A Brief History of UFO Phenomenon
by The first wave of UFO sightings in the United States occurred between late 1896 and the spring of 1897. At the time, people thought they were someone’s aerial breakthrough. Only later were the “airships” speculatively linked with extraterrestrial visitors.
During World War II UFOs were referred to as “foo fighters” and were feared to be secret weapons of the Axis powers. Immediately following the war, secret Soviet missile firings were blamed for the “ghost rockets” seen over northern Europe. Public interest in the UFO phenomenon did not, however, really take off until after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting on June 24, 1947.
The first books with the expression “flying saucers” in their titles were published in 1950. Also, the first UFO organizations were formed in the early 1950s. Most were just saucer fan clubs, but some were more serious and undertook something like scientific investigations. These people referred to themselves as “ufologists.” The early ufologists distanced themselves from contactees who claimed direct contact with benevolent Space Brothers.
By the mid-1950s the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book-set up to respond to civilian UFO sightings-had become little more than a debunking exercise. It conducted few, if any, field investigations.
Most individuals involved in Blue Book were total skeptics. Some observers who discounted official pronouncements believed that the Air Force was covering up UFO secrets. By the end of the 1950s, the consensus of elite opinion was that the notion that UFOs represented anything more than hallucinations or misunderstood natu ral phenomena was ludicrous. Despite official dismissals, however, the sightings continued to occur.
UFO waves erupted with alarming frequency between 1964 and 1973.
J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer, was for many years the Air Force’s chief scientific adviser on UFOs. Hynek finally stepped forward to criticize Blue Book’s shortcomings and argued for a fresh look at the phenomenon. James E. McDonald, an atmospheric physicist, got involved by going out and personally researching UFO sightings. Jacques Vallee, one of Hynek’s students, became one of the two leading proponents (John A. Keel being the other) of a theory of occult ufology.
While all of this was going on, the Air Force handed over its UFO problem to the University of Colorado and physicist Edward U. Condon.Within months, the Condon Committee was engulfed in controversy amid charges that the committee’s conclusion had been reached before the investigation began. The final report of the committee stated that there was no use further exploring UFOs, despite the fact that 30 percent of the project’s own cases were left unexplained. Later that year Blue Book closed down, and public interest dropped. It would come to life again in the fall of 1973, in the midst of another wave of sightings. The mid-1970s also saw the rise of a public debunking effort intended to address the public’s growing interest. Certain individuals began claiming that aliens were inspired by visionary experiences. As investigations became ever more detailed, serious researchers found that, for all the hoaxes and unbelievable cases, there were also a significant number of plausible cases that resisted conventional explanation.
In the 1960s and particularly in the 1970s, close encounters dominated UFO reports as much as daylight disks and nighttime lights had in the 1950s.Now it became ever more difficult to distinguish a hoax from someone’s genuine testimony because the content of both was extremely outlandish. Some individuals even claimed to have had sexual experiences with extraterrestrials. In the late 1970s several American ufologists reinvestigated so-called crash-recovery cases.Eventually ufologists were prompted to examine the famous Roswell incident. This task stretched into the 1990s and involved the General Accounting Office of the U.S. government, which would report that all original documents were missing. The story of the Roswell crash is one of the most important narratives in the history of modern ufology, providing apparent evidence for the long-standing suspicion that certain government authorities know more about the phenomenon than the public has been led to believe. The Roswell case has also provided fuel for some of the wildest imaginable conspiracy theories, making JFK assassination-plot theories pale by comparison.
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