The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age

The summer of 1952, the period that Captain Ruppelt called “the big flap,” offers a history of the UFO mania in capsule form. If the newspapers were to be believed, the heavens were crowded with armadas of spaceships both visible and invisible. There was even a monster story to add spice to the tales.

Yet the panic was largely an artificial creation. All spring the nation’s movie-goers had been flocking to see a well-made thriller, The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which a mysterious glowing object appears in the sky over Washington, D.C., and lands in the middle of the city. The object proves to be a flying saucer from another planet, whose inhabitants want only to help the human race. Looking something like a huge poached egg, a hump in the center sloping down to a circular rim, the pictured vehicle offered a dramatic example to anyone in the mood to see a spaceship but not quite sure how it should look. In fact, many of the saucers described in the months and years following were obviously based on this model.

The summer’s hysteria was also nurtured by the fears of some Air Force investigators who were convinced that UFOs were intelligently controlled craft originating outside the earth[VII-1, p. 286]. Although these officials realized that whenever an unusually good saucer story appeared in the papers the number of sightings increased sharply in the days following, they apparently did not consider the possibility that the increase resulted from the power of suggestion. This apprehensive attitude, plus three publications in the spring of 1952, made the summer’s panic almost inevitable.

Growth of a Panic

On April 4 Life magazine published an article whose title might well have alarmed the most stolid: “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?” Presenting ten “insoluble” cases, the article managed to suggest without exactly saying so that interplanetary visitors were among us. The very next day, April 5, the Air Force announced a new directive, ordering the commanding officers of all Air Force installations to make immediate, high-priority reports of all UFO sightings in their areas[VII-1, p. 178]. Reasonably inferring from the Life article and from the new directive that Defense officials were concerned by the threat of UFOs, newspapers gave space to all tales of flying saucers. Look magazine then jumped on the bandwagon and on June 24 published an article, “Hunt for the Flying Saucers!” The public responded enthusiastically. Hypnotized by the prestige of these magazines, whose saucer articles seemed to have the support of the Air Force, thousands of well-intentioned but poorly equipped observers joined in the hunt, watched the skies, and began to cry “Tally-ho!” at every streak of light.

Nature cooperated. As in every summer, she offered a rich display of regular meteor showers. By mid-July Aquarids in large numbers are streaking through the sky, to continue into mid-August, and by the beginning of August the Perseids have arrived to join the summer’s parade. The records of the American Meteor Society reflect this rise in the number of meteors. In the nights from July 10 to 31, 1952, five observers stationed in California, Oregon, Missouri, Iowa, and Long Island, New York, counted a total of more than 2000 meteors in some eighty-five hours of watching. The smallest number reported by a single observer in any one hour was nine; the highest was fifty[VII-2].

Nature not only offered dramatic fireworks in the sky; she also produced exactly the right conditions for viewing them. During June and July an unprecedented heat wave lay over the entire East, driving sweltering citizens out of doors to savor the relative coolness of the night air. Furthermore, the nights were dark. The moon began to wane on July 7, and until nearly the end of the month there was little moonlight to dim the brilliance of the meteors flashing through the heavens. No wonder that frightened people hunting for saucers should have had so little trouble finding them, when the sky seemed to be teeming with UFOs.

By the middle of July the nine-man investigating force at ATIC was all but buried in saucer reports—more than forty a day, far too many to handle either promptly or adequately. Only a very lengthy history of the saucer era could describe and account for each one of the hundreds of UFOs reported during those weeks. A few of the most publicized incidents are listed here:

The sighting hysteria was approaching the critical mass, and no special wisdom was required to see that an explosion was inevitable. The only question was: Where would it occur? The panic finally reached its climax in the nation’s capital:

Most of these and hundreds of other UFOs were eventually identified as meteors, stars, balloons, jet planes, birds, searchlights, and radar angels. About the only aerial phenomenon that was not mistaken for a flying saucer during these weeks of panic was the planet Venus. Until the end of August it was too near the sun to be visible.

