That’s a lofty title, I know. Are we really going to cover all that? Perhaps not comprehensively, but we are definitely going to touch on it. This Spooky Saturday post is kind of a tie-in with a review of a YA novel I’m about to post. I just read an ARC of Carrie Arcos’s Skywatchers, and it brought up some interesting points to think about regarding just how and when UFOs and aliens started to become so prevalent in American culture.
Nowadays, it’s strange to think about a time when UFOs and aliens were not a huge part of our culture. With shows like Ancient Aliens, movies like Signs, Predator, Alien (hello), and countless others, and even popular shows like American Dad which features a classic “gray” alien as one the main characters, this is just a widely accepted part of our lives now. It’s not uncommon to see someone sporting a T-shirt with the classic alien face of a little green man with a head like an upside triangle and big, wide, black eyes, tiny or no nostrils, and a little slit for a mouth. Heck, even the government is admitting that yes, we have seen UFOs and we are tracking them.
Especially in my household, where we’re into documentaries about Bob Lazar or Project Blue Book, this is nothing if not routine.
But there was a time where this wasn’t even on the horizon for most Americans. No one even thought about UFOs or aliens. People just went about their daily lives without even entertaining the idea. There was no show called ALF, no kids Naruto running behind a reporter outside Area 51. It just was not a thing.
So where, and when, did it all start?
It could be argued that it all started shortly before the time period in which Carrie Arcos’s new novel, Skywatchers, is set.
While there are definitely reports of World War II pilots seeing UFOs, some of them were, at the time, written off as enemy aircrafts and only revisited years later when pilots began to share their stories more publicly. But the point when it became a full-fledged phenomenon was in 1947. Two major things happened in 1947, and one of them you definitely already know about: the Roswell crash.
But even before the Roswell crash happened and was explained away by the government as a “weather balloon”, there was another incident. An incident that would shape the future of “UFO culture” for decades to come. In June of 1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying around searching for a downed Marine Corps aircraft because there was a reward issued for it, when he spotted something…else. He spotted not just one, but a whole fleet of unidentified objects flying way faster than any planes at that time were able to fly, and he said they skipped across the water “like saucers”.
A reporter who he spoke to took this description and ran with it, calling them “flying saucers”. This incident is even alluded to in Skywatchers, when Dr. Bill Miller, an agent from Project Blue Book (I know, Project Blue Book in a YA novel, whaaat?) cringes at another character’s use of the term:
“They dismissed what Bill did as a joke. It also made people afraid to come forward with their stories. The term wasn’t even an accurate description of the 1947 incident where the reference came from…A reporter is the one who called it a flying saucer, and the name had stuck. It infiltrated a public consciousness, not to mention Hollywood and the alien and space movies that had come after.”
This is all totally accurate. This was where the term flying saucer was coined, and after this it took over pop culture, and is still a fixture in our minds to this day. But after this story, a lot of people started to report seeing things in the sky, and a lot of their stories followed similar paths: strange lights, aircrafts they didn’t recognize, lights or crafts that moved too fast or in a way that seemed impossible.
So why was there such a huge influx of sightings right after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting?
Well, there could be a number of reasons. One might be that once someone like Arnold came forward, other people felt more comfortable sharing their stories, as well. We see this all the time even today with all sorts of situations: once one person chips away at the barrier, then the dam breaks and there’s a flood of similar stories that people were just waiting for the right time to tell.
But there might have been another reason for the sudden explosion of sightings, as well: increased vigilance. People really were just watching the skies more around this time.
In the novel Skywatchers, the group of teens who star as our main characters are part of the Ground Observer Corps, or sky watchers, who are a group of civilians mobilized by President Harry S. Truman to keep an eye out for anything suspicious in the skies that might be a sign of Russian aircrafts or a threat of nuclear warfare.
This is a totally real thing that actually existed. It’s not made up for this book, but it’s also not extremely well known.
At this time, the United States was still reeling from WWII and from the attack on Pearl Harbor that no one had anticipated. The U.S. also had intel that the Soviet Union was probably working on nuclear weapons, and they worried about having another Pearl Harbor incident that could decimate the country and no one would see coming. So what they decided to do was try to make sure that someone would see it coming, by mobilizing the sky watchers.
Truman mobilized hundreds of thousands of people across the country to volunteer to take shifts to just…watch the sky. Volunteers had cursory training in what to look for and instructions to phone a call center and report anything they saw (just like the characters in the book do). The volunteers in the call center then matched up the reports from the watchers with known activity in the area and if there was anything unusual or anything that didn’t line up, they passed it on to the higher ups to decide what to do from there. There were about 8000 posts manned by volunteers and they were largely concentrated on the coasts and along the border between the U.S. and Canada. People who volunteered to be sky watchers ranged in age from early elementary school children to octogenarians. There were only a few things required to be a part of this troop of volunteers: good hearing, good eyesight, good judgment, and the ability to speak clearly on the phone. (So, I’m out on three out of four. I don’t know if anyone has ever accused me of having good judgment…) While they had fun with it, they also took it very seriously, often carrying their guides explaining the different types of planes, and using clear templates with holes cut out to try to tell how far away the planes were. Spotter clubs in high schools were a real thing, which is how all the kids in the Skywatchers novel come to know each other.
Honestly, I think the concept of the Ground Observer Corps is in and of itself a phenomenon which could be explored in depth in its own right, looking at how Truman was able to successfully mobilize so many civilians to participate, the role that patriotism played in American culture at the time, and also the way the threat of the Cold War and the fear and panic associated with it infiltrated every aspect of life for many people, including young people who were afraid they would never get to grow up before being wiped out by a nuke.
In any event, people were looking to the skies a lot more during this time. Plus, people had access to more technology, like the ability to film and photograph their sightings. Sightings skyrocketed, pun intended, and in a time when panic was already high, the government feared absolute hysteria would set in. Project Blue Book (the government’s program for studying UFOs) was founded in 1952. There was also Project Sign and Project Grudge prior to that, but neither of them…took off.
I’m sorry, there’s just so many opportunities for puns here. I’ll stop, I’ll stop.
The saturation of sightings coupled with the relatable concept of invasion and the world being destroyed at a time when everyone was already scared of these very things did exactly what one could expect: it made art imitate life.
From this point on, UFO sightings and the concept of aliens began to overtake pop culture. Science fiction, which had already been around for decades, saw a major spike in popularity, especially in the avenue of sci-fi novels about aliens, spaceships, and interplanetary travel (at a time when no country had even launched a craft to the moon yet), and other publications began to explore the possibility of visitors from other worlds, as well. Popular publications like Life magazine, which was a mainstream magazine and which many people would have seen, proving that this was not just a niche thing. Skywatchers even mentions an issue of Life magazine with a headline about interplanetary visitors, which happens to be this real issue right here:
And, of course, as Dr. Bill Miller mentions in the book, sci-fi boomed in Hollywood, too, with classic movies like It Came From Outer Space, Forbidden Planet, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers all coming out in the 1950s.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Because as you all know, the obsession with aliens and UFOs has certainly not died down, and if anything, it’s actually ramped up since that time. Our world might be more obsessed with the idea of visitors from other planets now than we ever have been, and it’s possible it all started with that one sighting…that one so-called “flying saucer”.
What do you all think? Are we more obsessed with UFOs now than ever before? Do you believe in aliens? Let me know in the comments, and then come back on Monday to check out what could be viewed as a companion piece to this article: my full-length review of Skywatchers by Carrie Arcos.
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