Flying saucer
The term was coined in 1947 by the U.S. news media for the objects pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed flew alongside his airplane above Washington State.
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.
[6] 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".
[2][12]: 1–3 Until the magazine ceased printing The Shaver Mystery, Amazing Stories' letter column was regularly full of readers sharing their own purportedly true sightings of the robots.
[3] Skeptical physicist Milton Rothman noted the appearance of so-called flying saucers in the fantasy artwork of 1930s pulp science fiction magazines, by artists such as Frank R.
[3] 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.
[40][33] By July 11, the most widely reported story was a North Hollywood resident's claim that a 30-inch galvanized iron disc containing glass radio tubes had crashed in his garden.
The fragments 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 in later UFO literature.
[47]: 4 Van Tassel built the Integratron, a domed structure near Landers, California, intended to facilitate further contact with aliens, physical rejuvenation, and a kind of spiritual time travel.
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.
The hoaxers were convicted of fraud for selling useless dowsing equipment to the oil industry based on a claimed alien origin, but the book described one of the men as a doctor with "more degrees than a thermometer".
[57][47]: 34 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.
[4]: 103 Antonio Ribera started Centro de Estudios Interplanetarios in Spain, and Edgar Jarrold founded the Australia Flying Saucer Bureau.
[59] 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.
French psychiatrist Georges Heuyer viewed the phenomenon as a kind of global folie à deux, or shared delusion, triggered by fear of a possible nuclear holocaust.
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.
[83] The diversity was greater in the 1950s and early 1960s, when witnesses reported the aliens variously as hairy, hairless, monstrous, gorgeous, gigantic, dwarfish, robotic, insectoid, avian, Nordic, or grey-skinned.
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".
Fictional flying saucers represent concerns about atomic warfare, the Cold War, loss of bodily integrity, xenophobia, government secrecy, and the question of whether humanity is alone in the universe.
Ufologists claim that early portrayals of flying discs can establish a historical basis for their existence as physical craft or some other type of external phenomena.
For example, Italian Renaissance painter Carlo Crivelli put a disc-shaped element in his 1486 altarpiece The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius that art historian Massimo Polidoro described as "a vortex of angels in the clouds".
[89] 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.
[100]: 4 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.
[106] 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.
[120][121] Wright's circular Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, United States, is capped by a flattened dome over a hundred feet across.
[124] Other modernist and brutalist UFO structures include the Ukrainian Institute of Scientific, Technical and Economic Information,[125] Bulgaria's concrete Buzludzha monument,[126] the Most SNP in Bratislava, Slovakia,[127] and The Flying Saucer in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
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.
[140] In the arcades, the popular early shooting games Asteroids (1979) and Space Invaders (1978) featured flying saucers as "bonus" enemies that only emerged briefly.
[141] Super Mario Land, one of Nintendo's launch titles for the original Game Boy, contained spaceships modeled after photographs by George Adamski and set among various monuments falsely attributed to ancient astronauts, such as the Egyptian pyramids and the monolithic Moai of Easter Island.
