Flying saucer

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Flying saucer

A flying saucer (also flying disc) is a disc- or saucer-shaped unidentified flying object (UFO) of the type that dominated UAP reports from 1947 through the 1970s, and remains the predominant cultural image of extraterrestrial craft despite the modern shift toward triangular and spherical shapes. The term entered United States news wires in late June 1947 in the wake of Kenneth Arnold's June 24, 1947 sighting of nine objects moving at roughly 1,200 miles per hour between Mount Rainier and Mt. Adams in Washington State — a phrasing attributed to Associated Press reporter Bill Bequette of the East Oregonian and editor Nolan Skiff, whose wire story the following day described Arnold's objects as "nine bright saucer-like objects". Arnold had told reporters the craft moved "like a saucer if you skip it across the water" — a description of motion that press coverage converted into a description of shape, producing the dominant popular vocabulary for disc-shaped unidentified aerial phenomena for the next six decades until the U.S. government's adoption of "UAP" in the 2010s. In exopolitics and secret space program witness testimony, disc-shaped craft are specifically associated with Zeta Reticuli Grey-piloted vehicles, Majestic 12-era crash retrievals (including the 1947 Roswell incident), and Bob Lazar's description of nine craft at S-4, as distinct from the triangle/boomerang-shaped craft associated with human-built programs.

Precursors

Disc-shaped craft appeared in fiction and folklore long before the 1947 coinage. In antiquity, mysterious sky lights were treated as spiritual phenomena; in the 1890s, American newspapers reported a wave of mystery airships with glowing lights and humming engines. On January 25, 1878, the Denison Daily News reported a farmer named John Martin describing a fast balloon-like object that appeared "about the size of a saucer" — one of the earliest English uses of "saucer" in an aerial-anomaly context. Allied pilots during World War II reported luminous spheres following their aircraft that they dubbed foo fighters. In science fiction, Jean de La Hire's 1908 novel La Roue fulgurante featured a disc-shaped machine that abducted the protagonists via a beam of light, and pulp magazines such as Science Wonder Stories published flying-disc cover art as early as November 1929 — decades before Arnold's sighting.

1947 coinage and flying disc craze

Arnold, a businessman and amateur pilot, landed at the Yakima, Washington airstrip on June 24, 1947, and told staff he had seen nine unusual airborne objects while searching for a missing Marine Corps plane over southwestern Washington. He reported the objects to reporters Bill Bequette and Nolan Skiff at the East Oregonian the following day; Bequette's wire story referred to them as "nine bright saucer-like objects", and the phrase "flying saucer" and "flying disc" entered headlines within 48 hours. In a June 26 KWRC radio interview from Pendleton, Arnold described the craft as "something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear" and said they flew "like a saucer if you skipped it across the water" — a description of the flight motion, not the craft's shape, that subsequent reporting conflated.

Arnold's story was followed by a nationwide wave of hundreds of sightings. On July 4, 1947, United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith and First Officer Ralph Stevens reported nine disc-like objects pacing Flight 105 over Idaho, later filing a first-person United Press account describing the objects as "thin and... smooth on the bottom and rough appearing on the top" — corroborated by stewardess Marty Morrow. On July 7, four Idaho teenagers fabricated a crashed disc from jukebox parts (the Twin Falls saucer hoax), and on July 8, the Army Air Force base at Roswell, New Mexico, issued a press release announcing the recovery of a "flying disc" from a nearby ranch — the Roswell UFO incident — which was retracted within 24 hours as balloon debris. Contemporary press reaction was extensive enough that Editor & Publisher of July 12, 1947, remarked that no reporter had yet compared the "flying saucers" to the Mercury Theatre's 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast.

A Gallup poll that summer found that 90% of Americans were aware of the stories; 16% thought the objects were secret U.S. military weapons, and fewer than 1% believed they were alien craft. Air Force General Nathan F. Twining established Project SAUCER, later renamed Project Sign, the first in the series of U.S. government UFO investigations. Canada followed with Project Magnet (1950) and Project Second Storey (1952); the United Kingdom launched the Flying Saucer Working Party in 1950.

Arnold's technical correction

Arnold was frustrated by the conflation of motion with shape. He later told CBS News that early coverage "did not quote me properly [...] when I described how they flew, I said that they flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the water. Most of the newspapers misunderstood and misquoted that, too. They said that I said that they were saucer-like; I said that they flew in a saucer-like fashion." His July 1947 report to Army Air Forces intelligence included sketches showing a crescent or biscuit-shaped outline — closer to modern boomerang/wing reports than to the classic disc. The Roswell crash three weeks later produced recovered debris initially described as a "flying disc", embedding the disc vocabulary in military and media usage simultaneously with Arnold's crescent-wing description.

Post-1947 development and subculture

By the 1950s, "flying saucer" was widely associated with extraterrestrial life. After pilots Clarence Chiles and John Whitted reported a glowing cylindrical object in 1948, the USAF began seriously investigating an alien origin while simultaneously concluding that the reports "seem inconsistent with the requirements for space travel". In a 1950 interview, Arnold himself said, "if it's not made by our science or our Army Air Forces, I am inclined to believe it's of an extra-terrestrial origin". Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell died in 1948 while pursuing a large round object later identified as a Skyhook balloon.

