Kenneth Arnold, Roswell, and the term "Flying Saucer"
Aliens are a Retcon
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This is in a series of anniversary UFO incident investigations. See also Tehran at 50 (September 2026), Phoenix Lights at 30 (March 2027), and the Washington DC Flap at 75 (July 2027).
Roswell’s Flying Saucer - Context is Key
Take a listen to the famous July 8, 1947 radio announcement about the United States Army Air Force declaring it had recovered a flying disc. Try listening to the broadcast without thinking about any other context you may have concerning the Roswell incident.
The recovery of a “flying disk” was big news, along with the All Star Game, Russia being upset about foreign military presence in Greece, and tax legislation. For many modern listeners, this would seem surprising. Shouldn’t the news of an alien craft being recovered dominate the news? Well, no one said alien or extraterrestrial for a reason. To find out why, let’s look at the start of the weird things in the sky craze.
Contemporary Thoughts During the Dawn of Modern Strange Things in the Sky
The first modern reports of strange things in the sky were foo fighters of World War II. These strange balls of light were mostly seen in the European theater of the war, with both Allied and German pilots unable to determine what exactly they were, but assuming the foo fighters must be a weapon from the other side. The one hundred or so reported sightings started around 1942, peaked in 1944, and dropped off before the end of the war. While some have claimed the foo fighters were a combination of mistaken jets, St. Elmo’s fire, and the chaos of high intense flights, others were convinced the pilots saw something strange. The 2026 U.S. government UFO files have a series of documents in them that describe the foo fighters and how they spooked U.S. air crews.
In the war’s aftermath, the Nordic countries noticed a new phenomenon. Ghost rockets were eerie streaks of light, caught on camera, that disabled signs of maneuverability. In the course of a year, over a thousand were reported with the Swedish military believing over 200 were actual sightings of something material. American Lt. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, director of the Central Intelligence Group - which formed the nucleus of what became the CIA - wrote a letter to then President Truman assessing the ghost rockets came from the Soviet-occupied former Nazi missile testing site Peenemunde.
In both the foo fighter and ghost rocket events, the leading theories involved military technology, or at the very least more mundane mistaken military equipment.
So it should be little surprise that when Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947 saw what he described as flying discs, he initially said “whether it has something to do with our army, or our intelligence, or some foreign country, I don’t know.”
Newspaper articles at the time like “AAF Pilots Reported ‘Foo Fighters’ in War Like ‘Flying Saucers’” and “Ex-Pilot Saw Discs in Italy: Buddies Saw ‘Foo-Fighters,’ Too, Syracusan Claims” compared the flying saucer sightings to the foo fighters. The article War-Time Fliers Saw Silver Objects in Sky 2 Years Ago, published less a month after the Arnold sighting and on the day of the Roswell announcement, stated the cause of the foo fighters remained unknown but sightings “went into limbo when the area east of the Rhine was captured by Allied troops.”
The association of a terrestrial explanation for flying saucers continued with Roswell. From the 1994 Air Force report on the 1947 incident, “The wreckage was described as a ‘..bundle of tinfoil, broken wood beams, and rubber remnants of a balloon…’ [The rancher on whose property something crashed] claimed that he and his son, Vemon, found the material on June 14, 1947, when they ‘came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks.’”
The described wreckage did not sound like an advanced alien craft, and few people thought so. According to an August 1947 Gallup poll, ninety percent of people had heard of flying saucers. Yet when asked what people thought the flying saucers were, the public had very grounded beliefs. Of those who responded
No answer, don’t know: 33%.
Imagination, optical illusion, mirage, etc.: 29%.
U.S. secret weapon, part of atomic bomb, etc.: 15%.
Hoax: 10%
Weather forecasting devices: 3%.
Searchlights on airplanes: 2%.
Russian secret weapon: 1%.
Other explanations: 9%
Among the “other explanations” listed in the Tampa Bay Times article about the poll were a woman citing the Bible claiming the flying saucers were a sign of the End Times, radio waves from atomic bomb testing, and a new product being put out by the DuPont company. The newspaper did not mention extraterrestrial beings as a response. In a related note, the 2026 U.S. government UFO files has another set of reports from 1947 which include officials being contacted by people claiming the flying saucers are Soviet technology launched from Mexico or craft being made in Spain by German scientists. Another report states the Soviets are building flying wing aircraft and that the flying saucers could be that.
