User:Feoffer/sandbox History of UFO mythology

In the 20th-century United States, popular folklore included stories of flying saucers or unidentified flying objects (UFOs). In sharp contrast from fringe UFO researchers (or "ufologists") who entertain the historicity of UFOs, mainstream researchers examine UFO stories through the lens of Folklore Studies.

Overview
Folklore frequently features unknown objects in the sky. Mystery airship, reported worldwide during the 1880s and 1890s, are seen as a cultural predecessor to 20th-century claims of extraterrestrial-piloted flying saucer-style UFOs.



Mythos overview
The "Nuts and Bolts" folklore describes UFOs as physical objects which are sighted or even recovered. Atomic folklore describes UFOs as associated with atomic research or nuclear weapons. "Contactee" folklore describes UFOs as entities capable of 'telepathic' communication. Hoax and Conspiracy folklore describes UFOs as being associated with human deception;  In some legends, UFOs are the product of a intentional lies, while other stories hold that UFOs are being "covered up" by agents of deception. Finally, a strand of folklore holds that UFOs are the product of Malevolent or Demonic beings.

1947

 * Kenneth Arnold sighting ignites 1947 flying disc craze.
 * July 7
 * Rancher informs Sheriff of discovered debris.
 * Marcel and Sheridan travel to ranch and collect debris.
 * July 8 -
 * Press reports discovery
 * Marcel flies with debris to Ft. Worth
 * Ft. Worth press conference identifies debris as weather balloon

Renewed interest

 * 1978 - National Enquirer reprints original, uncorrected reporting from July 7
 * February 1978 - Stanton Friedman interviews Jesse Marcel
 * December 19, 1979 - Marcel was interviewed by Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer
 * February 28, 1980 - Enquirer publishes Marcel story
 * September 20, 1980 - In Search Of... airs segment on Roswell incident
 * October 1980 - Berlitz & Moore's book The Roswell Incident released
 * August 1985 - HBO's American Undercover airs interview with Marcel
 * September 20, 1989
 * Unsolved Mysteries airs segment on Roswell incident
 * Mortician Glenn Dennis claims involvement
 * 1991
 * Randle & Schmitt's book UFO Crash at Roswell released
 * Dennis and Haute open UFO Museum in Roswell
 * 1992 - Friedman & Berliner's book Crash at Corona released
 * September 17, 1993 - Deep Throat, the second episode of The X-Files, discusses the Roswell incident.
 * 1994 - US Air Force report on Roswell
 * August 28, 1995 - Alien Autopsy hoax
 * July 3, 1996 - Sci-Fi film Independence Day released
 * 1997 - Philip Corso's book The Day After Roswell released

"Nuts and Bolts" folklore
In the earliest and most popular tales, UFOs are viewed as physical objects which can be sighted, detected by radar, or photographed. In some legends, UFOs are said to explode, crash, or land, with humans recovering debris or even entire craft. April 1947 issue of Forgotten Mysteries.

Aerial sightings

 * June 24, 1947 - Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting and the Summer 1947 UFO Wave
 * September 23, 1947 - Twinning summarizes "nuts and bolts" folklore:  "The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious."
 * January 7, 1948 - Mantell UFO incident
 * July 24, 1948 - Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter
 * October 1, 1948 - Gorman dogfight

Photography

 * June 8 1950 - McMinnville UFO photographs
 * August 1950 - Mariana UFO incident first UFO footage
 * August 30, 1951 - Lubbock Lights
 * July 2, 1952 - Navy Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse films unidentified objects near Tremonton, Utah.
 * 1956 - Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers a semi-documentary featuring the Mariana footage
 * January 16, 1958 - Trindade Island UFO hoax
 * November 1987 - Gulf Breeze UFO incident

Engine stoppage, power loss, and instrument failure
A recurring motif in folklore was engines that cease working in the presences of UFOs.


