‘The Flying Saucer,’here 869.
14. Lagrange, ‘Close Encounters of the French Kind,’153 [emphasis in original]; Jung, ‘Ein
moderner Mythus,’337: ‘jenes Gerücht von runden Körpern, die unsere Tropo- wie Strato-
sphäre durchstreifen.’
15. US government-funded investigations included Project Sign (1948), Project Grudge (1949)
and Project Blue Book (1951–1969), culminating with the publication of the so-called Con-
don Report in 1969. See Jacobs, UFO Controversy,44–56, 67–68, and Dick, Biological Uni-
verse, 274–78, but the key text remains the controversial report itself: Condon, Final Report
of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects.
16. See the introduction to this special issue of History and Technology and Geppert, ‘European
Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism,’6–9.
17. The term ‘alternative history of the Space Age’is borrowed from Benjamin, Rocket Dreams,4.
18. While ‘alien abduction’became widely discussed only in the late 1980s, in retrospect the
1961/1966 case of Betty and Barney Hill is usually said to have constituted its starting point;
Dean, Aliens in America,48–50, 131.
19. On the nexus of outer space and the limits to futuristic thought during the long 1970s, see the
contributions to the symposium Envisioning Limits: Outer Space and the End of Utopia, Ber-
lin, April 19–21, 2012; details at www.limits.geschkult.fu-berlin.de (last accessed May 20,
2012). A publication is currently in preparation by Alexander C.T. Geppert and William R.
Macauley.
20. Denzler, Lure of the Edge, 80.
21. ‘“Flying Saucers”in the Sky’;‘Transatlantic Whizz’;‘Transatlantisches Sausen,’19; ‘Unter-
tassen,’33; Haffner, ‘Schluß mit dem Untertassen-Spuk?’:‘Die Berichte über die Fliegenden
Untertassen haben im ganzen, westlichen Bereich unseres Erdballs Verwirrung, Zweifel, Panik
und Hysterie gestiftet.’Nolan, ‘Those Flying Saucers’; Hynek, ‘Are Flying Saucers Real?’;
Girvan, ‘Global Thinking,’1.
22. Vallée, Challenge to Science,90–93, 125, 143 (Figure 24); Jacobs, UFO Controversy, 151,
194, 200, 264; Denzler, Lure of the Edge, 183, n57.
23. TNA AIR 2/18183, AIR 2/18950-60 and AIR 2/19126; Hansard 753 (November 9, 1967):
c160W and 757 (January 22, 1968): c40W. A rudimentary analysis of the UFO-related cover-
age in the Times of London between 1947 and 1975 gives a different picture. During that per-
iod, altogether 86 relevant articles were published, an average of three per year. Peaks,
however, occurred in 1953 (8 articles published), 1959 (6), 1966 (9) and 1967 (11), rather
than in 1957–1958 (2) or 1973–1974 (2).
24. For the present, at least, social scientists have been able to demonstrate so-called ‘credibility
effects,’that is, direct and significant impact of different news reports on the willingness to
believe in the existence of UFOs. See Sparks, ‘Does Television News About UFOs Affect
Viewers’UFO Beliefs?’, 290–91.
25. Ramet, ‘UFOs over Russia,’81, 86; Binyon, ‘Russia Has Flying Saucers Too.’
26. The standard history of the Space Age, McDougall’s…the Heavens and the Earth, does not
mention the UFO phenomenon, but it is cursorily discussed in two other standard works,
McCurdy’sSpace and the American Imagination,72–74, and Burrows’This New Ocean,
140–41, the latter arguing (in the opposite direction) that it was ‘great for space because it
made it alluring for ordinary people.’
