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A flying saucer, or flying disc, is a purported disc-shaped UFO. The term was coined in 1947 by the news media for the objects pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed flew alongside his airplane above Washington State. Newspapers reported Arnold's story with speed estimates implausible for airplanes of the period. The story spurred a wave of hundreds of sightings across the United States, including the Roswell incident and Flight 105 UFO sighting. The concept quickly spread to other countries. Early reports speculated about secret military technology, but flying saucers became synonymous with aliens by 1950. The term has gradually been supplanted by the more general military terms unidentified flying object (UFO) and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

In science fiction, reported UFO sightings, UFO conspiracy theories, and broader popular culture, saucers are typically piloted by nonhuman beings. Descriptions in reported sightings vary considerably. Early reports emphasized speed but the descriptions shifted over the decades to the objects mostly hovering. They are generally said to be round, sometimes with a protrusion on top, but details of the shape vary between reports. Flying saucers have been described as silent or deafening, with lights of every color, flying alone or in formation, and twenty to thousands of feet in diameter. Sightings are most frequent at night. The majority of reported saucers have been identified with known phenomena including astronomical objects like Venus, airborne objects like balloons, and optical phenomena like sun dogs.

1950s pop culture embraced flying saucers. These discs appeared in film, television, literature, music, and other minor aspects like toys and advertising. The shape became visual shorthand for alien invaders. During the 1960s, they waned in popularity. Discs ceased to be viewed as the standard shape for alien spacecraft but are still often depicted, sometimes for their retro value to evoke the early Cold War era.

History

Precursors

Reports of fantastical aircraft predate the first flying saucers. In antiquity, mysterious lights in the sky were interpreted as spiritual phenomena. In the 1800s, many newspapers reported massive airships with glowing lights and humming engines. These are often seen as precursors to "flying saucer" and "UFO" sightings. On January 25, 1878, the Denison Daily News printed an article in which John Martin, a local farmer, reported an object resembling a balloon flying "at wonderful speed". The newspaper said it appeared to be about the size of a saucer from his perspective, one of the first uses of the word "saucer" in association with a UFO. During the 1940s, allied pilots reported encountering foo fighters they believed were advanced axis aircraft.

Many aspects of the typical flying saucer first appeared in science fiction. French sociologist Bertrand Méheust noted, for example, Jean de La Hire's 1908 novel La Roue fulgurante [fr] (The Lightning Wheel). In the novel, a flying disc-shaped machine abducts the protagonists via a beam of light. Science fiction magazine Amazing Stories began publishing "The Shaver Mystery" in 1945. Written by Richard Sharpe Shaver and edited by Raymond A. Palmer, they were science fiction tales about technologically-advanced "detrimental robots" that abducted humans, but the stories were presented as a true account of Shaver's life. Until the magazine ceased printing Shaver's stories, Amazing Stories's letter column was regularly full of readers sharing their own purportedly true sightings of the robots.

Before the term "flying saucer" was coined, fantasy artwork in pulp magazines depicted flying discs. Skeptical physicist Milton Rothman noted the appearance of "flying saucers" in the fantasy artwork of 1930s pulp science fiction magazines, by artists like Frank R. Paul. One of Paul's earliest depictions of a "flying saucer" appeared on the cover of the November 1929 issue of Hugo Gernsback's pulp science fiction magazine Science Wonder Stories. Science fiction illustrator Frank Wu wrote:

The point is that the idea of space vehicles shaped like flying saucers was imprinted in the national psyche for many years prior to 1947, when the Roswell incident took place. It didn't take much stretching for the first observers of UFOs to assume that the unknown objects hovering in the sky had the same disk shape as the science fictional vehicles.