 * In October 1946, Raymond Palmer's Amazing Stories published "The Green Man" by Harold M. Sherman.  In that story, an astronomer is driving a car when the engine stops as a result of an a beam-of-energy from a cigar-shaped craft inhabited by Christ-like visitor intent on bringing world peace.   Folklorists suspect the story influenced both engine stoppage and Contactee narratives in UFO folklore.
 * The 1948 serial Bruce Gentry – Daredevil of the Skies features flying saucers that interfere with instruments of nearby aircraft.  At the time, no public claims existed of flying saucers affecting electronic equipment.
 * In 1951, The Day The Earth Stood Still featured Flying Saucers which interfere with power and engines, bringing Earth to a standstill.
 * In 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind features a lineman whose truck loses power in the presence of a UFO.
 * In the 2005 book Faded Giant, author Robert Salas alleged missile shutdown associated with UFO at Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1965.
 * September 9, 1976 - The Tehran UFO incident includes a story of multiple planes experiencing loss of function in the presence of UFOs.
 * 1986's Flight of the Navigator features an electrical blackout after a UFO crashes into power lines.

Transmedium travel
Some folklore describes UFOs as traveling through water or even solid objects.


 * In 1946, Dirk Wylie penned a letter to Amazing Stories in which he reported two instances of having witnessed unidentified objects. In Wylie's telling, an object repeatedly rose out of the ocean and returned to it.
 * In 1970, the book Invisible Residents speculated about underwater intelligences.
 * The 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension includes nonhumans who can travel through solid rock.
 * The 1986 film Flight of the Navigator featured a UFO that can submerge in the ocean.
 * In the summer of 1988, Bill Cooper authored a document claiming that in 1966 he was serving aboard the USS Tiru when he and fellow Navy personnel witnessed a metal craft "larger than a football field" repeatedly enter and exit the water.  Cooper claimed he was instructed by superiors to never speak about the incident.
 * The Abyss (1989) features ocean-dwelling UFOs near atomic weapons.

Debris and retrieval

 * July 8, 1947 - Roswell incident published; debris-only; Retracted as 'weather balloon' the following day.
 * July 29 1947 - Maury Island incident reported to have occurred a month prior
 * October 12, 1949 - Aztec incident published; bodies and recovered technology;  revealed to be a hoax.
 * December 9, 1965 - Kecksburg Incident
 * July 31 1974 - UFOs: Past, Present, and Future describes cattle marked with UV-reflective powder, Taos NM ash released from UFO; Ash allegedly similar to cattle powder,  maybe organic?
 * July 1980 - Hangar 18
 * November 19, 1993 - Fallen Angel (The X-Files)
 * 1996: Independence Day
 * 1990s: "Fascist UFO" (Milan, 1933)
 * 2001 - "Nazi Bell" (Prawda o Wunderwaffe))
 * 2001 - "Nazi Bell" (Prawda o Wunderwaffe))

Artifacts

 * 1948 - Yreka spheres published in Fate Magazine
 * 1948 - Arthur C. Clarke short story The Sentinel,
 * 1954 - In Aboard a Flying Saucer author Truman Bethurum reported having had discovered four strange, small metal pyramidal items in connection with a contact experience
 * 1954 - Keyhoe reports artificial satellite in polar orbit, later know as the Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory
 * 1955 - Morris K. Jessup The Case for the UFO
 * 1969 - 2001:A Space Odyssey
 * 1979 - Klerksdorp Spheres

Ancient astronauts

 * July 4, 1947 - Man on the street speculates Flying Disc occupants "planted the original humanities here".
 * 1955 - Morris K. Jessup The Case for the UFO
 * October 29, 1965 - Nonhuman The Great Gazoo enters The Flintstones television show
 * In 1966, popular astrophysicists Iosif Shklovsky and Carl Sagan wrote a chapter on the possibility of extraterrestrial contact during history.
 * 1968 - Chariots of the Gods? popularized the possibility that UFOs may have inspired ancient religions.
 * 1969 - 2001:A Space Odyssey featured non-human intelligence influence early hominids

Atomic folklore
In both UFO folklore and popular culture, UFOs have been associated with atomic or nuclear energy. . Other stories connect UFOs to developments in rocketry.

