On June 24, 1947, American businessman and aviator Kenneth Arnold, upon returning from a flight over the Cascade Mountains in the northwestern United States, reported that he had encountered nine flying objects in the sky resembling flat saucers. Two weeks later, an unidentified object crashed in the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico. Five years later, the United States Air Force launched Project Blue Book to investigate such incidents. How the UFO sighting phenomenon developed in the USA.
Wikimedia Commons
Exactly 70 years have passed since the American aviator Kenneth Arnold returned from his flight over the Cascade Mountains with news that changed the world. A businessman who was looking for the wreckage of a missing plane in the hope of getting a reward, met nine unidentified flying objects in the air.
“They flew about 20-25 miles and disappeared from view. For about three minutes I watched as a chain of objects moving like saucers on the water, like thrown flat stones, stretching for at least five miles, maneuvered between the mountain peaks. They were as flat as frying pans and, like a mirror, reflected the sun's rays. I saw it all very clearly and distinctly,”Arnold told aviation officials and reporters.
Kenneth Arnold describes his UFO encounter over the Cascade Mountains
The meeting over the Cascade Mountains was the first case of a UFO encounter that was replicated by the press and received wide publicity in society, giving rise to modern ufology.
Arnold himself went down in history, describing objects as "flying saucers" or "saucers", and became the father of a term that has not left the front pages of tabloids and conspiracy books for many years.
However, 1947 was a landmark year for ufology and UFO hunters not only because of the incident over the Cascade Mountains. Just two weeks later, in the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico, an unidentified object was wrecked, the fragments of which were discovered by a local farmer. After loading the jeep with pieces of a substance that looked like foil and bars of an unknown alloy, the farmer went to the Sheriff of Roswell and to the radio station to report on the incident, where he was detained by the American military.
Promotional video:
On July 8, 1947, a number of regional newspapers reported on the front pages that the Air Force had captured a flying saucer near Roswell, citing a press release prepared by an Air Force base officer.
Roswell Daily Record newspaper. On the front page, a large headline reads: "Air Force Seized Flying Saucer on Roswell Farm." & copy; Wikimedia Commons
However, the very next day, Air Force General Roger Raimi issued a rebuttal, in which he stated that the object was in fact a weather balloon used as part of the secret Mogul program. A week later, the military released the farmer, who confirmed the official story but declined to comment further. The incident itself was soon forgotten by everyone.
General Raimi demonstrates the wreckage of the Mogul weather balloon to reporters
In 1978, the legendary ufologist and physicist Stanton Friedman published an interview with a participant in those events, Major Jesse Marcel, who told him that the American army had hidden from the public the discovery of an alien spacecraft and the aliens on it. The interview renewed interest in UFO sightings among the general public, and the Roswell incident itself became one of the central elements of American pop culture.
By 1952, interest in the phenomenon of "flying saucers" reached its zenith after the citizens of Washington for more than two weeks observed dozens of UFOs circling over the American capital, the Capitol Hill and even the White House. By this point, public pressure was so great that the US Air Force launched Project Blue Book to investigate the phenomenon.
UFO in the sky over the Capitol, 1952
After two fighters chased four luminous objects in the sky over Washington, on July 26, 1952, President Harry Truman himself phoned the Blue Book headquarters and demanded that they investigate this phenomenon. The Central Intelligence Agency also launched its own project separately from the Air Force.
Soon after the Washington Carousel, encounters with mysterious objects took on a more intimate character. On September 12, 1952, three schoolchildren from the town of Flatwoods noticed a bright object crossing the sky, which then landed in the hills next to one of the local farms. Together with their mother and a member of the US National Guard, the boys went to the farm. Reaching the top of the hill, the group saw a “pulsing fireball” in the distance. Acrid fog began to spread over the area, under the influence of which all eyewitnesses had symptoms of mustard gas poisoning. Then, by directing the flashlight at a tree next to the object, the guardsman, as eyewitnesses recalled, "illuminated a huge creature."
The "Flatwood Monster" encountered by the townspeople in the hills of Braxton County
Nine years later, in 1961, the spouses Barney and Betty Hill, returning by car from their vacation at Niagara Falls, noticed a luminous object above the road. After the incident, the Hills began to have strange dreams about the event, and then, under the influence of hypnosis, talked about their abduction by alien beings. This incident was the first of its kind, and also introduced into popular culture the classic image of a UFO pilot as a short creature with gray skin, a large head and teardrop-shaped black eyes.
A still from the 1975 film, based on a story by Betty and Barney Hill. The role of Barney Hill in the film was played by the famous black actor James Earl Jones.
Despite such exciting stories, in 1969 the Blue Book project was closed. Nuclear physicist Edward Condon, the head of the National Bureau of Standards and the head of the Blue Book Boulder Project, released a report in which he stated that the UFO phenomenon posed neither a threat to the United States in terms of national security, nor interest in any area. science. In his memoirs, Condon wrote that he agreed to become the head of the committee in order to remain in the public service. The overwhelming majority of ufologists perceive his activities negatively, believing that he did not take his duties seriously and studied the information provided superficially.
The Condon report played a key role in the closure of all government programs to study the UFO phenomenon in the United States.
Despite the fact that after the closure of the "Blue Book" eyewitnesses did not stop reporting UFO encounters, this topic was pushed to the margins of tabloids and science fiction magazines.
In the 1980s, ufology merged tightly with the New Age movement, which was then gaining popularity around the world. Some researchers even assumed that UFOs are not spaceships in the usual sense, but intangible guests from other dimensions.
“According to one of the ideas, flying saucers are a kind of projection of the consciousness of our planet Gaia, which itself is an alchemical object that has declared human history a symbol of totality. Such a totality, which our religions and mystical studies so hard try to explain. But if we, as egocentric beings, do not establish a relationship with the unconscious, then, I think, flying saucers will remain something mysterious for us, the philosopher Terence McKenna suggested.
However, nowadays, UFO hunting again ceases to be a matter of the marginalized. So, Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace and partner of NASA, on the air of the prestigious social and political program "60 Minutes" on the CBS TV channel, said that he did not doubt the existence of aliens.
In addition to reports from industry captains demonstrating their interest in the UFO problem, the press has again begun to receive evidence of encounters with flying saucers from reputable sources. So, in January 2017, the State Committee for the Investigation of Anomalous Phenomena in the Atmosphere (CEFAA), which is part of the Department of Civil Aeronautics under the jurisdiction of the Chilean Air Force, reported that the crew of a military helicopter managed to obtain very unusual footage.
In 2014, while patrolling the coastal area west of Santiago, the crew used a thermal camera to capture an unidentified flying object, which the military described as a flat, elongated platform with two thermal centers. The Chilean Air Force and CEFAA in an official report stated that the object could not be a parachutist, nor an airplane or hang glider, nor a piece of space debris, nor an atmospheric anomaly. The report and video footage has become the most authoritative official evidence of a UFO incident available to date.
The emergence of new evidence, a new surge of interest from scientists and the public indicate that attention to the UFO topic has not faded even after 70 years.
Alexander Karpov