Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

Fess-up,muchachos. How many times have you been asked whether you believe in flying saucers? How many times have you wondered whether you do or not? Truth is, flying saucers, UFOs, have little to do with astronomy, amateur or professional. They could just as easily have been “assigned” to meteorology—perhaps with some justification. They really only intersect with our art and science when it comes to identifying the commonplace sky objects the public typically and often confuses for spaceships. You would be absolutely gobsmacked to learn how many Joe and Jane Sixpacks have mistaken the good, ol’ friendly Moon for maleficent visitors from Zeta Reticuli II.

Anything is possible, I reckon, but without evidence, concluding, as Erich Von Daniken has notoriously done, that any ancient artifact that looks remotely like a spaceship or a spaceman is indeed that, is foolish. I discount any “sightings” from times prior to the industrial revolution. Much earlier and it is just too difficult to tell—often even for trained anthropologists and archaeologists—what our ancestors intended. We’re safe to ascribe most odd-looking ancient artifacts to religious myth and nothing else, I think. Maybe...

Anyhoo, there is no doubt when the modern Flying Saucer Era begins; it begins in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold’s landmark sighting. Mr. Arnold was a business man, but also a member of the Civil Air Patrol and an enthusiastic and experienced aviator. On June 24, 1947, he was buzzing along near Mount Rainier, assisting in the hunt for a downed aircraft, when he caught sight of a formation of funny-looking craft. What he saw he summed up in a relatively few descriptive words:

It was while I was searching for this crash that I noticed a terrific blue flash pass the nose of my airplane. I noticed that the flash came from a train of very peculiar-looking objects that were rapidly approaching Mt. Rainier at about 107 degrees. This train of objects were 9 in number. I assumed at the time they were a new formation or a new type of jet, though I was baffled by the fact that they did not have any tails. They passed almost directly in front of me, but at a distance of about 23 miles, which is not very great in the air. I judged their wingspan to be at least 100 feet across. Their sighing [sic] did not particularly disturb me at the time, except that I had never seen planes of tha[t] type.

There are a couple of notable things here. Firstly, the character of the witness was such that his veracity wasn’t much questioned. Oh, the Air Force folks said they’d thought he’d seen some kind of reflection or mirage, but nobody seems to have doubted the pilot had seen something.

Secondly and maybe most notably? Arnold described half-moon, crescent shapes that he went on to say moved like saucers skipping across water. He didn’t say they were shaped like saucers, but, again, that they moved like saucers. The press immediately produced the wonderfully evocative “flying saucers” from that. The odd thing? The truly weird thing? People immediately began seeing craft that didn’t just move like saucers, but which also looked like saucers. What does this say about the Phenomenon and/or its witnesses? That I do not know, muchachos, but I suspect it is something important.

And so it began. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, on to the 1970s, and to this day normal, average folks, and not just the naïve backwoodsmen as the more sophisticated among us find comforting to believe, have looked up and seen the weird, the bizarre, the outré, the ALIEN. And the longer this has gone on, the more confusing and strange the reports have become.

Saucer? Nope. Chicken incubator.

Way too strange and elusive for the USAF, anyhow (or so they’d have us believe). The Air Force, finally tired of chasing its metaphorical tail over the UFOs, attempted to wash its hands of the whole affair in the late 60s, closing down its (public) investigatory organ, Project Bluebook, after the Government paid for a study of the Phenomenon, which came to be known as The Condon Report. Even that did not come easy, as the study was fraught with internal dissent. Some of the participants realized they were not being paid to do a serious study of UFOs, but merely to debunk them, and objected strenuously.

The damned saucers would have none of this, of course, barely pausing their capricious reconnaissance. After The Condon Report was released in 1968, there was a dearth of UFOs for a little while. Maybe because fewer people were looking for or expecting to see them. Or simply because the Phenomenon was following its own schedule as it had been doing all along. 