27. For this notion, see Oberth, Wählerfibel,7.
28. On the genesis of the first space fads and the establishment of transnational expert networks
after 1927, see Geppert, ‘Space Personae,’284–85, and Bainbridge, Spaceflight Revolution,
36. On the rise of space experts and the fledgling field of astronautics in Great Britain during
the postwar years, see the contributions by James Farry and David A. Kirby, and by William
R. Macauley in this issue.
29. The two standard works are Guthke, Mythos der Neuzeit, here 298 [Last Frontier, 339]; and
Dick, Biological Universe. Battaglia, ‘Insiders’Voices,’19.
30. See Arnold’s‘Are Space Visitors Here?’, 21; for a summary of alternative explanations, see
Nolan, Those Flying Saucers.’
31. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers Are Real, here 70–75; Keyhoe, Flying Saucers from Outer Space;
Scully, Behind the Flying Saucers; Heard, Riddle of the Flying Saucers. For a comparative
354 A.C.T. Geppert
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review essay, see Ley, ‘More About Out There’; for a devastating review of Heard’s book by
Sir Harold Spencer Jones, then British Astronomer Royal, see his ‘Flying Saucer Myth.’
32. Jacobs, UFO Controversy, 101. Haas; ‘Steht die Erde unter Kontrolle?’; Drews, ‘Sie kommen
von einem anderen Planeten.’See also Haffner, ‘Schluß mit dem Untertassen-Spuk?’
33. Heard, ‘Is Another World Watching Us?’[emphasis in original]; see also the Sunday Express
issues of October 29, November 12 and November 26, 1950. Ley, ‘More About Out There’;
Muirfield, ‘Silence in the Press,’here 18; Clarke and Roberts, Flying Saucerers,21–24.
34. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers Are Real, 6, 163, 204–05 (quotation). Keyhoe first made these claims
in an article (‘Flying Saucers Are Real’) that True magazine published in January 1950. For
his reception in West Germany, see ‘Untertassen,’here 34.
35. Darrach and Ginna, ‘Have We Visitors from Space?’The article provoked an unprecedented
response from Life’s readers which was summarized a month later; see Ginna, ‘Saucer Reac-
tions.’
36. Schäfer, ‘Flying Saucer Story,’141; Menzel, Flying Saucers, 272.
37. Trench, ‘Editorial.’Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 107–30.
38. Mischo, ‘Kaleidoskop der Heilserwartungen,’29; Sharp, ‘An Appraisal of the Present UFO
Position,’20, 22; Lorenzen, Flying Saucers,44–46; Thirouin, ‘Les observations mondiales en
1956,’47. The distance between Earth and Mars varies between 55 and 401 million kilome-
ters; as a consequence of their perihelic opposition –that is, Sun, Earth and Mars forming a
straight line –they were only 56 million kilometers apart in September 1956.
39. Heinz-Hermann Koelle, ‘Rechenschaftsbericht über das 1. Vierteljahr 1950,’Protokollbuch
der Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung (1948–1952), January 26, 1950, DTB, I.3.008VV, 1/
02, 64: ‘Eine offizielle Stellungnahme zu den “fliegenden Untertassen”soll nicht erfolgen.’
40. Clarke, ‘Flying Saucers,’97; ‘Flying Saucers,’225 [both emphases in respective originals].
For the three reviews see Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 13, no. 2 (March
1954): 119–22 [Arthur C. Clarke on Leslie/Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed]; Journal
of the British Interplanetary Society 13, no. 3 (May 1954): 186–88 [Alan E. Slater on Menzel,
Flying Saucers]; and Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 15, no. 5 (September–Octo-
ber 1956): 289–90 [Arthur C. Clarke on Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects].
41. Clarke, ‘Memoirs of an Armchair Astronaut,’413; Clarke, ‘Review of Philip J. Klass, UFOs
Explained’; and Clarke, ‘Flying Saucers.’
42. Ley, ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’; Ley, correspondence with Kenneth H. Ford, here Ley to
Ford, July 8, 1956, WLC/NASMA, 1/8. It might not have helped to strengthen their position
that neither Clarke nor Ley were ready to exclude the UFOs’alleged extraterrestrial origin
entirely, however unlikely such a possibility might be.