A contactee movement emerged in the early 1950s: George Van Tassel, George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, Orfeo Angelucci, and George Hunt Williamson each claimed to have ridden aboard saucers and returned with messages for humanity. Van Tassel built the Integratron near Landers, California to facilitate further contact; George King founded the Aetherius Society under claimed extraterrestrial direction; the Nation of Islam incorporated a half-mile-wide "Mother Wheel" saucer into its end-times teaching. Variety columnist Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers (1950) presented the Aztec crashed-saucer hoax as a genuine recovery, and Donald Keyhoe's The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950) took a "nuts and bolts" government-cover-up approach. Life magazine's 1952 article "Have We Visitors From Space?" was followed by the 1952 UFO flap, which in turn spurred Leonard H. Stringfield's Civilian Investigating Group for Aerial Phenomena and Albert K. Bender's International Flying Saucer Bureau.

Some early flying-saucer photographs were hoaxes. German rocket scientist Walther Johannes Riedel analyzed George Adamski's UFO images and concluded the "landing struts" were General Electric light bulbs with GE logos visible; researcher Joel Carpenter later identified the craft's body as the lampshade of a 1930s pressure lantern.

Terminology evolution

The U.S. military and intelligence community transitioned from "unidentified flying object" (UFO, formally adopted by USAF in 1952) to "unidentified aerial phenomena" and later "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP) in the 2000s — partly to reduce the cultural baggage of the flying-saucer era and to enable objective analysis. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) uses UAP as its standard term. Recent reports more often describe spherical and triangular shapes rather than discs. In exopolitics literature, "flying saucer" remains in use for specifically disc-shaped craft reported in pre-1970s encounters.

Disc-shape in alleged NHI taxonomy

Elena Danaan's A Gift from the Stars and Corey Goode's SSP testimony identify the classic disc form as purportedly typical of Zeta Reticuli-origin craft and of craft operated by the ICC built using reverse-engineered Zeta Reticuli designs. Bob Lazar describes the "sports model" at S-4 as a classic disc approximately nine meters in diameter with three gravity amplifiers and an antimatter reactor allegedly using Element 115.

Alleged S-4 craft at Papoose Lake

Bob Lazar disclosed in 1989 and confirmed in subsequent interviews that nine non-human craft were allegedly housed at S-4, a facility in the side of a mountain approximately 15 miles south of Area 51. Lazar reportedly first saw the craft when he entered S-4 through hangar doors that were open rather than the normal double-door entrance; an armed guard instructed him to keep his eyes forward. All nine craft were said to be different from one another in shape. Lazar was assigned to work specifically on one disc — the "sports model" — whose sub-components were extracted and studied in a laboratory setting.

Alleged Nazi prototypes and post-war retrieval

Michael Salla and other researchers have argued that the "flying saucer" phenomenon has a dual origin: genuine non-human craft (allegedly crash-retrieved from the late 1940s onward) and German-derived prototypes built during and after World War II. Up to 30 different flying saucer prototypes were reportedly developed by Nazi Germany; according to this narrative, the successful ones were transported to Antarctica as the backbone of a post-war German breakaway state program, while unsuccessful prototypes recovered by the Allies became the basis of early U.S., British, and Soviet reverse engineering efforts.

Alleged White Sands crash retrieval

William Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse (1991) describes a 1948 White Sands crash retrieval in which a 100-foot disc was allegedly recovered along with 17 non-human bodies, with human body parts reportedly stored inside the craft — a discovery Cooper stated caused immediate escalation of program secrecy. Cooper placed early disc retrievals in the radar-surveillance zone around the White Sands Proving Ground and connected the secrecy response to the development of Majestic 12.

Element 115 and partial corroboration

Bob Lazar's description of the disc propulsion system — an antimatter reactor fueled by Element 115 (which Lazar called "115" when it was not yet on the periodic table) — gained partial scientific corroboration when moscovium (element 115) was first synthesized in 2004 at Darmstadt, Germany. The initial synthesis produced four atoms lasting 220 milliseconds; subsequent confirmations led to formal addition to the periodic table. Jeremy Corbell cited this development in a 2019 interview as consistent with Lazar's original claim.

Identification and skepticism

Mainstream investigators have identified the majority of flying-saucer reports with known phenomena — including the planet Venus, weather phenomena, balloons, airborne trash, and classified Skyhook spy balloons launched by the U.S. Navy and General Mills through the 1950s. Astronomer Donald Howard Menzel's 1963 survey of saucer reports noted that "no two reports describe exactly the same kind of UFO" — with size estimates ranging from 20 feet to over 2,000 feet, colors spanning the visible spectrum, and sounds ranging from thunderclaps to silence — concluding that "no single phenomenon could possibly display such infinite variety". Sociologist Robert Bartholomew observed that reported saucer features tracked cultural expectations of each period — 1890s airships with propellers and searchlights, 1947 saucers emphasizing impossible speed (in the months before Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier), and later sightings increasingly described as hovering.

International spread

News of Arnold's sighting spread rapidly beyond the United States. Translations of "flying saucer" entered French (soucoupe volante), Spanish (platillo volante), Portuguese (disco voador), Swedish (flygande tefat), German (fliegende Untertasse), and Italian (disco volante). German newspapers reported flying saucers with rocket-like tails of fire. Local UFO-research groups formed in Spain (Antonio Ribera's Centro de Estudios Interplanetarios), Australia (the Australia Flying Saucer Bureau), France (where saucer groups overlapped with occult circles and the anti-nuclear movement), and later across Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.

Popular culture

Flying saucers became visual shorthand for aliens by 1950. Films including The Flying Saucer (1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956 — whose saucer design was consulted with contactee George Adamski by special-effects artist Ray Harryhausen), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Fire in the Sky (1993) embedded the disc shape in the cinematic vocabulary of the unknown. A disc, often domed or emitting a beam of light, remains the dominant symbol of alien contact despite the decline of disc reports; in 2017, the flying-saucer emoji was added to Unicode.

See also

References