Even a bare two decades into the mess, it was apparent there were periods of lesser and greater activity. Strangely, these flaps seem to correlate, as I believe the French computer scientist-cum-UFOlogist, Jacques Vallee, first observed, with the oppositions of the planet Mars. What the UFOs and their drivers—if any—have to do with the apparently barren Red Planet is, like most things in saucer-land, not at all clear.

One thing I do know: the flying saucers had a noticeable impact on American culture almost right away. Not only were saucers everywhere by the early 1950s—on the new TV sets, in the movies, and in cheap paperback books—they were in the collective consciousness, or maybe collective unconsciousness to an amazing degree. So much so that some saucer followers began to treat the Whole Big Thing as a quasi-religious experience. They flocked to goobers like George Adamski, who claimed not just to have seen UFOs, but to have ridden in them. It didn’t take much looking to see these “contactees” were either self-deluded or were charlatans, but still the public threw boatloads of cash at ‘em.

Castle Bravo.

Why? To some extent, the saucers were tied up with the Cold War. The constant fear of thermonuclear immolation, which you sprouts thankfully have not had to endure, was bound to manifest in some weird ways. And saucers were likely one of ‘em. When there doesn’t seem anywhere to turn in desperate times, the human mind latches onto any “out” it can find, and the beautiful, human-like Space Brothers the contactees found inside the flying saucers were that. These aliens, sometimes from unknown planets with strange mellifluous names, sometimes from more mundane places like Venus, promised peace if only we would listen to messengers like ol’ Georgie A.

It’d be nice to tie the UFOs up in a neat package with the U.S. – Soviet nuclear standoff, but, as usual, them dadgummed discs just won’t be pinned down. They continued to fly e’en during the few thawings of the Cold War, and continue to patrol our skies now that it is over. The contactee period is an interesting part of saucer history, but it has no revelations to offer, other than ones about human psychology. 

Amusingly enough, and typical for the constantly elusive and morphing Phenomenon, "serious" saucer researchers, who looked down their noses at the contactees and their fans, would soon have their own contactee experiences and experiencers to reckon with, even if they weren’t called that and these "aliens" didn’t (always) preach Cosmic Brotherhood.

Flaps have come and gone over six decades, and the Phenomenon, or at least our take on it, has changed and evolved. In the beginning, in the 50s, it was shiny saucers seen in the sky from afar. The sixties brought tales of landings and encounters with “flying saucer occupants” (as the late Coral Lorenzin called them) like the famous Lonnie Zamora case, and, most of all, the one that set the stage for what was to follow, the Barney and Betty Hill “interrupted journey.”

In this odd story (or event, if you prefer) the Hills were taken aboard a craft for (apparently) a medical exam. It wouldn’t be long after Betty and Barney’s terrifying experience that abductees, as these experiencers would come to be known, would take center stage in the saucer game, becoming the major focus of even the more lucid saucer enthusiasts, who were now callin’ themselves “UFOlogists.”

With The Condon Report’s debunking at least tentatively accepted by a fair portion of the public, some 1970s UFOlogists switched gears for a while, ignoring the saucers in the skies for the ones in the history books. No doubt quite a few were inspired by the surprising success (in making money, at least) of Erich Von Daniken and the ancient astronauts he championed in his bestseller, Chariots of the Gods. There was no sweeping the Phenomenon’s ever present High Strangeness factor under the rug, however. Those Ufologists who now preferred to concentrate on combing archives and archaeological digs for The Truth or battling the Air Force for secret documents that would REVEAL EVERYTHING, soon found themselves eclipsed.

Almost unnoticed at first, some disturbing and strange goings-on were taking place in the less visited corners of the U.S. of A.—if you chose to believe the stories the few remaining and more colorful flying saucer magazines were publishing. Firmly in the strange category was the tale of a young lumberjack, one Travis Walton, who claimed he was snatched from an Arizona forest in 1975. He went on to describe his abductee experiences, which included a horrifying medical exam, in graphic detail. How much credence you put in Walton’s story depended on, as it usually does in the UFOlogy biz, whose “facts” you chose to believe. One thing was obvious: quite a bit of cash was made off the book and movie about Walton’s purported encounter, Fire in the Sky.