The Scoutmaster’s UFO

True to the pattern set during 1947, the first summer of the saucers, the panic of 1952 did not end without an elaborate hoax and a good monster story.

The famous “Scoutmaster” incident occurred at West Palm Beach, Florida, on the night of August 19[VII-1, p. 229]. According to the report given the Intelligence officer at the local air base, the scoutmaster (an ex-Marine) had offered to drive four of the boys to their homes at the close of the evening’s meeting. While traveling over a country road bordered by scrub pine and palmetto thickets, he had noticed some mysterious lights among the pines and decided he must investigate. Leaving the frightened boys in the car with instructions to go for help if he had not returned in fifteen minutes, he took his machete and two flashlights and bravely set off into the dangerous woods. He was found some time later by the boys, the constable, and the deputy sheriff, and was apparently terrified. When he entered the woods, he said, he noticed a peculiar odor and felt an oppressive sensation of heat. On looking up, he saw hovering above him a dark circular object with a turretlike dome in the middle, so large that it blotted out most of the sky. When he went closer, a door opened, a ball of fire emerged and drifted toward him, enveloped him, and rendered him unconscious. He called on the boys to confirm the presence of the strange lights and the huge machine, and as further proof he exhibited burns in his cap and on his face and arms.

Since scoutmasters are traditionally upright citizens, the story seemed to merit attention. Investigators from ATIC visited the scene, interviewed all persons concerned, and sent the cap and the machete to Dayton for analysis. Very soon, however, the drama began to fall apart. The scoutmaster, after being interviewed by Air Force investigators, assumed an aura of mystery and stated publicly that he had been warned not to talk. At the same time he hired a press agent and offered to sell his story to the newspapers. A study of the landscape showed that the boys could not have seen any “machine” from the road. The townspeople did not consider the woods dangerous. Aircraft preparing to land at the airport regularly flew over the area in question with their landing lights on; to a person on the road, the lights might seem to be flitting through the woods. Furthermore the study showed that the scene had been set in advance for a frightening incident. As they drove along the lonely road, the scoutmaster had been talking about flying saucers and, after he stopped the car, had warned the boys that they might need to go for help. The man’s reputation for veracity, too, began to melt away, and one townsman remarked that if the scoutmaster claimed that the sun was shining, he’d look up to see for himself before accepting the statement. The knife and cap showed no radioactivity. The laboratory report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed that the burn on the cap was made by a cigarette, and the “burns” on the hand and arm proved to be only superficial scorching of the hair and could easily have been produced by the flame of a kitchen match.

This investigation cost the usual amount of time and money, but it was unquestionably a hoax[VII-4].

Monster in West Virginia

The final incident in the summer’s panic occurred on the evening of September 12 when a family group near the town of Sutton, West Virginia, saw a flaming object flash across the sky and apparently land on a nearby hill. Taking their flashlights, they set out to investigate and, on reaching the hill, smelled an unpleasant odor. When they turned on their flashlights, they stated, they saw two red eyes glaring at them; a huge monster, ten feet tall, breathing fire, with a bright-green body and a blood-red face, waddled toward them, and they turned and ran[VII-5].

Air Force investigators concluded immediately that the flaming object first seen was the meteor observed that night by thousands of persons in Virginia and West Virginia and reported officially to various observatories. What the frightened family saw when they reached the hilltop and flashed the light was probably the glowing eyes or body of some mundane creature of the woods. A local group of civilian saucer investigators rejected this explanation, as usual, and after making its own study concluded that the monster story could very well have been true!