Origins

1947 flying disc craze
Headline from July 6, 1947
Events
Kenneth Arnold Flight 105 Roswell Rhodes photographs Twin Falls hoax Maury Island hoax

The modern flying saucer concept, including the association with aliens, can be traced to the 1947 Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting. On June 24, 1947, businessman and amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold landed at the Yakima, Washington airstrip. He told staff and friends that he'd seen nine unusual airborne objects. Arnold estimated their speed at 1,700 miles per hour, beyond the capabilities of known aircraft. Newspapers soon contacted Arnold for interviews. The East Oregonian reported his supposed aircraft as "saucer-like". In a June 26 radio interview, Arnold described them as "something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear". Headline writers coined the terms "flying saucer" and "flying disk" (or "disc") for the story. Arnold later told CBS News that the early coverage "did not quote me properly when I described how they flew, I said that they flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the water. Most of the newspapers misunderstood and misquoted that, too. They said that I said that they were saucer-like; I said that they flew in a saucer-like fashion." The circular shape of typical flying saucers may be due to reporters mistaking Arnold's "saucer-like" description of motion.

Arnold's story incited a wave of hundreds of flying saucer reports. The next widely publicized report was the sighting by a United Airlines crew on July 4 of nine more disc-like objects pacing their plane over Idaho. On July 8, the Army Air Force base at Roswell, New Mexico, issued a press release saying that they had recovered a "flying disc" from a nearby ranch, the so-called Roswell UFO incident, which was front-page news until the military issued a retraction saying that it was a weather balloon.

The public was divided on the potential origin of the saucers. Newspapers initially reported that Arnold suspected them to be experimental Soviet aircraft. A Gallup Poll found that 90% of Americans were aware of the saucer stories, 16 percent believed they were secret military weapons, and less than one percent believed they were alien craft. One report from Seattle, Washington, described a hammer and sickle painted onto a flying disc. Throughout 1947, the saucers became increasingly associated with the idea of extraterrestrial life. The stories spread to other countries, where they were influenced by local political and social concerns. In Europe, which was still recovering from the Second World War, saucers were often reported with rocket-like features. German newspapers reported flying saucers that exploded or had tails of fire. The names for the discs were largely derived from the English "flying saucer" including the French soucoupe volante, Spanish platillo volante, Portuguese disco voador, Swedish flygande tefat, German fliegende Untertasse, and Italian disco volante.

Flying saucer reporting declined by the end of summer. Newspapers had reported hoaxes by those looking to profit from the saucers and the Roswell incident, which was quickly retracted as balloon debris. In the July 7 1947 Twin Falls saucer hoax, a widely reported crashed disc from Twin Falls, Idaho, was found to have been created by four teenagers using parts from a jukebox. The Air Force's Air Materiel Command collected over a hundred reports at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Air Force General Nathan Twining established Project SAUCER, later renamed Project Sign, the first in a series of UFO investigations by the US Government. In the following years, other national governments would follow suit. Canada began Project Magnet and the United Kingdom launched the Flying Saucer Working Party in 1950, which attributed saucer reports to meteorological phenomena, astronomical phenomena, misidentification, optical illusions, misconceptions, or hoaxes.

Development

By 1950, the term "flying saucer" was widely associated with extraterrestrial life. In a 1950 interview on flying saucers, Kenneth Arnold said, "if it's not made by our science or our Army Air Forces, I am inclined to believe it's of an extra-terrestrial origin". This extraterrestrial hypothesis was accompanied by a range of other unusual theories. Meade Layne speculated that they came from an alternate dimension. Under editor Ray Palmer, Amazing Stories had run Richard Sharpe Shaver's purportedly true stories. Fred Crisman had written to Palmer about fighting Shaver's purported evil beings in an underground cavern. Within a month of the first flying saucer reports, Crisman sent Palmer metal fragments and an account from his employee Harold Dahl about a malfunctioning flying saucer. Palmer recruited Kenneth Arnold to investigate Crisman and Dahl's Maury Island incident. The metal turned out to be slag from a local smelter, but the men in black that Crisman and Dahl claimed were following them would become a common element of later UFO accounts. Gray Barker popularized the idea of "men in black" who intimidate or silence UFO witnesses in his book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Palmer launched the magazine Fate in 1948, claiming to offer "the truth about flying saucers". It was the first in a wave of non-fiction paranormal magazines that would thrive in the 1950s.