Wanna go for a ride in my Saucer, Rod?

More disturbing and certainly more credible, were the scores of sighting reported at Strategic Air Command ICBM missile launch and launch control facilities and at least one nuclear weapons “dump” in 1975. There is little doubt something was seen and something happened in these cases, but, as always, it’s not clear just what that was.

In the 1980s, the abduction dam broke. The focus was off the saucers themselves and on to the folks (?) flying ‘em. Which, it appeared, were little gray-colored dudes with big black eyes and a lust for subjecting unwilling humans to painful medical examinations and seemingly nonsensical “experiments.” Soon, the “New Age” or “Occult” or “Sociology” section of the local book store was bursting with scare stories of this sort, led by one called Communion.

Communion wasn’t a ghost-written repetition of some hillbilly’s encounters with the “Greys” and their dreaded anal probe, but, instead, was the firsthand account of a second-string horror writer (ferociously talented but not making money like Stephen King), Whitley Streiber. I was gobsmacked by the book when I read it. Whitley’s tale of nights of alien terror that eventually culminate in some glimmer of greater understanding, and, yes, communion, with entities he doesn’t necessarily identify as aliens, has the ring of truth. The flip side of that, of course, as it always is, is that Mr. Streiber made a lot of money (and, yep, a movie) off the book, is skilled at making his readers believe, and that there was no hard evidence. All we have is testimonials as to his truthfulness and marginally corroborating eye-witness testimony. Sigh.

That is the hell of the thing. I don’t know about you, but there is within me the will to believe in UFOs. Yes, I WANT TO BELIEVE. Oh, I don’t care pea-turkey about the silly stories of UNDERGROUND ALIEN BASES which are PART OF A MASTER PLAN FOR ALIEN CONQUEST. That is risible. But how fantastic it would be to finally have indisputable proof of the existence of an intelligent, advanced alien civilization, not via some faint hum heard in a radio telescope, but from a nuts-and-bolts spacecraft landing in the backyard! Alas, the final revelation, whether from the skies or from some hidden Air Force file, is always just around the next bend in the river. I’ve heard some good saucer stories over the years, but, in the end, that is all they were.

I was way too unsophisticated to recognize that fact, however. All I knew was evil flying saucers were on the attack, led by a terrifying GIANT ROBOT, the Moguera. I looked at the film the other night for the first time in near fifty years and found the robot far more comical than terrifying. Despite the fact that he stomps plenty of buildings (and people) and shoots radioactive rays, his squinty eyes and pointy snout (“Moguera” is Japanese for “mole”) make him look benign and friendly. Nevertheless, back in the hallowed Day I and plenty of the other kids in the theatre on that Saturday night were absolutely terrified. That damned Moguera was huge on the big screen, and the droning air-raid sirens and terrified villagers trying to evacuate their town were all too evocative of the frightening duck-and-cover drills at school—even if I couldn’t put that into words. Yeah, I was scared. But also fascinated.

That was the start, and for one summer Mama and me positively doted on the discs, much to my Old Man’s amusement and chagrin. We bought and read every UFO book and cheap saucer magazine we could get our hands on (Brad Steiger’s Flying Saucers are Hostile was one of our faves, along with his Strangers from the Skies). Mama seemed to delight mostly in the weird and frightening aspects, but for me it was a two edged sword. I was just delighted that evidence of an alien civilization was OBVIOUSLY right around the corner. That other edge, though, which began to eat away at me, was the Mysterians were terrifying, and I suspected the real thing, as Mama feared, would be too.

I made the mistake of reading this just before bed!

