The Flying Saucers Are Real

1950 magazine article and book by Donald Keyhoe

Published in January 1950 as the lead article in True magazine's January issue (and expanded to book form by Fawcett/Gold Medal Books in May 1950), The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe is a foundational text of mainstream United States ufology that argued for the interplanetary origin of flying saucers and accused the United States Air Force of concealing what it knew. Drawing on a survey of 1947–1950 sightings by military pilots, airline crews, and radar operators, Keyhoe — a retired U.S. Marine Corps major and former aide to Charles Lindbergh — advanced the thesis that Earth was being reconnoitered by intelligently controlled craft from another world and that the Air Force had followed a deliberate policy of concealment.

Background

Donald Keyhoe was a United States Naval Academy graduate and Marine Corps aviator who had served as chief of information for the Civil Aeronautics Branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce and as aide to Charles Lindbergh on his 1927 nationwide flying tour; he returned to active duty during World War II and afterward worked as a freelance writer. In late 1949 True magazine editor Ken Purdy commissioned Keyhoe to write a documented article on the flying-saucer wave that had begun with the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947. Keyhoe reportedly began the assignment as a skeptic but was converted by the quality of the witness testimony he collected.

Publication

The article "The Flying Saucers Are Real" appeared as the lead feature in the January 1950 issue of True, dated December 26, 1949 on newsstands. According to historian David M. Jacobs, "the January 1950 issue of True was the most widely sold and read in the magazine's history," and Air Force Project Blue Book chief Edward J. Ruppelt later called it "one of the most widely read and widely discussed magazine articles in history." Soon after, True ran a follow-up article by Navy Commander R. B. McLaughlin, head of a White Sands missile-tracking team, who went on record stating that the flying discs were "spaceships from another planet."

Keyhoe expanded the True article into a 175-page paperback published by Gold Medal Books (an imprint of Fawcett Publications) in May 1950, priced at 25 cents. The book sold in the hundreds of thousands and was reprinted multiple times.

Content

Cover-up thesis

Keyhoe contended that the Air Force had been investigating flying-saucer reports in earnest while publicly maintaining that such objects did not exist; he argued that by 1949 this policy of concealment was giving way to one of cautious, progressive revelation. He presented documented evidence that, despite official statements, the Air Force was allegedly convinced the unknown objects were physically real.

Interplanetary hypothesis

The book argued that Earth had been visited by extraterrestrials for roughly two centuries and that the frequency of visits had increased sharply after the first atomic weapon test in 1945. Citing anecdotal evidence, Keyhoe intimated that the Air Force might have recovered and adapted aspects of the alleged alien technology — its method of propulsion and perhaps its source of power — and suggested that the U.S. federal government would eventually disclose these technologies once the Soviet Union was no longer a strategic threat. Historian Raymond Fowler summarized the thesis as "a logical case for the interplanetary origin of UFOs" that, while "lacking proof, was convincing" to a mass readership.

Reception and impact

Religious-studies scholar Mikael Rothstein has written that "Keyhoe's book Flying Saucers Are Real... was the first influential attempt to promote the idea of 'flying saucers' as alien spacecraft." In the wake of the book's success, Keyhoe emerged as the leading civilian UFO authority in the United States and was courted by sympathetic military contacts who allegedly leaked him additional reports. By 1957 he had assumed the directorship of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), whose board he stacked with former Navy guided-missile chief Rear Admiral Delmar S. Fahrney and first Director of Central Intelligence Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter — a development Air Force Intelligence reportedly regarded as "ominous."

In 1953 Pentagon Project Blue Book spokesman Albert M. Chop wrote a cover blurb for Keyhoe's follow-up book Flying Saucers from Outer Space stating, "We in the Air Force recognize Major Keyhoe as a responsible, accurate reporter," and stated that "if the apparently controlled maneuvers reported by competent observers are correct, then the only remaining explanation is the interplanetary answer."

A loose parody of Keyhoe's book and of subsequent UFO and alien-abduction lore titled The Flying Saucers Are Very Very Real appeared in 2016.

See also

• Flying Saucers from Outer Space
• The Flying Saucer Conspiracy
• Aliens from Space
• Project Sign
• Circular wing

Citations

References

External links

• Full text at sacred-texts.com
• Donald E. Keyhoe Archives Archived 2009-09-07 at the Wayback Machine
• Works by Donald Keyhoe at Project Gutenberg
• The Flying Saucers Are Real public domain audiobook at LibriVox

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "The Flying Saucers Are Real", as of 2024-11-06, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.