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In a recent discussion between ufologists of various "tendencies" debating on the Roswell incident, an old suggestion surfaced again. The suggestion is that in 1947, at the time of the Roswell incident, the very idea that flying saucers may be extraterrestrial did not exist. It was said that this idea appeared only after 1950. From this, some deduced that when the witnesses or the soldiers expressed themselves in July 1947 on a "recovered flying disc" near Roswell, they did not have in mind one second that they were speaking of an extraterrestrial spaceship. It is then deduced that this implies that people could not have the least idea of what the term "flying disc" could mean, and deduced that it is only by effect of the following 50 years of cultural distance that we, nowadays, are interpreting the "flying disc" as a thing from another planet, which was not the idea at the time.
I submit that it is not correct.
I do not want to approach here any discussion on other sorts of objections to this argument, such for example that which if people had not had any concept of what a flying disc was supposed to be nor with what it was supposed to resemble, that does however not imply that they would not have known what a balloon or radar deflector resembled. Here, I want to discuss only this precise question, "in July 1947, did American have or they did not have any suspicion that the "flying discs" or "flying saucers" may be machines coming from another planet, occupied by inhabitants of another planet?
I submit that they did.
First of all, I want to recall that on October 30, 1938, Orson Welles, an imposing movie director but before that a radio genius (radio was the first media where he expressed his creativity,) had broadcasted on CBS an adapted version of the novel "The War of the Worlds" by science fiction writer Herbert George Wells. [1]
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Above: Cover of the current french issue
of 2 audio CDs of the CBS broadcast
in 1938 by Orson Welles.
This adaptation of the novel had something very particular: it was presented in the form of a non-fictional live report of an invasion of the Earth by hostile Martians arrived in their spacecraft. The hoaxed invasion, mainly narrated by pseudo reporter "Carl Philipps," realized in an extremely skilful way, comprising elaborate sound effects, false technical problems, voices of talented actors adding their realistic tone, the show had literally terrified the population of New Jersey where the Martians were supposed to have landed initially. This population had literally fled, by car, by foot, experiencing sheer terror due to the realism of the radio hoax. Once the hoax was revealed, it brought an even more outcry on a worldwide scale. By this event only, a determining proportion of the Western population was touched by the notion that beings could come from another planet on board their spacecraft.
Of course, the work of H.G. Wells had been read in the twenty years that preceded. Admittedly, it was not read by the totality of the world population, but anyway, the literary genre had developed, and people know what topics of the current books are even though they may not have actually read the books by themselves. A remarkable point is that although the fiction of H.G. Wells and its followers is well-known as being fiction, the dramatic radiophonic hoax by Orson Wells convinced most of the listeners. It could be deduced from it that people are deeply influenced by fiction, but then it is difficult to maintain that the concept of extraterrestrial spacecraft at the time of the 1947 June/July saucer scare was non-existent. It could just as easily be deduced from it that the idea of interplanetary visitors developed in science fiction quite simply seemed to be one sciencefictional idea among the many extraordinary sciencefictional ideas that may come within the realm of the possible.
French sociologist Pierre Lagrange in particular exposed in 1995 in his work "La rumeur de Roswell" ("The Roswell rumour") [2] that the concept of space visitors coming to Earth existed indeed, through science fiction, but also though the literature by Charles Fort, and also thought many articles of non-fiction in Ray Palmer's "Astounding" magazine, listing sighting reports of strange craft which were interpreted as flying machines from another planet, for example:
"By reading the press of the summer of 1947, one finds some articles advancing the assumption that the flying saucers could be machines coming from other planets. Sometimes jokingly, sometimes more seriously."
"... some short novels later, the reader can take note of an article by Vincent Gaddis, "Visitors from the Void", composed of a succession of observations reports of "strange craft" during the Thirties and Forties."
Lagrange indicates here in his book that the idea of extraterrestrial visitors was widely diffused, and there in his book that the idea of extraterrestrial visitors would remain marginal before the incident of Roswell. However he seems to admit that the idea that nobody would have the extraterrestrial as origin of the flying saucers in mid is a coarse simplification.
(On the contrary, it should not then be deduced from the above that "flying saucers" or extraterrestrial beings reported in 1947 are "explained" as the result of too much science fiction reading by the witnesses; without entering a long discussion on this subject, I am satisfied to note that among the vast pallet of very different types of "spacecraft" in the science fiction, there is a great quantity referred to which have never surfaced in the sighting reports, and the same applies to the occupants as well as to their activities.)
But now I want to give a real example of what was suspected before the Roswell incident with regard to the "flying discs:"
France-Soir, July 8, 1947. |
(From our permanent correspondent G.H. MARTIN)
NEW YORK, July 7 (via teletype)
Currently in the United States, there is either the most fabulous phenomenon of collective hallucination of all times, or a foretaste of the emotions which will shake the country when the popular opinion gets for the first time the certainty that the Russians have seismic projectiles. Scientists speak learnedly about "optical illusions", but frankly nobody believes that they can be illusions.
Mysterious "flying saucers" which, for twelve days, have furrowed the American sky, had seemingly populated the air with fantastic "flying [?]", if one believes the accounts of the eyewitnesses collected today in the area of the North-West of the United States. The first "flying plates" have also been announced in the Canadian sky. For three days, the entire America has gone with [?] [?] towards the [?], observing the outer space with the hope to locate one of these unexplainable objects [?] the large ones with above the horizon.