Between 1947 and 1948, the years of the first modern flying saucer episode, Newspapers.com lists 34,137 matches of “flying saucers” and 19,861 matches of “flying discs” in its archives. A search of “flying saucers” plus extraterrestrials and “flying discs” plus extraterrestrials reveals a total of three unique articles. One was a humorous short fiction story, another proposed that extraterrestrials piloted flying saucers, and the third was a blurb in the main New Orleans newspaper mentioning someone selling flying saucer insurance. The insurer stated his belief flying saucers were man made. He further stated the insurance would not cover meteorites or other extraterrestrial objects. There was nothing in his article to suggest alien beings whatsoever. As for the word “alien,” that term was not popularly used to primarily mean extraterrestrial beings until the early 1950s. Searches through newspaper records so far have only revealed the term alien referring to not of the United States.
The entertainment industry mirrored popular ideas about the origins of flying saucers. The 1949 movie Bruce Gentry – Daredevil of the Skies was the first Hollywood serial to feature flying saucers. In this 15-part series, flying saucers were a pulp villain’s superweapon. The first feature film to feature a flying saucer, the 1950 movie The Flying Saucer, had the vehicle being an American secret technology program that the Soviets were trying to learn about.
As for extraterrestrial beings, those who advocated cases of alleged encounters were still in their mystical stage. The 2003 book UFO Religions by Christopher Partridge documented how the early Contactee movement was still primarily Theosophist, with most ascended masters being mystery men like the Count of St. Germain, with ascended masters from Venus being side features who magically appeared. No ascended master before had used a flying machine to move around, as why would someone who could transcend matter need a starship?
The Later Shift
In 1949 and 1950, there was a hard shift towards aliens being the cause of flying saucers. Two popular books were part of the charge. On December 26, 1949, Donald Keyhoe’s True Magazine article The Flying Saucers Are Real was published. It was the first major piece of journalism claiming UFOs were from other worlds and that the Air Force was slowly revealing the flying saucers’ origins. Early in 1950, the book-length The Flying Saucers Are Real became a bestseller. Then in September, Frank Scully’s book Behind the Flying Saucers claimed the U.S. government had recovered crashed saucers containing alien bodies. Scully’s previous reporting on an alleged flying saucer crash in Aztec, New Mexico - later a con man-run hoax - was a key part of his book’s claim.
At the same time, influential con man George Adamski started doing lectures in late 1949 that flying saucers were alien-operated machines. It wasn’t until 1952 that he claimed he saw flying saucers before Kenneth Arnold did and he - Adamski - was meeting aliens. His claims did much to cement Theosophy to UFOlogy.
Back on July 7, 1947, Kenneth Arnold stated to the Chicago Times that the craft were moving at such extremes that it would kill anyone inside to survive the pressure. He opined the craft could be drones ‘from Mars, Venus, or our own planet,” but he didn’t pursue to alien hypothesis for a while. Then in the April 30, 1949 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, Arnold shifted stating, “There is no doubt in my mind but what these objects are aircraft of a strange design, and material that is unknown to the civilization of this earth.”
This shift was picked up as well in fiction in things like the 1949 pulp short story The Mouse by Fredric Brown. In the second part of the novel This Island Earth - The Shroud of Secrecy - published in December 1949, the main character sees a flying saucer and assumes it is proof of human advanced technology, though later it is revealed to be an alien spacecraft.
Hollywood caught up as well. The Day the Earth Stood Still came out in 1951, and throughout the decade more flying saucer movies arrived, like This Island Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, and Plan 9 from Outer Space.
This shift cemented the idea that flying saucers were alien devices in the public’s mind. However, for a few years in the 1940s, the public had more mundane thoughts about the strange sights in the sky.
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Next time, I will take a look at the famous 1907 science fiction End of the World novel Lord of the World, a book loved by Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, and Pope Leo XIV.
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That's a lot of cool information. I was not aware of the different, contemporary interpretations of what the phenomena were. Thanks for writing!
Will you cover the Lonnie Zamora incident in Socorro, New Mexico, at some point?