Science fiction, Project Blue Book, and the beginnings of the UFO craze

The beginning of the space age is generally dated to the Soviet Union’s launch of the first Sputnik probe in 1957. But that event was ten years behind a space age of the imagination that had begun on June 24, 1947. On that date, while searching for a downed plane between Chehalis and Yakima, Washington, private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw a group of nine disklike objects flying in the vicinity of Mount Rainier. He estimated their speed to be approximately 1,700 miles per hour, twice the air speed record for a jet plane at the time. Arnold compared their shape to that of a pie plate, but newspapers picked up a different term for their headlines, from Arnold’s comment that they moved “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” 

The Associated Press picked up the story, which appeared in newspapers across the country. Other mysterious sightings preceded Arnold’s, but this was the moment when “flying saucers” became an American cultural phenomenon. Dozens of reported sightings followed throughout the summer of 1947.

Many witnesses reported these sightings to the Army Air Force, in addition to the local and national news, in hope that the government might be able to identify the objects. But one notable event was reported instead to Raymond Palmer, editor of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. Fred Lee Crisman and Howard Dahl told Palmer that, three days before Arnold’s sighting, they had witnessed a group of donut-­shaped craft over the Puget Sound near Maury Island. One of the objects ejected hot metal debris into the water, damaging their boat, injuring Dahl’s son, and killing their dog. To investigate the incident, Palmer hired someone he knew who was both local to the area and interested in strange aerial sightings: Kenneth Arnold himself. 

Arnold detailed his investigation in The Coming of the Saucers, a 1952 book coauthored with Palmer. The story is filled with strange occurrences, including mysterious black-­ clad strangers, abandoned buildings, and disappearing samples of saucer debris, and ends with the plane crash that killed two army intelligence officers sent to investigate the Maury Island event. The Army Air Force ultimately determined that the sighting was a hoax, but the narrative of the events and their investigation set a template that has echoed throughout UFO history.

Crisman and Dahl chose Palmer as the recipient of their report for good reason: He had been deliberately blurring the line between science fiction and outrageous fact for years. Palmer saw these mysterious aerial objects as a natural sequel to the phenomenon to which he had devoted many pages of Amazing Stories during the mid-­1940s. Branded by Palmer as “the Shaver Mystery,” the subject was inaugurated in the February 1945 issue, which carried the novella I Remember Lemuria! by a new author, Richard Shaver. 

This story —­ and dozens more by Shaver that followed —­ concerned the distant past of planet Earth that the author claimed were true, having been communicated to him as “thought records” through his contact with mysterious subterranean creatures. Shaver believed that there exists below Earth’s surface a complex world of caverns, altogether larger than the surface world above, inhabited by a malevolent race of beings he called “dero” (short for “detrimental robots”) and their benign but powerless counterparts, the “tero” (for “integrative robots”). The dero could affect events in the world above through the use of ancient ray weapons, which they used to torment surface dwellers. Through communications with these beings, Shaver had recovered an ancient language he called Mantong, a sort of substitution cipher he used for interpreting the occult meaning of words in any language. Palmer backed up Shaver’s claims and opened up the reader letter section to those who claimed similar experiences. Among the correspondents reporting encounters with dero was Fred Crisman, who provided Palmer with dramatic accounts of a subterranean firefight with a group of dero beneath the Karakoram Mountains during the Second World War and a later deadly expedition to an Alaskan cavern. 

The sensationalistic Shaver Mystery dominated the pages of Amazing Stories for four years, massively increasing circulation but also leading to a harsh backlash in the small but vocal world of science fiction fandom, perhaps in part because, as [the author] Andrew May notes, the Shaver stories attracted an educationally and socioeconomically diverse group of readers who threatened fandom’s self-­ conception as an intellectual elite. In late 1947, under pressure from both his publishers and fandom, Palmer left Amazing Stories. Made a pariah in the world of science fiction, he quickly branched out into a parallel field: stories of the paranormal.

Signs and grudges

By the end of 1947, the United States Air Force —­ as of September, an independent branch of the armed forces —­ had received enough reports of flying saucers to devote resources to their investigation. Major General L. C. Craigie, director of research and development, approved a study group under the classified code name Project Sign; the group began its work in January 1948. 

The same month saw the next major saucer incident, when Kentucky Air National Guardsman Thomas F. Mantell, Jr., perished in a plane crash while pursuing an unidentified object in the skies near Franklin, Kentucky. The object was later determined to have been a Skyhook balloon —­ a classified high-­altitude reconnaissance device. But the official Air Force statement, designed to protect the top-­secret balloon project, was that Mantell had mistaken the planet Venus for a flying saucer. This explanation proved difficult for the public to accept. Some trusted that the Air Force was investigating these sightings seriously and would soon issue a definitive public statement on the matter. Others were not so sure.

Into the information void surrounding the saucers stepped Ray Palmer. In spring 1948, the Clark Publishing Company issued the first issue of his new venture, Fate Magazine. Fate had tantalizing covers of supposedly real but inexplicable events —­ the “damned facts” or “data that Science has excluded” that Charles Hay Fort explored in his 1919 work, Book of the Damned. 

