UFOlogy

November 11th, 2010 by Art Chantry

Everybody loves flying saucers. How can you not? They are the coolest. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been fascinated by the whole phenomenon. It really captured my imagination. In all honesty, over the years, I’ve read nearly every book on the subject, from the crackpots to the respected scientists. Some of the books are utterly fascinating, while others make you laugh out loud. If you ever bother to read the lore, read the books in chronological order (if you can). The whole thing reads like a developing religion, like a fantasy that feeds on itself, and (as per that thing that our species does so well) that fantasy becomes reality.

The whole story is what I like about the UFO (and its permutations), the whole development of the flying saucer fantasy over the years and its slow acceptance as (perhaps actual) reality. As a result, I love flying saucers, but I remain skeptical. I want one to land in front of me.

Back in 1947, Kenneth Arnold spotted the first “modern” saucers while flying over Mount Rainier near Tacoma, Washington. He described them to a reporter as nine bat-winged shiny metallic crafts flying in formation and moving through the sky “like a saucer skipped over water.” Some local yokel reporter wrote a headline, “Flying Saucers Seen Over Mt. Rainier,” and the name stuck. They weren’t saucer shaped at all, they were precisely described as “bat-winged.”  Interesting how fiction becomes fact, isn’t it?

The “lore” of the flying saucer is rife with this phenomenon. Another great example is the weird effect that flying saucers have on automobiles – indeed, any sort of electrical device nearby. It stalls them. Dead in the water, and then when it leaves, everything becomes OK again. Fascinating huh?

Do you know where that phenomenon first popped up? The first documented incident? A play. a theatrical production performed live on a stage. A fiction. The first time the idea ever appeared in public was in that play in the early 1950s. Almost immediately, it began to emerge in “eye witness accounts” and sightings. Now, it’s so much a standard event in the lore that if your car doesn’t stall, people think you’re making the whole story up. Isn’t strange how this stuff works?

Like I said, the history of the flying saucer phenomenon is rife with this sort of thing. Yet, it seems to become part of the reality experienced. It’s like when the bizarre “UMMO” hoax (a debunkers’ favorite) emerged in South America. Those “aliens” even had a logo on their craft and on their uniforms (it looked almost exactly like the old “International Harvester” logo. A hubcap logo, no less).

Strangely, decades later (long after the UMMO hoax was forgotten and tossed aside) a massive sighting that happened in a Soviet park (on the other side of the planet) cites literally hundreds of witnesses to a craft landing and beings emerging from that craft – HUNDREDS of witnesses in a public park. And on the side of that “craft” was the UMMO logo. So, go figger that one out.

Now, the reason I pointed out that Kenneth Arnold saw specifically BAT-WINGED shaped craft over Mt. Rainier is very important here. The first sightings – even the notorious Roswell crash – were always batwing shaped in those early days (sometimes they were ‘cigar shaped’). This is important. The name “flying saucer” didn’t appear until some time later as the reporters flubbed the story. gradually, the shape of the craft drifted into the classic “flying saucer” shape. It was a shape kick-started by pop culture.

In fact, it was the extremely popular movie (it was a huge box office hit) “The Day the Earth Stood Still” among the first of the films to depict a flying saucer in all its glory (aside: I think Ray Harryhausen’s “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” may have been earlier, but it didn’t command the viewership that “Day the Earth Stood Still” did. So, I discard it from consideration here). After “Klaatu and Gort” emerged from that flying saucer, the world shifted on its axis and nobody ever saw a “bat-winged shaped” flying craft in the skies ever again. It was gone virtually that sudden. From then on it was the “flying disk” that people saw almost exclusively.

So, who designed the flying saucer? The answer is almost as weird as the whole of flying saucer history. It’s a small footnote in the lore that the creative directors on the film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” consulted the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright on the design of the saucer craft. He proposed (did he make a model? I dunno) a disk shaped craft based on a parabolic curve. And THAT is the craft you see on the screen. So, that sorta indicates that Frank Lloyd Wright actually designed the modern concept of the flying saucer. To this day, all people ever describe are Frank Lloyd Wright’s design shifting around in the night sky. Very, very weird.

Don’t go looking for the credit on the film titles. It’s not there. This info seems to be as sketchy to pin down as the UFO we all love so much. I’ve read this info in respected books and heard it personally from “noted experts” that it’s true. If any of you out there have concise reference material to note, please share it.

Did Frank Lloyd Wright invent the flying saucer?