Which began to affect my observing. I’d be glued to the eyepiece in a vain attempt to discern M74 in my puny Palomar Junior, when I’d begin to get spooked. Yes, I was in my friendly backyard, but those derned Mysterians had kidnapped Earth women right out of their houses. Snatching me from the backyard oughta be like shooting fish in a barrel for real aliens. Even in my slightly demented state the whole thing seemed faintly ridiculous…but only by the light of day. Out in the dark, it was sometimes all I could do to keep from running inside, ducking into my room, and hiding under the covers. I persevered, but there were some nervous nights out there by myself.

Luckily, I eventually emerged from this odd phase. For one thing, I began to wonder why a race who could traverse the dark light years with ease would be at all concerned with dumb little ol’ me. I certainly wasn’t a pretty, young chick. Didn’t have much to offer ‘em as far as Earthly knowledge, either; I’d made a “B” on my last Geography test. I also began to believe any race that could perform such marvels must necessarily be more wise than evil, even if they might seem scary to the primitive likes of us. Even more than either of those things, I began to wonder where the hell they were.

Despite night after night out in the dark, often into the wee hours on the weekends and during the Summer (when I could fly under Mama’s radar, anyhow) I never saw anything that even hinted at saucerness. Closest I came was early one June Saturday morn when a blindingly bright light skimmed toward me over the trees. Was this it? Should I run? Should I greet the visitors? Should I at the very least try to snap a picture with my humble Argus Seventy-Five twin lens reflex with which I’d been making Moon Pictures just a few hours earlier? As I was reaching for the camera, the familiar sound of multiple jet engines broke the silence, and I understood I’d been fooled by an all too Earthly airplane heading almost but not quite straight at me with its landing lights on. This encounter with a USAF KC-135 was almost the end of my expectations of experiencing the Visitors for myself.

That hasn’t changed over the intervening years. I have seen plenty of odd things in the sky, including a group of satellites flying formation. That looked spooky, lemme tell you, but turned out to be nothing more otherworldly than the U.S. Navy’s Ocean Surveillance Satellites. Usually, I have realized what I was seeing almost immediately (with mingled relief and disappointment).

Occasionally, though, I have been totally stumped for a while, but only for a while. My observing buddy Pat and I were puzzled for quite some time by an odd-looking thing we saw from his observatory one dark night. Bright light. In binoculars, part of it seemed to be rotating. Suddenly, smaller bright objects were emitted and seemed to fly away. Was this THE MOTHERSHIP? The reality was not nearly so romantic. What we saw was, I eventually decided, a Navy E2-C or similar aircraft with a rotating radome running an exercise, dropping flares to counter “enemy” heat-seeking missiles. Probably. Shucks. Since I hadn’t seen a saucer in damned near 50 years of nights, I finally reluctantly concluded they must be rare—which would only make sense—darnit.

Me and Mama's favorite reading material that summer of '67.

Don’t get me wrong. I still find the Phenomenon interesting—and certainly entertaining—but it’s been a long time since I put quite as much credence in it as I did when I was a young sprout ogling the pictures of flung hubcaps that graced the pages of the True Report on Flying Saucers. I found myself increasingly unable to believe the accounts of even the seemingly honest souls who saw the damned things. Years of doing public star parties, watching lay folk look at and talk about the sky, and hearing their questions about it has led me to believe many but not all sightings that do not involve the usual culprits—aircraft seen in unusual aspects, balloons, and weather phenomena—are nothing more strange than everyday astronomical objects: the Sun, the Moon, the planets, spacecraft, and meteors.

Heck, you don’t even have to go to bolides or reentering satellites to explain most UFO encounters quite satisfactorily. I used to be skeptical the Moon or Venus could be mistaken for an alien spacecraft and looked at explanations that blamed those easily identifiable (I thought) objects as utterly disingenuous. Till I came to understand people who never much look at the sky can mistake anything for a UFO. The Moon is big and oddly colored when it’s near the horizon and seems to pace you as you walk or drive along. Mix in the power of suggestion and some flying saucer specials on the fricking History Channel, and what do you have? ALIENS! Venus is bright and noticeable. Stare at it for long and small motions of the human eye will make it seems to jog around. SAUCER!