A flying saucer movement developed during the 1950s. It was influenced by scientific research, occult practices, pop culture, existing religions, and earlier myths. In reports and in popular media like the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, saucers and their pilots were characterized as messengers. The first wave of so-called contactees, George Hunt Williamson, George Van Tassel, Truman Bethurum, George Adamski, and Orfeo Angelucci claimed to have ridden aboard the saucers and brought back messages for humanity. New religions and institutions arose around the contactees. Van Tassel's Aetherius Society built the Integratron, a domed structure near Landers, California, intended to facilitate further contact with aliens, physical rejuvenation, and time travel. According to George King, he founded the Ashtar Command—a new religious movement influenced by theosophy—at the direct instruction of an extraterrestrial. Some existing religions began to incorporate flying saucers. The Nation of Islam taught that the end of the world would be brought about by the "Mother Wheel" or "Mother Plane", a flying saucer half a mile wide. During the same time that Margaret Murray's "Old Religion" or witch-cult hypothesis was being discredited in academic circles, its core idea—a lost civilization remembered in myth—was being embraced in pulp fiction, occult groups, and the growing UFO movement. Several authors speculated that ancient astronauts piloting UFOs were the cause of myths and religions. Schoolteacher Robert Dione wrote God Drives a Flying Saucer to reframe biblical miracles and the Miracle of the Sun as the work of humanoid aliens piloting flying saucers. Later, Erich von Däniken released Chariots of the Gods?, a work of pseudoscience that attributed ancient artifacts and monuments to its purported ancient astronauts.

Ufology developed as a parallel social movement. Well-known Variety columnist Frank Scully published Behind the Flying Saucers in 1950. The book presents the Aztec, New Mexico crashed saucer hoax as the true account of an alien craft that "gently pancaked to earth like Sonja Henie imitating a dying swan" and was recovered by the United States government. It describes one of the hoaxers—who were convicted of fraud for selling nonfunctional dowsing equipment to the oil industry based on the claim that it was derived from alien technology—as a doctor with "more degrees than a thermometer". Donald Keyhoe took a "nuts and bolts" approach to the idea of the government covering up alien life in his 1950 book The Flying Saucers Are Real. When the popular and respected Life magazine ran "Have We Visitors From Space?" in 1952, taking seriously ideas of alien visitors, a wave of sightings followed. The 1952 sightings spurred Leonard H. Stringfield to form an early UFO investigation group called the Civilian Investigating Group for Aerial Phenomena and to publish research on UFOs. Albert K. Bender started his own International Flying Saucer Bureau in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1952. Influenced by these works, James W. Moseley began to tour the country interviewing witnesses and distributing a newsletter for the growing saucer subculture.

Within a decade of the first saucer sightings, reports had spread to many countries where local groups and ufologists emerged. Antonio Ribera started Centro de Estudios Interplanetarios in Spain, and Edgar Jarrold founded the Australia Flying Saucer Bureau. In France, UFO groups overlapped with occult groups and the anti-nuclear movement. Reports have been more often made in the countries where UFO groups are in operation, such as the United States, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. By the end of the decade, The Case for the UFO author Morris K. Jessup reflected on his field, "This embryonic science is as full of cults, feuds, and dogmas as a dog is of fleas. There are probably more opinions about the nature and purpose of UFO's as there are Ufologers."

UFO photography emerged as a subgenre of documentary photography, showing often blurry or abstract discs framed by otherwise everyday settings. Notable examples include the McMinnville photographs, the Passaic UFO photographs, and the photographs of contactee George Adamski. Some of the alleged flying saucer photographs of the era were hoaxes, done with everyday objects like hubcaps. German rocket scientist Walther Johannes Riedel analyzed George Adamski's UFO photos and found them to be faked. The UFO's "landing struts" were General Electric light bulbs with logos printed on them. UFO researcher Joel Carpenter identified the body of Adamski's "flying saucer" as the lampshade from a 1930s pressure lantern.

