Kenneth Arnold and Flying Saucers

First, flying saucers are not just popular culture. Historians like Michel de Certeau have long criticized the tendency to see a clear-cut division between high culture and popular culture when historians study the alleged popular literature of the past centuries.And instead of taking this division for granted, historians like Natalie Zemon Davis and Roger Chartier have shown that we should describe how similar cultural elements are used in different ways. Thus, the divide between popular and elite culture is a result of the actors’ actions, not the basis of their actions. Flying saucers are not a priori different from other cultural objects such as, for example, scientific facts. They become different in the course of controversy. Why should we describe flying saucers in a different way than we describe the “popular” culture of the sixteenth century?

In this perspective, the Arnold case has the same kind of importance for the social history of parasciences that the Menocchio case studied by historian Carlo Ginzburg has for the social history of the popular cosmologies of the sixteenth Century. Arnold provides us with the possibility of studying what is too quickly dismissed as “popular belief ” with the same tools we use to study scientific knowledge. Moreover, in the same way Carlo Ginzburg identified the existence of a legitimate form of knowledge that was constructed and transmitted by actors like Menocchio, in Arnold we can identify a particular way of constructing the saucerian reality. Instead of taking categories like popular culture for granted, we should ask ourselves to describe the difference between the way we see saucers and the way we see scientific facts. Describing how Arnold saw the saucers and discussed their reality, and describing the way scientists describe scientific facts, helps us to identify a mode of seeing that is common to different social and cultural worlds.

Second, as a result of this methodological discussion, flying saucers should no longer be considered as secondary by-products of the Cold War. While historians explain how the actions of historical figures like Harry Truman and George Kennan played an important role in the birth of the Cold War era, they simply discard flying saucers as a byproduct of this climate, and witnesses like Kenneth Arnold are merely victims of the cultural influence of the Cold War. Whereas the first are actors who create a context, UFO witnesses are reduced to cultural sponges responding to their environment. This asymmetrical sociological scenario, which proposes that some actors are constructing reality while others are under its influence, is clearly limited. On the contrary, witnesses such as Arnold are, like other actors (for example, the military or diplomats like George Kennan), constructing the same menace by different means.

Whereas Kennan and Truman constructed their image of the Soviet world thanks to a complex network of diplomatic and military relations, witnesses like Arnold construct it from sightings and readings. The way the first category sees the Red Menace is not necessarily better or less “popular” than the way Arnold sees it. If, for example, we turn away from Truman and Kennan and examine Air Force military experts, we find both strategies in the same milieu:While military experts build networks of intelligence agents who collect documents and construct the Soviet Red Plan in their office, Air Force pilots search the skies of Alaska for a Soviet presence. There is no great divide between the way in which Arnold and the Washington experts see the world; there are only many minor differences between the direction they look and the tools they use.