What about the current craze for abductions? It’s leveled off after being the ne plus ultra of UFOlogy through the 1990s, but the idea that small, gray aliens with big heads are creeping into our bedrooms, often to abduct our women just like the Mysterians did, hangs on. What do I think of that? I don’t know. It’s possible these people are experiencing something, perhaps some “alternate reality” like the late John Keel talked about in his many thoughtful and thought-provoking books. Or they may not be experiencing any reality, alternate or otherwise. Frankly, when you read, really read, some of these accounts (usually given under hypnosis), it becomes pretty clear some Abductees are describing nothing more unusual than a bad dream

“But Uncle Rod, but Uncle Rod, how come they all describe the same gray aliens with big heads and big eyes?” Not much mystery there, Skeezix. Every tabloid magazine and tabloid TV show has been using that archetypal figure as the standard alien since abductions became hot-hot-hot. The “Grey” has been in the public eye for damned near two decades. I also note our old pals, The Saucer-Men, looked a lot like the Greys, had a similar yen for Earth girls, and predated them by decades.

There is one other 400-pound gorilla in modern UFOlogy we have not touched upon yet, the Roswell Crash. Something does appear to have happened out in New Mexico in ’47. The members of the Air Force’s 509th Composite Group stationed in Roswell, the Wing that dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seem to have thought they’d found something very unusual—and you'd think they'd have been able to identify the remains of a mundane object. Certainly, the air force explanation of "weather balloons or maybe test dummies" is ridiculous.

The problem with Roswell is a couple of generations of researchers, both for and agin the saucer crash hypothesis (including the Air Force), have so muddied the waters and contaminated the few remaining witnesses and the scene that, unless some previously unknown data is unearthed by some responsible person, we are never likely to know The Truth—whatever the hell that is.

So, in my estimation, there is nothing at all to the UFO phenomenon? Given the lack of evidence—that much wished-for alien ashtray ain’t turned up despite sixty years of ardent UFOlogy—I must reluctantly admit that, no, there may not be anything to it. Maybe not, anyway... 

And yet...and yet...  There does remain that residue, those cases, like the multiple sighting in the Midwest ICBM fields, that are not easily explicable. If we had a little more data, would even these cases evaporate? Well, maybe. On that other hand, some of our own, some astronomers, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, and Clyde Tombaugh, for example, came to believe there is indeed something to the wily Phenomenon.

The saucers seem to be in abeyance in this new century. There are still sightings, but it’s been a long while since there’s been a big flap or even a headline-grabbing case like the one down here on the coast in 1973 where a couple of Pascagoula river fishermen claimed they were abducted by “space robots.” Given the discs’ habits, I suspect they will soon be back, though, treading their inexplicable paths across the sky, confounding the skeptical and gullible alike. Me? Let ‘em come, I say. It’s been a long time since I’ve let them pesky flying saucers disturb my quiet contemplation of M74.

Ah, that wily Phenomenon! Just when I'd convinced myself we'd (probably) put it to bed...  Did you see the film, Independence Day? Remember the scene where the president tells his friends there's nothing at all to the stories about Area 51? And his advisor turns to him and says, "Weeelllll...sir, that's not quite accurate..."? What we are now hearing from the feds is, yeah, like that. After going on eight decades of debunking and denying, the government now admits, "Darn! Looks like there is something to it after all!"

Am I surprised? Not really. These sorts of astonishing switchbacks are the backbone of the UFO--excuse me, "UAP" (as the government is now calling the saucers)--story. Otherwise? Good luck to the G-Men investigating the UFOs (if that's really what they are doing). Me? I'll be awful disappointed if the saucers turn out to be nothing more exotic than mundane hardware spaceships from Zeta Reticuli II...