Flying saucers are now considered retro and emblematic of the 1950s and of B movies in particular. The term "flying saucer" was gradually supplanted by "UFO" and later "UAP". Discs ceased to be the standard shape in UFO reports, and a broader variety of objects were reported. Recent reports more often describe spherical and triangular UFOs.

Description

Identification

The majority of flying saucer and broader UFO reports have been identified with known phenomena. Investigations by the British government in the 1950s found the vast majority of reports to be misidentifications or hoaxes. Some causes of saucer sightings include Venus, ice crystals, balloons, and airborne trash. The US Government and General Mills launched thousands of top-secret Skyhook spy balloon during the 1950s. These massive balloons floated at high altitudes, making it difficult to judge their speed, and were widely reported as flying saucers. During the Mantell UFO incident, a pilot died while pursuing an unknown round object that was later identified as a Skyhook balloon.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, psychologists began to study why people believed in flying saucers if the evidence was so limited. French psychiatrist Georges Heuyer considered the movement to be a kind of global folie à deux, or shared delusion, used to navigate anxieties. In the 1970s, French UFO researcher Michel Monnerie examined reports that were later identified and reports that remained unidentified. Monnerie found no difference in the frequency of paranormal phenomena reported alongside the sightings identified later as mundane known objects. This led him to develop the thesis that the saucer-specific experiences were a "psychosocial" process of myth-making triggered by but not caused by aerial phenomena. This psychosocial UFO hypothesis became a popular explanation in France.

Reported sightings

Flying saucer sightings differ in their descriptions of appearance, movement, and purpose of the saucer. In a 1963 overview of flying saucers, astronomer Donald Howard Menzel found some broad traits across sightings, but noted that "no two reports describe exactly the same kind of UFO." Menzel found saucers were usually reported as round, but included objects shaped like dining saucers, teardrops, cigars, kidney beans, the planet Saturn, and yarn spindles. Saucers often were reported with a dome or knob-shaped protrusion on the top side. Size estimates ranged from 20 feet to thousands of feet in diameter. Menzel found saucers reported in nearly every color, often glowing or flashing. The sightings had little consistency in reported movement or sounds. Some witnesses reported silent objects; others reported a roar or thunderclap. Sightings were most often during the night around sunset or sunrise. If the saucer's crew was described by the witness, they were usually extraterrestrial.

Flying saucers have been consistently described and depicted as ahead of contemporary technology. When comparing the 1947 saucer reports to the mystery airships of the 1800s, sociologist Robert Bartholomew found that the claimed observations "reflected popular social and cultural expectations of each period". The mystery airship sightings of the 1800s included details like metal hulls, propellers, searchlights, and large wings. The 1947 sightings—occurring months before Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier—emphasized the "incredible speed" of flying saucers. The majority of 1947 reports emphasized speed. This fell to 41 percent in 1971, and 22 percent in 1986. In the 1950s, hovering flying saucers were associated with contactees and hoaxes; by 1986 almost half of reported UFOs were claimed to hover slowly or motionlessly.

Fictional portrayals

Flying saucers in popular media underwent a similar change in movement. Early films like The Flying Saucer (1950) and film serials like Bruce Gentry – Daredevil of the Skies (1949) show saucers streaking past at high speeds. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) mentions high speeds tracked by radar but also includes a slow landing scene. The 1960s television series The Invaders prominently features a slow landing scene in every episode. Many later iconic flying saucer films, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Fire in the Sky (1993), depict hovering and slow movements.

Popular culture

Since the late 1940s, flying discs have increasingly become associated with a cultural conception of aliens that reflects the social and political anxieties of the 20th century. Fictional flying saucers reflect concerns around atomic warfare, the Cold War, loss of bodily integrity, xenophobia, government secrecy, and whether humanity is alone in the universe. No correlation has been found between the release of major UFO films and spikes in sightings. A disc, often domed or shining down a ray of light, has become visual shorthand for aliens. It has been used in modern times to signify pop culture aliens. The aerial disc motif has been misinterpreted in much older art, created when it had different connotations. In 2017, the flying saucer emoji was added to Unicode.