The cover story of the premiere issue was Kenneth Arnold’s first-hand account of his sighting the year before, under the title “I Did See the Flying Disks!” Nearly a third of the first issue concerns flying saucers. There is a long narrative of the Maury Island incident alongside reports of other strange occurrences and mystical ideas, including automatic writing, radio signals from Mars, and prehistoric giants. In light of the new wave of mysterious sightings, saucer investigators reinterpreted older phenomena, including the “foo fighters” reported by some World War II pilots and a series of mysterious airships that appeared in newspaper reports in the late nineteenth century.

Project Sign members were unable to come to a consensus on an explanation for the sightings they reviewed, but believed that continued investigation would be valuable. In February 1949 Sign was replaced by Project Grudge. Though Air Force project names are generally assigned at random, the classified name of the new project suggests a change in philosophy. Where Sign had sought to collect data on sightings of unidentified objects, Grudge’s goal was to explain them away. To this end, Grudge cooperated in the production of a two-­part article by Sidney Shalett, published in the April 30 and May 7 issues of the Saturday Evening Post, which sought to offer terrestrial explanations for the objects that saucer witnesses had seen and to dismiss the rest as hoaxes or the reports of crackpots. Instead of diminishing the number of reported sightings, the Post article was followed by a large spike in new saucer reports.

Shortly after Shalett’s article, journalist and former pilot Donald Keyhoe was hired to write an article for True Magazine, which believed the Air Force was hiding something about flying saucers. His article, “Flying Saucers Are Real,” appeared in the January 1950 issue, and he expanded it into a paperback that spring —­ the first book-­length treatment of flying saucers.

Keyhoe quickly became the most prominent proponent of an increasingly popular theory about the origins of flying saucers: that they originate on another world. Later ufologists called this the “extraterrestrial hypothesis,” or ETH, and it quickly emerged as the dominant metanarrative of the early 1950s. Keyhoe also argued that the government was covering up what it knew about the saucers and their origin, and thus the second major metanarrative, conspiracism, went hand in hand with the first. 

The second flying saucer book, Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers, was based in large part on the story of the crash of a flying saucer near Aztec, New Mexico, and the retrieval of the bodies of several extraterrestrials from the wreckage. The book became a bestseller, but the story was soon revealed as a hoax perpetrated upon Scully by two con men named Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer (the book’s anonymized witness, “Dr. Gee”) as part of an oil prospecting scam. Crashed saucers would nonetheless emerge decades later as another major metanarrative.

The Air Force ended Project Grudge, replacing it in early 1952 with a new project that would last longer than the previous two saucer projects combined: Project Blue Book. The extraterrestrial hypothesis was proving influential —­ a Life magazine article in April asked, “Have We Visitors from Space?”—­ and a new series of sightings in June and July constituted a major flap. A well-­ publicized evening of visual and radar sightings in Washington, DC, made front-­page news across the country. 

The Air Force’s explanations of these events were beginning to backfire, leaving many members of the public to speculate that the government was covering up what it knew. Meanwhile, the narratives surrounding sightings were becoming more elaborate, as in the August 1952 case of scoutmaster “Sonny” Desvergers, who claimed not only to have seen a saucer, but to have climbed aboard it and scuffled with its humanoid pilots.

The period from 1947 to 1952 shows the Air Force repeatedly attempting and failing to control the flying saucer macronarrative. The cumulative result of its efforts to provide rational explanations for sightings, its obligation to provide dishonest explanations where classified aircraft had been witnessed, and its policy of maintaining silence where a rational explanation could not be given was an erosion of public confidence in the government’s ability or willingness to provide information about the mysterious sightings.

Moreover, attempts to quiet the growing saucer hysteria in the press, as in the 1949 Saturday Evening Post articles, had failed, instead increasing public awareness not only of flying saucers in general, but of the fact that some sightings remained unexplained. If there had ever been hope of the Air Force gaining control over the plot of the flying saucer story, it was gone by 1952.

One sign of this eroding confidence was the formation of civilian saucer research clubs. The first of these was Civilian Saucer Investigation, founded in December 1951 by Los Angeles–­based aviation writer Ed Sullivan. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), begun by Jim and Coral Lorenzen of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, followed in January 1952. The third —­ and the one with which [Gary] Barker was to become the most closely involved —­ was the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), launched by Bridgeport, Connecticut, resident Albert Bender in April, 1952. 

Occult groups got involved as well, most notably the Borderland Sciences Research Associates (BSRA), which claimed psychic contact with the saucers. These occult information sources provided something that few other saucer witnesses could: firsthand knowledge of the nature of the unearthly apparitions. Project Blue Book’s approach —­ commenting in vague and limited ways on individual sightings, often long after the media had moved on —­ created an information void, and an increasing number of groups and publications were on hand to provide speculative explanations, particularly for the strangest saucer narratives.