43. Weltraumbote 16/17 (March/April 1957): 23.
44. Heard, ‘Is Another World Watching Us?’, 1; Crowther, ‘Outer Space Comes of Age,’91.
45. For instance, ‘Science-Fiction on the Screen’or ‘Utopie: Das Ding.’Out of a rich body of lit-
erature on (although almost exclusively American) science fiction films, see only Meehan,
Saucer Movies, here 35–48; and Vizzini, ‘Cold War Fears, Cold War Passions,’here 33–34.
46. Stupple, ‘Mahatmas and Space Brothers’; Denzler, Lure of the Edge,34–67; Hague, ‘Before
Abduction.’
47. For this famous classification system, see Hynek, UFO Experience, 29, 88, 110, 138, who distin-
guishes three different kinds of encounters: A ‘close encounter of the first kind’(CEI) is defined
as an encounter without interaction between the UFO and the environment or the observers; to
constitute a ‘close encounter of the second kind’(CEII) a physical ‘mark’or visible record is
required; while the third kind (CEIII) consists of those cases in which the presence of ‘occu-
pants’in or about the UFO is reported. Necessitated by the increase in abduction stories, a fourth
category (CEIV) was later added to describe ‘actual’contact, with face-to-face communication
between human and extraterrestrial. Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Hollywood blockbuster Close
Encounters of the Third Kind directly derived its title from Hynek’s classification system.
Spielberg hired Hynek as a consultant and gave him a minor role in the film.
48. Leslie and Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed; Adamski, Inside the Space Ships. With
sales exceeding 250,000 copies, Flying Saucers Have Landed was translated into German,
Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Italian and French. See ‘Talking of Flying Saucers;’and Hallet,
Le Cas Adamski,A–K.
49. ‘Kontakte mit der Venus,’56; ‘The Queen & the Saucers’; Naumann, ‘Bierdeckel statt flie-
gender Untertassen’;‘Auf der Venus gibt es Kühe,’49.
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50. Leslie and Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed, 185; Adamski, Inside the Space Ships,
73–83, 160–61.
51. Leslie and Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed, 194: ‘Now, for the first time I fully rea-
lised that I was in presence of a man from space –A HUMAN BEING FROM ANOTHER
WORLD!’[emphasis in original]; ‘Auf der Venus gibt es Kühe,’52. Däniken, Erinnerungen
an die Zukunft.
52. Bethurum, Aboard a Flying Saucer; Fry, The White Sands Incident; Angelucci, The Secret of
the Saucers; Menger, From Outer Space to You. In 1969, the Flying Saucer Review published
an entire special issue on worldwide landings of UFOs and their alleged occupants; see
Bowen, Humanoids.
53. Michel, ‘Meeting With the Martian,’43; Michel, ‘The Little Men,’72. For an in-depth analy-
sis of Dewilde’s account of his alien encounter, see Miller, ‘Seeing the Future of Civiliza-
tion.’
54. Allingham, Flying Saucer from Mars. Christopher D. Allan, ‘Who invented the Martian? An
Analysis of a UFO Whodunit,’undated report, BIS, 54-D; see also Clarke and Roberts, Fly-
ing Saucerers,91–93. There are no traces of Moore’s involvement in this potential hoax in
his autobiography although he does acknowledge the UFOs’historical significance when dis-
cussing the occurrences of 1954: ‘So far as I was concerned, the whole chain of events began
with flying saucers’; see Moore, Autobiography, 19. While Moore has never publically admit-
ted to having authored the hoax, he published in 1972 a book entitled Can You Speak Venu-
sian? on the various myths of the Space Age in which he did cite his putative alter ego
Allingham (97, 100–01).
55. Clarke, ‘Review of Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed,’
119, 122.