The June 24, 1947 Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting occurred not far from Hanford plutonium plant. On July 6, news reports quoted an unnamed "noted scientist" at CalTech who claimed flying discs were associated with atomic energy experiments. Two days later, Roswell Army Air Field, home to the world's only atomic bomber force,  issued a press release announcing recovery of a "flying disc". A December 1949 report prepared for the Air Force speculated about a hypothetical link between atom energy and flying discs, and a 1952 memo reports UFOs "in the vicinity of atomic energy production and testing facilities", listing the three hotspots as "the Seattle area, the Albuquerque area and the New York-Philadelphia area".

On March 16, 1967, Malmstrom Air Force base personnel reportedly observed a UFO which rendered ten of their nuclear missiles inoperable.

Atomic folklore continues to the present:  Former Pentagon UFO investigator Luis Elizondo recalled "when I was at AATIP, we were under the presumption that there was definitely a connection between UAP activity and our nuclear energy".
 * September, 1944 - Hanford reactor, the first industrial-scale plutonium production facility, goes online.
 * July 16, 1945 - Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear device.


 * June 24, 1947 - Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting
 * July 6, 1947 - News report speculating a link between 'flying disks' and atomic energy.
 * May 1949- "It is a jittery age we live in, particularly since our scientists and military spokesmen have started talking about sending rockets to the moon and about experiments to by-pass the law of gravitation by creating a man-made planet that will streak off the earth at 25,000 miles per hour or so and start circling in our orbit.  Though we have not yet produced the rocket-to-the-moon and the homemade satellite, it is small wonder that harassed humans, already suffering from atomic psychosis, have started seeing saucers and Martians."
 * 1950 book The Flying Saucers Are Real repeats July '47 speculation of link between atomic energy and flying saucers.
 * September 1951 - The Day The Earth Stood Still premieres with a plot that connects UFOs and atomic energy.
 * January 3, 1952 - Garland memo lists three hotspots:  one near Seattle, one near Albuquerque, and one "between New York and Philadelphia".
 * June 21, 1952 - Oak Ridge air defense gives an F-47 permission to fire on an unidentified object
 * July 3, 1952 - Press report mentions three hotspots, each near an atomic facility, plus baltic sea
 * In the 2005 book Faded Giant, author Robert Salas alleged missile shutdown associated with UFO at Malmstrom Air Force Base on March 16 1967.
 * 2008 - Robert L. Hastings publishes "UFO and Nukes"


 * 2014 - USS Theodore Roosevelt incident
 * 2019 - Black triangle sighting off US East Coast


 * July 8, 1947 - Roswell Army Air Field issues press release stating that 509th Operations Group had recovered a "flying disc"
 * January 7, 1948 - Mantell UFO incident near Fort Knox
 * July 24, 1948 - Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter in Alabama
 * October 1, 1948 - Gorman dogfight in North Dakota
 * December 5, 1948 - Green Fireballs first sighted, concentrated around Los Alamos and Sandia
 * 1978 - Jesse Marcel interviewed by Stanton Friedman
 * 1980 - The Roswell Incident published
 * December 1980 - Rendlesham Forest incident at RAF Woodbridge
 * 2004 - USS Nimitz incident


 * Rockets
 * February 26, 1946 - Ghost rockets first reported over Finland

Telepathy & Contactee folklore

 * Contactee movement


 * Richard Sharpe Shaver (1943)
 * George Adamski
 * George Van Tassel
 * George Hunt Williamson
 * Frances Swan
 * Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
 * Flight of the Navigator (1987)
 * Ariel School

Hoax and conspiracy
Many strands of folklore attribute UFOs to intentional hoaxes or pranks. In some stories, agents of deception attempt to cover-up the existence of UFOs or their occupants.


 * Philadelphia Experiment

Debris and craft retrieval hoaxes

 * July 5, 1950 - Balloon with "sickening gas" reported to be a prank by FBI superior Guy Bannister.