Literature

There were several precursors to the modern flying saucers in science fiction literature, like The Shaver Mystery. Richard Sharpe Shaver's stories about a secret technologically advanced civilization of "detrimental robots" inside the earth were published as a true account of his life. Backlash from the science fiction community carried over to UFO literature. Saucers did appear in conventional science fiction, but a genre emerged that treated fantastical stories as either true or plausibly true. The debut issues of Mystic magazine asked readers, "When you read this story, you will tell yourself that it is fiction; the editors assure you that it is. But what if—it isn't?" The Fortec Conspiracy, a science fiction novel, both drew from and fed into the UFO rumors surrounding the Roswell incident debris.

Aliens and flying discs were common in the 1950s science fiction comics that flourished after the Golden Age of Comic Books. The comic book anthology UFO Flying Saucers, launched in the 1960s, published illustrations of supposedly real sightings. The opening to its first issue declared, "Our scientists have seen them! Our airmen have fought them!"

Advertisements in the 1950s and 1960s referenced flying saucers as purported alien spacecraft and reflected the diversity of attitudes towards their plausibility. The major attitudes towards UFOs invoked in print advertisements were the potential for advanced technology, awe towards their potential pilots, and skepticism about hoaxes. Much of the former pulp reader base shifted their attention to the growing medium of television during the 1950s.

Film and television

Many early portrayals of flying saucers linked them to the Cold War. The 1949 film serial Bruce Gentry – Daredevil of the Skies featured a man-made flying saucer, and the 1950 film The Flying Saucer focused on Cold War espionage. The first novel to explicitly use the term "flying saucer" was Bernard Newman's The Flying Saucer, released in 1950. The novel's craft was a hoaxed alien ship intended to end military tension by giving humanity a common enemy.

Two early 1950s films, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing from Another World, were financial successes that established the market for an "alien visitor" subgenre of science fiction that merged flying saucers into existing space opera tropes. Slowly hovering discs, like the one from the landing scene in The Day the Earth Stood Still, appeared throughout science fiction including It Came from Outer Space (1953), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and the television series The Invaders. While contactees described aliens as benevolent messengers, Hollywood films often depicted them as monstrous antagonists.

Other localities adapted the largely American phenomenon at different times, adding elements of the local culture. Early British films were low-budget productions like Devil Girl from Mars (1954) and Stranger from Venus (1954). Japanese filmmakers incorporated flying discs and alien invaders into the tokusatsu tradition in mid-50s films like Fearful Attack of the Flying Saucers and Warning from Space. Indian cinema began to incorporate alien invaders in the 1960s, starting with the Tamil-language Kalai Arasi. An adaptation of Bankubabur Bandhu by Satyajit Ray was never completed but may have influenced other works of science fiction. In Spain, alien-themed television shows became popular in the 1960s.

Flying saucers quickly spread to other genres. In Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's big-budget Forbidden Planet, a futuristic 1956 adaptation of William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, humans travel through space in the United Planets Cruiser C-57D, a ship resembling a 1950s flying saucer. The Twilight Zone episodes "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", "Third from the Sun", "Death Ship", "To Serve Man", "The Invaders" and "On Thursday We Leave for Home" all make use of the iconic saucer from Forbidden Planet. The C-57D was followed by other disc-shaped spaceships in broader science fiction, like the Jupiter 2 from the television series Lost in Space (1965-1968). Saucers appeared in the television series Babylon 5 (1994-1998) as starships used by a race called the Vree. Doctor Who has featured different designs of flying saucers, like those used by the Daleks in Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. or the Cybermen in "The Tenth Planet". Aliens in the film Independence Day (1996) attacked humanity in giant city-sized saucer-shaped spaceships.

