"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.
No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets.
And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely they drew their plans against us ..."
| Thus begins Jeff Wayne's brilliantly conceived musical version of The War of the Worlds. Be sure to get yourself a copy! |
During the fifties, "saucers" were very physical "nuts-and-bolts" things. The pilots were generally nice guys, somewhat angelic or, at least, Aryan in appearance, taking "contactees" like George Adamski or Daniel Fry for a ride, often expressing concern for the state of the world and admonishing against the nuclear tests of those days. Cigar-shaped "mother ships" were seen in the skies. Alien mass landings were imminent.
The sixties, a less technologically and more spiritually oriented decade, saw new explanations, more in line with the general thinking of the day. Researchers realised that some UFO experiences had a lot in common with the fairy tales of old and with stories like the one about Rip van Winkle. There were absurd reports like those about waist-high ufonauts asking for the time or sharing pancakes with humans. Evidence of a connection between UFO encounters and parapsychological phenomena started to emerge. Hynek abdicated as USAF:s chief debunker and published "The UFO Experience". Jaques Vallée wrote "UFOs: The Psychic Solution" and "Passport to Magonia". Hynek and Vallée jointly published "The Edge of Reality".
"Abductions", performed by small humanoids, had been reported already in the fifties, for example the Brazilian Villas-Boas case in 1957, but they were scarce and seldom taken seriously. In the seventies, there was a sharp increase in the number of "abduction" reports. Typical (if that is the word!) are Betty and Barney Hill's experience at Exeter, the Hicks case in Pascagoula, the Travis Walton case and the Betty Luca Andreasson affair. What had initially seemed rather harmless and innocent -- like Antonio Villas-Boas being seduced by a humanoid -- now began to take on a more sinister character. The purpose of the kidnappings seemed to be more or less painful medical examinations and, perhaps, the surgical insertion of tiny objects into the victim's body. Many abductees experienced the "missing time" syndrome and were also troubled by nightmares; this lead some of them to undergo hypnotical regression to recover buried memories.
Abductions continued to be reported during the eighties. Whitley Strieber made an impact on the general public with his books "Communion" and "Transformation". Some researchers, like Budd Hopkins, feel -- on the basis of material obtained during hypnosis -- that we are being subjected to an experiment in cross-breeding between humans and aliens. Others, like Alvin Lawson, believe that the abduction experience is purely psychical, probably inherited.
A characteristic feature of our time is paranoia. Ufologists have always had good reasons to be paranoid, and today these reasons seem stronger than ever. This has given rise to renewed interest in the Roswell case (an alleged "saucer" crash in 1947 in New Mexico), theories about a secret government group called Majestic-12 and suspicions about conspiracies between humans in high places and aliens. And what is really going on in the forbidden zone -- Area 51?
Of necessity, much must be left out in a brief introduction such as this. Examples of omissions are
As researchers have dug deeper, another aspect has emerged. Today, the general feeling seems to be that the UFO phenomenon has been with us since time immemorial. For example,
To summarize: The UFO phenomenon has been with us in its present form for the last fifty years. In other manifestations it may perhaps be a perpetual companion of mankind. It is clearly dynamical -- during the years it has changed character several times. Or -- is it our conception of it that has changed? Another question naturally comes to mind: is it really one phenomenon, or are we ignorantly putting a common label on a whole range of phenomena?
An abundance of theories (or, rather, hypotheses or conjectures) have been put forth:
Was H.G. Wells actually right? Are we being studied by beings -- not Martians, but perhaps Venusians as claimed by George Adamski or Zeta Reticulians as indicated by the Marjorie Fish map or maybe Billy Meier's visitors from the Pleiades -- from outer space? Are we, as some assert, being experimented upon? Are we -- unknowingly and involuntarily -- taking part in a cosmic genetic experiment, a cross-breeding between aliens and humans, as Budd Hopkins' findings seem to indicate? Or ...
Hold it, please, hold it!
Let's start at the beginning -- or, at least, some kind of beginning -- shall we:
To most people, a UFO is a "flying saucer" -- an advanced vehicle from outer space, most likely manned by little green men. Part of the blame for this falls on businessman Kenneth Arnold who, fifty years ago, reported seeing nine silvery discs over Mt Rainier, USA, "skipping like saucers on a pond". This started the first modern UFO "wave".
On the more conventional side, aircraft pilots -- military as well as civilian -- reported encounters with "saucers" or more remote observations (so called "nocturnal lights" and "daylight discs"). The U.S. Air Force felt compelled to set up Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book to deal with reports. The first serious UFO book -- The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by captain Edward Ruppelt, head of Blue Book -- was published. The scientific Robertson Panel convened in 1953 and concluded that UFO:s didn't pose a threat to U.S. national security. Lots of observations were made all over the world. "Debunkers", like astronomers Donald Menzel and J. Allen Hynek, explained away observations as swamp gas, hallucinations or the planet Venus. Psychoanalyst C.G. Jung wrote "Flying Saucers -- A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky", blaming it all on the collective unconscious.
The nuts-and-bolts explanation coexisted with the new approach, and there was much talk about government secrecy and about crashed craft and dead aliens being stored at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In '68 the infamous Condon Report was released in an unsuccessful attempt to show that all observations had "natural" explanations.
The newly released report by Gerald K. Haines gives conclusive evidence of CIA involvement and manipulation "in the interest of national security".
But we must not forget that the influx of more conventional observation reports has continued to this day. There are for example the fairly recent Hudson Valley and Gulf Breeze sightings and the Belgian "flap".
Whether these phenomena are in fact related to the UFO issue is an open question.
Most of these suggestions don't seem to lead to testable proposals -- at least not at mankind's present level of knowledge. To help you formulate and nurse your own pet theory, here are a few links -- some of which are probably dead -- of varying quality and reliability (the ordering is only alphabetical):
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