Reverse engineering

 * Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Reproduction vehicles

 * Deep Throat (The X-Files episode) (S1E02 - Sept 17 1993)

Alien bodies

 * December 1949 article (and later a 1950 book) The Flying Saucers Are Real features the Aztec Hoax, a story of crashed saucer including dead bodies of three feet tall men in metallic suits.
 * 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers by Variety columnist Frank Scully discusses Aztec UFO.
 * 1991 - Cape Girardeau UFO story reported in Ufology newsletter
 * 1991 - Cape Girardeau UFO story reported in Ufology newsletter

Men in Black

 * Maury Island Incident
 * Gray Barker 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers

Purported counter-intellience or conspirators

 * Fred Crisman
 * Carl Allen
 * Rick Doty
 * John Lear
 * Guy Bannister

Majestic 12

 * MJ-12 documents (1984)
 * Anasazi (The X-Files)
 * Dark Skies

Nazis, Operation Paperclip, and UFOs

 * UFO (1956) - penemunde scientist suggests veracity of UFOs
 * Le Matin des Magiciens ("The Morning of the Magicians"), a 1960 book by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, made many spectacular claims about the Vril Society of Berlin. Several years later writers, including Jan van Helsing, Norbert-Jürgen Ratthofer, and Vladimir Terziski, have built on their work, connecting the Vril Society with UFOs. Among their claims, they imply that the society may have made contact with an alien race and dedicated itself to creating spacecraft to reach the aliens. In partnership with the Thule Society and the Nazi Party, the Vril Society developed a series of flying disc prototypes. With the Nazi defeat, the society allegedly retreated to a base in Antarctica and vanished into the hollow Earth to meet up with the leaders of an advanced race inhabiting inner Earth.
 * The Indiana Jones film series (1981-2008) would revisit Nazi Occultists searching for supernatural artifacts, including Roswell Debris.


 * X-Files - mention of Paperclip
 * Contact - Olympic Broadcast initiates contact

Government communication

 * UFOs: Past, Present, and Future (1974)
 * Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Government invites landing

 * UFOs: Past, Present, and Future (1974)
 * Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Government treaty

 * Behold a Pale Horse (1991) alleged the human collusion with nonhumans.
 * Sneakers (1992): "The key meeting took place July 1, 1958 when the Air Force brought the space visitor to the white house for an interview with President Eisenhower. And Ike said: Hey, look, give us your technology, we'll give all the cow lips you want"
 * August 11, 1992 - Tabloid Weekly World News claims Aliens back Clinton
 * X-Files features a treaty between human elites and nonhumans.
 * American Horror Story: Double Feature (2021) features an Eisenhower treaty with nonhumans as a major plot point.

Malevolence and Demons
Many stories claim that UFOs are tied to malevolent entities or demons.

Occult

 * Jack Parsons and Flying Saucers (?)
 * Contactees revealed to be occultists

Abductions

 * Betty and Barney Hill (1964)
 * Travis Walton (1975)
 * Whitley Strieber (1985)

Military abductions

 * In 1995, at the fifth annual International UFO Congress, Melinda Leslie reported having been abducted by humans in military uniforms following an alien abduction experience
 * Jose Chung's From Outer Space (1996)

Mutilations

 * September 9, 1967 - Snippy mutilation
 * UFOs: Past, Present, and Future (1974)
 * 1975 - Senator Floyd K. Haskell requests FBI investigation
 * A Strange Harvest (1980)

Underground bases

 * Fred Crisman - Burmese cave story (1945)

Dulce Base

 * Strange Harvest inteview Dulce, NM mutiliation
 * Doty & Bennewitz
 * Lear & Cooper

Flying discs and flying saucers
The Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting occurred on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that Arnold estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour (1,932 km/hr). This was the first post-World War II sighting in the United States that garnered nationwide news coverage and is credited with being the first of the modern era of UFO sightings, including numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks. Arnold's description of the objects also led to the press quickly coining the terms flying saucer and flying disc as popular descriptive terms for UFOs. In the weeks that followed Arnold's June 1947 story, at least several hundred reports of similar sightings flooded in from the U.S. and around the world—most of which described saucer-shaped objects. A sighting by a United Airlines crew of another nine disk-like objects over Idaho on July 4 probably garnered more newspaper coverage than Arnold's original sighting and opened the floodgates of media coverage in the days to follow.

