The beginning of the era of modern ufology is considered to be the incident that occurred on June 24, 1947, when aviator Kenneth Arnold amazed the world with his declaration of observation of nine disc-shaped objects flying at fantastic speed in the sky over Mount Rainier. Arnold compared objects and their movement to "saucers sliding on water."
“At the beginning of the first modern wave of sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the United States in 1947, little was reported about the possible inhabitants of these mysterious vehicles. The question was - "do they exist or not?" and the general consensus was that if they really existed, then these UFOs or "flying saucers" were supposedly the last secret development of the United States.
At the time, only a few eyewitnesses publicly stated that what they saw were "spaceships." The idea of extraterrestrial visits was mainly limited to the notes of journalists who did not take testimony seriously (1).
This does not mean that in 1947 there was no evidence of UFO occupants. Local newspapers have published at least three reports of small creatures associated with flying saucers.
The first incident occurred on June 19, 1947 in Webster, Massachusetts. An elderly woman saw from a window a "moon-sized" object hovering nearby, inside which was a "slender" figure, dressed in something like a naval uniform (2).
On July 7, 1947, during a flurry of sightings in Tacoma, Washington, Gene Gamachi, I. W. Martenson, and others around Center and Jay Street reported sightings of many objects, some of which landed on adjacent rooftops. Witnesses saw several "little people" who disappeared upon the arrival of the correspondents (3).
On July 8, 1947, during UFO sightings all over Texas, an unidentified merchant sailor observed the landing of a "silver saucer" in a suburb of Houston. From it emerged a tiny pilot with a round head “the size of a basketball” and no more than two feet [~ 60 cm] tall - he greeted the sailor, then re-entered his vehicle and flew away (4).
Not surprisingly, these absurd-sounding stories, especially the last one, were briefly and derisively told. And the authors did not expect them to be taken seriously. For virtually everyone in 1947, such stories had no precedent; the press and the public plunged into solving the riddle of the plates themselves, naturally did not want to solve the mystery of a two-foot man with a "basketball" head.
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Such stories, of course, never spread beyond local newspapers, although evidence of the inhabitants of aerial objects appeared long before 1947.
Mysterious airship at Call of San Francisco, November 1896
Back in the days of the "mysterious airships" seen in the United States in 1896-1897, aeronauts in or nearby were often reported. But in 1947, no one seemed to notice a possible connection between flying saucers and reports of strange airships fifty years ago. " / Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955 (1978), excerpt from introduction, p. I.
1. Report on the UFO Wave of 1947, Ted Bloecher (1967), Section I, pp. 1-16.
2. Worcester (Mass.) Daily Telegram, July 7, 1947, p. 1.
3. Tacoma (Wash.) News Tribune, July 8, 1947.
4. Houston (Texas) Post, July 9, 1947, p. 1.
Probably in these cases, contacts with the Gray Aliens, as they began to be called in ufology, were described somewhere in the 1980s.