56. The locus classicus in this context is When Prophecy Fails, Festinger’s 1956 case study, one
of the few in-depth analyses of an individual UFO cult, that led to the development of the
theory of cognitive dissonance.
57. UFO, created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, pilot episode, ‘Identified,’first aired on September
16, 1970. In 1964, Brinsley le Poer Trench had named an almost identical set of three ‘w’-ques-
tions –‘1. Where do they come from? 2. Who crews them? 3. Why are they coming?’–as the
three most important questions in UFO research; see his ‘The Three W’s.’It seems plausible that
the series’producers, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, had familiarized themselves with the state of
the art in contemporaneous British ufology before production began in 1969, as they did on
other occasions.
58. ‘So wurde die Weltöffentlichkeit getäuscht,’cover illustration.
59. TNA AIR 2/18116; British Unidentified Flying Object Research Association, Guide to the
UFO Phenomenon,3–6; ‘Uforia by Bufora at Night.’
60. Michel, Mystérieux objets célestes; on Michel see in particular Miller, ‘Seeing the Future of
Civilization,’here 253–56. Jacobs, ‘UFOs and the Search for Scientific Legitimacy,’229.
61. Hynek quoted after Salisbury, ‘Scientist and the UFO,’16; ‘Playboy Panel: UFOs,’85.
62. Asimov, ‘A Science in Search of a Subject,’52. Basalla, Civilized Life in the Universe, 135–
39.
63. Peter Masefield, ‘By 1970 a Link with Men of Other Worlds,’Sunday Express (January 10,
1960); quoted after Muirfield, ‘Silence in the Press,’18. Masefield (1914–2006) was president
of the Royal Aeronautical Society at the time.
64. Cryptozoology, the search for elusive animals whose existence is not consensually acknowl-
edged (Bigfoot/Sasquatch; Yeti; the Monster of Loch Ness etc.), shares many of the same
characteristics and used a milder version of the same argument for self-legitimization during
its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Notably, Willy Ley published in this field as well and
actively engaged in extensive correspondence with both scientists and the general public,
apparently with considerably less professional doubt and skepticism than in the case of UFOs.
See Regal, Searching for Sasquatch,27–29, 131–56.
65. Within a little more than a decade, scholarly interest in the history of the occult, nineteenth-
century spiritism and Western esotericism has moved from the fringes to mainstream histori-
ography. See only the contributions in Geppert and Braidt, Orte des Okkulten, in lieu of a
much more comprehensive body of literature.
66. See Oberth, ‘Flying Saucers Come from a Distant World,’5; ‘Gibt es UFOs?’, 100; and his
1966 book Katechismus der Uraniden.‘Es gibt fliegende Untertassen’;Vorstandssitzungen
356 A.C.T. Geppert
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der Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung,1948–1955, August 5, 1954, DTB, I.3.008VV, 1/04;
‘Ambassador from Mars.’
67. Oberth, ‘Wir werden beobachtet,’28: ‘Allem Anschein nach sind die UFOs eine Art Wacht-
posten, die bloß beobachten und berichten sollen, denn eine Menschheit, die geistig über
unsere Erfinder- und Forschergabe verfügt, aber politisch und moralisch auf unserer Stufe ste-
hengeblieben ist, stellt eine Gefahr für den ganzen Kosmos dar.’Oberth, ‘Gibt es UFOs?’,
101. Oberth’s claims were reported by newspapers as varied as BILD (‘Saison der Untertas-
sen’), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (‘“Liebesstrahlen”auf dem Ufo-Kongreß’) and The
Times (‘Ambassador from Mars’;‘Spatial Etiquette’).
68. Jung, ‘Ein moderner Mythus,’337.
69. Hague, ‘Before Abduction,’440; see also Lagrange, ‘Ghost in the Machine,’226–30.
70. On transcendence within astroculture, see only Bjørnvig, ‘Transcendence of Gravity,’and
Noble, Religion of Technology,115–42.
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