Major UFO incidents of 1948
On January 7, 1948, Captain Thomas Mantell, a Kentucky Air National Guard pilot, died in the crash of his  fighter near Franklin, Kentucky after being sent in pursuit of an unidentified flying object (UFO). The event was among the most publicized early UFO incidents.

The Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter occurred in the early hours of July 24, 1948, in the skies near Montgomery, Alabama. Two commercial pilots, Clarence Chiles and John Whitted, claimed to have observed a "glowing object" pass by their plane before it appeared to pull up into a cloud and travel out of sight.

The Gorman dogfight was a widely publicized UFO incident which took place on October 1, 1948, in the skies over Fargo, North Dakota. United States Air Force (USAF) Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wrote in his bestselling and influential The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects that the "dogfight" was one of three "classic" UFO incidents in 1948 that "proved to [Air Force] intelligence specialists that UFOs were real," along with the Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter and the Mantell UFO incident. However, in 1949 the USAF concluded that the Gorman dogfight had been caused by a lighted weather balloon.

Al Chop and The True Story of Flying Saucers
In 1956, Hollywood producer Clarence Greene collaborated with Air Force public information officer Albert M. Chop, who was in charge of answering UFO questions. When Chop told Greene about the existence of film footage of UFOs, Greene obtained the footage for analysis and display in his documentary.

The documentary includes recreations of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting, the Mantell UFO incident, and the Gorman Dogfight. Project Sign and Project Blue Book, the Air Force studies of the UFO phenomenon, are discussed. Although initially a UFO debunker, Chop comes to believe that UFOs are unknown, and possibly extraterrestrial, aircraft. Chop interviews a German rocket scientist (formerly of Penemunde's V2 program) working for Americans who supports the possibility that UFOs exist.

The documentary analyzes two famous pieces of UFO footage: the Mariana UFO Incident of 1950 and the 1952 UFO film taken near the Great Salt Lake in Utah by US Navy photographer Delbert Newhouse. The documentary concludes with the famous 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO incident and Chop stating his belief that UFOs are a "real", physical phenomenon of unknown origin.

July 1989 MUFON Convention
The Mutual UFO Network held their 1989 annual convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 1, 1989.

The Ufologist Bill Moore was scheduled as the main speaker, and he refused to submit his paper for review prior to the convention, and also announced that he would not answer any follow-up questions as was common practice. Unlike most of the convention's attendees, Moore did not stay at the same hotel that was hosting the convention.

When he spoke, Moore said that he and others had been part of an elaborate, long-term disinformation campaign begun primarily to discredit Paul Bennewitz: "My role in the affair ... was primarily that of a freelancer providing information on Paul's (Bennewitz) current thinking and activities". Air Force Sergeant Richard C. Doty was also involved, said Moore, though Moore thought Doty was "simply a pawn in a much larger game, as was I." One of their goals, Moore said, was to disseminate information and watch as it was passed from person to person in order to study information channels.

Moore said that he "was in a rather unique position" in the disinformation campaign: "judging by the positions of the people I knew to be directly involved in it, [the disinformation] definitely had something to do with national security. There was no way I was going to allow the opportunity to pass me by ... I would play the disinformation game, get my hands dirty just often enough to lead those directing the process into believing I was doing what they wanted me to do, and all the while continuing to burrow my way into the matrix so as to learn as much as possible about who was directing it and why." Once he finished the speech, Moore immediately left the hotel and Las Vegas that same night.

Moore's claims sent shock waves through the small, tight-knit UFO community, which remains divided as to the reliability of his assertions.