As the flying saucer was surpassed by other designs and concepts, it fell out of favor with straight science-fiction moviemakers, but continued to be used ironically in comedy movies, especially in reference to the low-budget B movies, which often featured saucer-shaped alien craft. The 1964 Italian comedy Il disco volante centered around a flying saucer. The image is often invoked retrofuturistically to produce a nostalgic feel in period works, especially in comic science fiction. For example, Mars Attacks! (1996) draws on the flying saucer as part of the larger satire of 1950s B movie tropes.

Architecture

The sleek, silver flying saucer in particular is seen as a symbol of 1950s culture. The motif is common in Googie architecture and Atomic Age décor. Notable flying saucer structures include Seattle's Space Needle and Los Angeles International Airport's Theme Building. Googie architecture in California, like the Chemosphere home, influenced the futuristic structures in the 1960s cartoon The Jetsons. The cartoon popularized the style to such an extent, that it is often referred to as the "Jetsons look". Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who collaborated on the design of the flying saucer in "The Day The Earth Stood Still", went on to use the flying saucer as an architectural motif. Wright's circular Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, United States, is capped by a flattened dome over a hundred feet across.

Spaceships are also one of the subjects of novelty architecture. Novelty architecture, also known as mimetic architecture, is the practice of creating structures shaped like other existing objects. The Communist-era Kielce Bus Station in Kielce, Poland, was designed by architect Edward Modrzejewski to resemble a UFO. Other modernist and brutalist UFO structures include the Ukrainian Institute of Scientific, Technical and Economic Information, Bulgaria's concrete Buzludzha monument, the Most SNP in Bratislava, and The Flying Saucer in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. The Westall UFO was commemorated with the Grange Reserve UFO Park, featuring a UFO with red slides modeled after the reported sighting. Roswell, New Mexico, is a UFO tourist destination in the Southwestern United States. Many structures in the town, including the streetlights and the McDonald's, are designed around alien themes. Moonbeam, Ontario has an alien for its mascot and a prominent roadside flying saucer at its welcome center. UFO-shaped homes include the Futuro pods designed by Matti Suuronen, the former Sanzhi UFO houses from the Sanzhi District, New Taipei, Taiwan, and artist Harry Visser's iconic home in Roodepoort, Johannesburg.

Broader pop culture

Flying saucers were a ubiquitous part of pop culture from 1947 into the mid-1970s. Flying disc motifs were used in toys and other novelties soon after the earliest reports. The frisbee was introduced in 1948 and initially branded the "flying saucer". Flying saucer candy was introduced in the 1950s when a Belgian producer of communion wafers had a dip in sales. Along with other vintage candies, they have since seen renewed interest from customers as "retro". In the 1950s and early 1960s, Japan was a major manufacturer of tin toys often with space themes like robots, rockets, and flying discs. Throughout the 1950s, musicians like Billy Lee Riley, Jesse Lee Turner, and Betty Johnson released novelty songs about flying discs and alien invaders. Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman released the first break-in record, "The Flying Saucer", which took the form of a mock news broadcast covering an alien invasion. Disneyland introduced Flying Saucers, an attraction where guests could pilot a hovering disc by tilting their own body.

Video games have a long history of depicting flying saucers, typically as antagonists. In the arcades, the popular early shooting games Asteroids (1979) and Space Invaders (1978) featured flying saucers as "bonus" enemies that only emerged briefly. Super Mario Land, one of Nintendo's launch titles for the original Game Boy, contained spaceships modeled on the photographs of George Adamski and set among various monuments falsely attributed to ancient astronauts, like the Egyptian pyramids and the monolithic Moai of Easter Island. The XCOM series tasks players with countering an invasion of aliens landing on Earth in flying discs. Saucers have appeared as a craft that players can control in Fortnite, Destroy All Humans, and Spore.

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• Flying saucers
• 1940s neologisms
• Fictional spacecraft by type
• UFOs by type