As I have been busying myself with Greetings Earthlings, I (somewhat ironically) missed Sunday's 60th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold's seminal "flying saucer" sighting (June 24, 1947).
The current issue of the Fortean Times, however, has not been so lax - with a spiffy "60 Years of UFOs" special edition to mark the occasion. I particularly enjoyed the segment on depictions of UFOs/aliens on stamps…a phenomenon that's more common than you might believe (Tanzania seems to be something of a leader in this particular field). "An Post", sadly, don't appear to have embraced ufology to the same extent as the postal services of Vietnam and Grenada (etc) - limiting themselves instead to landscapes, flowers, badgers etc. Yawn.
But back to Arnold. Despite the fact that his sighting led to the term "flying saucer" becoming common currency,1 the objects he claimed to have seen may not (according to his various descriptions) have been saucer-shaped at all. The "saucer" image appears to have been used by Arnold to suggest the movement of the objects rather than their shape - with their motion described as akin to "saucers skipping over water" (or words to that effect).
That always struck me as a rather odd description - evocative yet vague (and confusing). Had Mr. Arnold ever seen saucers being skimmed across water? It seems unlikely. I mean, I'm a big fan of stone skimming (and can never leave a beach without spending at least half an hour engaged in the activity) but I've never, to the best of my knowledge, skimmed a saucer. Maybe I should…
It appears that at least one of the objects he saw (possibly the most visible one) was, in fact, roughly crescent-shaped. Here's the bould Mr. Arnold pointing to an artist's impression (his own?) of the object in question:
It's rather underwhelming - a bit like an interstellar croissant. While circles are, of course, artistically, psychologically and "spiritually" significant and resonant shapes - crescents (despite Mr. Arnold's insistent pointing above) just don't float our boats to the same extent. No great surprise then that "flying crescents" never really (forgive the pun) took off.
Anyway, a (belated) Happy Birthday to the "saucers". Long may they confound us.
Tags: Kenneth Arnold, UFOs, Flying Saucers, Fortean Times
- Though it remains debatable who exactly coined the term [back]
I’ve always rather liked Arnold’s elegant crescent-shaped UFO. It looks far more futuristic than the clunky Adamski-style saucers that followed it.
Oddly enough, the jacket illustration of Arnold’s own book depicts a flotilla of golden discs hovering menancingly over his tiny plane - an image far removed from the reality of the encounter.
There’s quite an interesting piece by Martin Kottmeyer here:
June 30th, 2007 at 9:16 amhttp://www.debunker.com/texts/SaucerError.html
I think that’s the reason I don’t like it! I’ve always had a soft spot for the preposterousness of the Adamski type saucers.
Wasn’t the book written a good few years after the sighting? I’m guessing (though I don’t know) that by the time it came out the term “flying saucer” had so gripped the public imagination that the publishers probably thought any other shape would just confuse people (and muddy the issue)!
The piece by Kottmeyer sort of points to why reports of very oddly-shaped UFOs and bizarre looking aliens are actually (in some ways) more credible/interesting than those which seem to fit an established template (saucers/greys etc).
However, claiming that people’s imaginations were influenced by the early, ubiquitous (and erroneous) media use of the term “flying saucer” to the point that they could only subsequently “see” saucer-shaped objects sounds far too convenient and facile an explanation to me.
Even if one accepts (and I’m not sure I do) that actual saucer sightings were somehow “produced” by media coverage of the Arnold case, it’s not remotely clear (to me at least) how this process might actually work.
Kottmeyer’s claims that: “The reason excited imaginations didn’t come up with hundreds of radically different variations is that they were constrained by Bequette’s description of the objects.” - Bill Bequette being the reporter who may have accidentally coined the phrase “flying saucer”. Again I’d ask, can imaginations really be “constrained” to this extent? Isn’t the human imagination a more resilient and creative thing than this suggests?
July 1st, 2007 at 12:29 amImaginations, I would suggest, can be constrained by expectations. If one considers alleged visions of deities, it is only Catholics who have ‘visions’ of the Virgin Mary and only Hindus who have ‘visions’ of Krishna or Kali. Protestants and atheists, on the other hand, do not expect to have such visions, so they don’t have any, or if they do they would probably interpret it as a symptom of mental illness…
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:15 pmIt’s a Batarang.
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:07 pm