The monster is now enshrined in West Virginia history[VII-5], and forms the subject of a new ballad written by Cindy Coy and set to the tune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” One verse and the chorus will suffice:

The Panel of Civilian Scientists

When after three months of constant threat no flying saucers had yet tried to invade the country, the acute phase of the panic subsided. Nevertheless, responsible officials in the Department of Defense were uneasy, and Air Defense was particularly worried by the problem of the radar phantoms, whose cause was not fully understood (see Chapter VIII). Even if UFOs proved to be normal phenomena, other very real dangers existed in the situation. If the public believed in the possibility of extraterrestrial antagonists, a clever enemy on earth simply by fabricating a few incidents could easily induce a mass hysteria that might paralyze the country. Also, if the number of saucer reports should be greatly multiplied by some artificial stimulus, their sheer numbers would clog communication channels, interfere with the Early Warning System, and at a time of imminent attack from another part of the globe might cause a disastrous three- or four-hour delay in the activation of the Air Force network.

Government officials, uncertain of the facts, were reluctant to decide or to state whether there was or was not convincing evidence of extraterrestrial surveillance.

To clear up the potentially explosive atmosphere, the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), under the Central Intelligence Agency, decided to consult outstanding civilian experts and invited certain eminent scientists to study and evaluate the evidence. For this purpose Air Force investigators assembled the complete data on the cases they considered most significant. They also prepared, on their own initiative, an unofficial report setting forth the evidence which, in the opinion of several investigators, proved conclusively that UFOs were interplanetary objects operating under intelligent control.

After a preliminary meeting late in November 1952, the panel met on January 12, 1953, to begin their study. The chairman was the late Dr. H. P. Robertson, mathematician and physicist, of the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena. The other members were Dr. Luis W. Alvarez, physicist, of the University of California at Berkeley; Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, an expert on radio propagation; Dr. Samuel A. Goudsmit, physicist, of Brookhaven National Laboratory; and Dr. Thornton W. Page, astronomer, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Also present were several officers of the OSI. To avoid possible bias, Air Force officers who had actively worked on UFO cases and civilians who were closely identified with such studies were not asked to attend. The cases studied included all the “classics,” such as the Tremonton and other movies, the Mantell and Gorman affairs, the radar sightings at Washington, D.C., as well as other less well-known reports.

One incident that particularly engaged the attention of the panel, and would probably have become a famous classic except that Air Force investigators had kept it a strict secret, was the sighting at Presque Isle Air Force Base in northern Maine. On October 10, 1952, at about 10 P.M. E.S.T., a group of weather observers had noticed a bright-orange object hovering low on the eastern horizon and had set up a theodolite to measure its altitude and bearing. As the glowing unknown slowly rose higher above the horizon and seemed to come closer, it appeared through the telescope of the theodolite as a circular disk accompanied by four flickering green lights, two on each side. Alarmed by this spectacular phenomenon, the observers called the Air Force Base at Limestone, some twenty miles north and east, to ask whether the object was visible there. It was. Setting up a theodolite, the Limestone observers measured the height and bearing, and both groups of observers sent the recorded data to ATIC.

Here was the kind of situation the investigators had been hoping for: simultaneous observations of a single object, made from two different stations a known distance apart. Calculations based on the altitudes and bearings reported by the two stations yielded fantastic results. In a plot of the data (shown schematically in Figure 12a) the prolonged lines intersected, indicating a group of unknowns hovering 100 miles above the earth and more than 50 miles off the Maine coast, of tremendous size and moving at high speed. Concluding that the objects must have come from outer space, or were possibly a new type of orbiting vehicle of Russian origin, the Air Force had promptly clamped down the security lid. When ATIC’s science consultant, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, looked at the data, he just as promptly disagreed with these ideas and clearly identified the unknown as the planet Jupiter, which had risen at 6:03 P.M. E.S.T. and at 10:00 was the brightest object in the eastern sky. The believers in the extraterrestrial theory were then in the majority at ATIC, however. They had refused to accept the identification, and submitted the Presque Isle sighting to the panel as a prize example of UFO surveillance.