The American army formally denies to have any plane or projectile-rocket which can explain the presence of these "flying plates" on the North-American continent. The Army admits that the phenomenon was announced too frequently during the last days to authorize the military authorities to discard them. Therefore six military interceptors flew all of the day yesterday in the State of Oregon. Their pilots had received the order to watch for these "plates." On the military airport of Oakland, California, a rocket, one of the fastest of the world, is ready to fly away in order to rush in pursuit of the plates, if their presence were to be suddenly announced in the surroundings of this aeronautical base, located close to the Bay of San Francisco. All the military aircraft are equipped with photographic apparatus in order to film these phenomena, but no profitable catch was announced up to now. A report came from Spokane (State of Washington) according to which eight "aerial discs" had been seen, each one the size of a five room house, flying at a speed from 500 to 1500 kmh, and at an altitude of [1800?] meters, landing literally in front of ten reliable witnesses, at the edge of the river [?] in the state of Idaho. According to the witness, Mrs. Walter, the "flying saucers" fell like leaves falling from a tree, but none could be found once on the ground.
A sales representative in a plane [??] [????] of the town of Sioux, in the State of Idaho, was the first to observe the "flying discs," which, since then, were observed repeatedly in various areas. [?], this sales representative [...illegible]
Here we have an article in the French national newspaper "France-Soir" whose headline and text are without ambiguity: one day before AFP, Agence France Peesse, informed France of the news of the Roswell incident, flying discs caused the following interrogations among Americans, interrogations which traveled as far as France: are flying saucers illusions, or Russian secret aircraft, or Martian spaceships?
This headline in France-Soir is not unique.
L'Union de Reims, July 9, 1947. |
The newspaper L'Union de Reims 5Reims, Frence) for July 9, 1947, which was not informed of the Roswell incident yet, had the headline "Marsian [sic] bolides or optical illusions? The "saucers" still furrow the American sky."
Of course, scientists rejected the idea that the flying saucers can be real and classify them without true examination as illusions or mirages. Perhaps were they perfectly aware of the contents of science fiction literature and sincerely could not believe that anything can exist if it is a science fiction topic. This would constitute a sort of cultural and sociological anti-saucer prejudice explaining their reaction of immediate refusal perfectly; "this resembles things read in science fiction, a low level popular genre, therefore this cannot be."
L'Aurore, July 19, 1947. |
L'Aurore (Paris, France) for July 19, 1947 shows a photograph of the wheel of a circular saw which flew above a church in Wisconsin, a well-known case of that time. It is often suggested that this case is a proof that people would call "flying saucer" even an object of such a small size, which would indicate that they could not have thought that such small "flying saucers" can be extraterrestrial spaceships with occupants. However, as the headline points out ("Is it a part of the flying saucer?") it seems that the people implied in this story of a flying circular saw with diameter of some 40 centimeters did not think that it constituted the totality of the flying saucer, but merely a part of the saucer which would have lost it. This suggests that for them the saucer itself was to be something of much larger proportion.
Thus we have exactly the opposite of the thesis that people may have called a flying saucer absolutely any object, even small to the point that it was unconceivable that they meant that flying saucers can be spacecraft: here, whereas obviously the observed "flying saucer" was really constituted of nothing more than the circular saw which had escaped from its support and had slipped by through the air in front of the eyes of the witness, the witness, seeing the recovered object, is actually anchored so much in the idea that a flying saucer must be a flying machine of a certain size ready to contain occupants, that instead of understanding that he found the entire saucer, he speculated that the recovered object could only be one small part lost by the saucer. (Of course this notion was abandoned after the FBI investigation established that the "part" was really all there is to it.)
Everything looked as if the mysterious flying saucers, still unidentified, have been estimated by the witness, the military and the press according to a normal progression of assumptions: they can be a) illusions b) secret aircraft of weapons of domestic origin, c) secret aircraft of weapons of Russian origin, and indeed d) spacecraft from another planet. Almost all the press headlines worldwide followed this pattern a,b,c,d, and the only difference with today's approach is that d) was that flying saucers are "Martians," which was 1947's synonym for the modern equivalent, "extraterrestrial."
The idea that the concept of flying saucers of extraterrestrial origin existed only after 1950 with the proposals of Major Keyhoe [3] or Commander McLaughlin [4] does not seem accurate to me.
The idea that nobody among those implied in the case of the recovery of a "disc flying" or its debris in 1947 could have thought that it can be an extraterrestrial spacecraft or parts of an extraterrestrial aircraft does not seem convincing to me. Almost everyone had heard of spaceships from other planets through science fiction before, the Orson Welles Martian invasion hoax had also reached almost the entire world. Admittedly the majority of newspapers reflect that the saucers remain a mystery, but some press headlines show that the theory of the origin extraterrestrial of the flying saucers existed in correlation with the saucer reports, even if as a "last recourse" theory preceded by the theory of hallucinations and illusions, of domestic aircraft or rockets, of Russian aircraft of missiles.
The author of the above article is the author of this site and this is the original location for the article. It was written on August 31, 2003.
