SAUCERS AND SMEARS
IT WAS 70 YEARS AGO TODAY...
...well, 24 June 1947 to be precise – that Kenneth Arnold made what was probably the most influential UFO sighting of all time: it launched the modern UFO age, gave us the phrase ‘flying saucer’, created a pervasive visual and cultural icon, and delineated the contours of a modern mythology that fascinated the world through the second half of the 20th century and beyond.
Back in 2000 we ran an article by James Easton ( FT137:34-39) suggesting that what Arnold saw that fateful day as he flew over Washington State’s Cascade Mountains was a flock of birds – specifically, American white pelicans – in flight. As we expected, it ruffled – if you’ll pardon the expression – more than a few feathers amongst the UFO community, which was perhaps both more sizeable and more engaged then than it is today. ‘Pelicanist’ (coined by Jerome Clark) became, for a while, a favoured term of abuse directed toward those who used such mundane explanations to ‘debunk’ UFO sightings (though it was worn as a badge of honour by Magonia magazine). FT received much criticism from the anti-Pelicanist faction, with those of a more paranoid bent believing the Pelicanist position to be part of a deliberate state cover-up of the ‘truth’ behind the UFO mystery. Our own UFO correspondents were, it was said, in the employ of MI5 or other shadowy bodies bent on spreading lies and misinformation about our vistors from space. In the millennial, post X-Files landscape of the time, ufology, conspiracy and the bizarre fantasies of David Icke and others were becoming inextricably entagled.
But this strange, down-the-rabbithole quality of ufology – a bricolage of unconventional beliefs and pop cultural memes – has been present in the subject since its very beginnings. As we mark the 70th anniversary of the Arnold sighting in this issue (see pp29, 46-49), we also examine the numerous ways in which this landmark ufological case was enmeshed from the start in a nexus of conspiracy theory, pulp fiction, fortean speculation and outright fantasies and fibs. Whether we’re talking about Fred Lee Crisman – a bizarre figure who somehow links Kenneth Arnold to JFK, via Maury Island (pp3239) – or SF magazine editors Ray Palmer and John W Campbell (pp40-45) – whose publishing ventures combined (and possibly confused) science fiction with fringe beliefs and forteana – it is clear that the UFO mystery has always been part of a wider, richer vein of weirdness, both influenced by and influencing the ‘real-life’ Hollow Earth mythos of Richard Shaver or the SF theology of L Ron Hubbard (see pp50-52). Ufologists of the nuts-and-bolts variety may lament the increasing prevalence of the psychosocial school, but the early origins of the subject, and its simultaneous entanglement in the popular culture of the time, suggest that if there ever really was a ‘pure’, prePelicanist ufology, we’ve surely not seen it in our lifetime.
ERRATA
FT352:26: Pete Swindells of Wolverhampton points out that, despite what was claimed in the UFO Files story ‘Surprising Silence’, TRAPPIST-1 is ‘only’ some 40 light-years away, not 40 million.
FT352:28: The missing back reference concerning the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar should have been: FT349:38-41.