The panel members quickly disposed of the case. The measurements reported from Presque Isle obviously pointed directly to the planet Jupiter, not a mere 100 but millions of miles beyond the earth. If a constant correction was applied to the bearings from Limestone, they also agreed with Jupiter’s position. Careless use of the theodolite had produced an error in the data. To measure the angle of an object above the horizon, the observer has only to make sure that the theodolite is level, but to measure the bearing he must align it with true north, a direction that cannot be determined by guesswork. The Limestone observers had made a mistake in determining true north and had thus obtained a wrong bearing for the unknown. When the corrected data were plotted (shown schematically in Figure 12b) the prolonged lines were parallel, and both pointed squarely to the planet Jupiter at infinity.

The orange light was unquestionably Jupiter, and the accompanying green lights were its four bright satellites twinkling through the layers of the earth’s atmosphere. Amazed that this uncomplicated case, already explained by Dr. Hynek, should have been offered as evidence for the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs, the panel extended its investigation to the original observers at Presque Isle. The witnesses there were bewildered by the inquiry; they had checked the object when it appeared again on the night of October 11, they said, and had then identified it as the planet Jupiter, but they had not thought it necessary to notify the Air Force![VII-4]

For five long days the panel worked, analyzing every available bit of evidence as it related to four alternative theories: 1) that UFOs were a supersecret device of some sort being developed by the United States; 2) that UFOs were a supersecret device being developed by some foreign power; 3) that UFOs were normal phenomena wrongly interpreted; and 4) that UFOs came from other planets. As the panel succeeded in explaining one after another of the fifty or so submitted cases, or was able to suggest a highly probable solution in terms of normal physical phenomena, the members reached their conclusion. Theory number one they rejected with complete certainty; they were 98 per cent certain that theory number two was wrong, and 99 per cent sure that number four was also incorrect (scientists are reluctant to accept any negative belief with absolute certainty). The document submitted unofficially by ATIC investigators they also rejected for lack of evidence. All the facts, they decided, supported theory number three, that the reported UFOs were merely natural phenomena, wrongly interpreted[VII-6].

The panel delivered this evaluation to the Office of Scientific Intelligence, together with a recommendation that government agencies should immediately abandon the policy of secrecy regarding UFO reports and should make public all the facts in every case. Unfortunately this recommendation was not followed. The report included some rather caustic comments on the general inadequacy of the investigative techniques that had been used. As one of the members remarked unofficially, trying to get to the bottom of some of the sightings was like cutting treacle. The panel report with its blunt criticisms was of course not intended for public release and, understandably, was kept classified.

Although the OSI had asked for an expert opinion, some Air Force and government officials were unwilling to accept the verdict when they got it, and flatly refused to believe that UFOs were normal phenomena[VII-7]. When echoes of their disagreement escaped the security screen, civilian saucer enthusiasts concluded with some justification that Air Force officials were “covering up.” They were. They were not hiding any proof that flying saucers came from outer space, however, as the saucer addicts charged, but were merely trying to conceal their own confusion and the panel’s criticisms.

As one member of the panel later stated to a correspondent, the explanation of UFO beliefs “lies in a logical defect. It is this: UFOs form a class of all celestial observations that cannot be immediately explained. There is no other truly common feature; some manifestations are optical, others are detected by radar; some are points, others circular, others patterned; some are seen by night, others by day, etc. The implication that they are somehow related is a false one, as we know from the large proportion positively identified after the fact (what relation is there between Venus and a meteorological balloon?). Calling all unidentified objects in the sky ‘flying saucers’ or even UFOs (Venus doesn’t ‘fly’ in any proper sense of the word) is like calling any word I cannot understand ‘Greek.’ The class of all words I cannot understand would scarcely form a single language. Therefore, the explanation of UFOs as a class is simply that they are not a uniform class but a hodge-podge of widely disparate, partly described phenomena that were seen in the sky.”[VII-8]

Not until April 9, 1958, did the Air Force make public the internal recommendation made by the panel some five years earlier. If the entire study had been released earlier, with a full statement of the facts and the analyses made by the panel, it might have ended the saucer scare at once. Instead the UFO hysteria continued, with periods of remission, and is still dying a slow and lingering death.