The evolution of the ‘ET Hypothesis’ in Ufology

The UFO age is usually said to have begun when an Idaho businessman, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing some anomalous objects near Mount Rainier on 24 June 1947 whilst searching for a missing aeroplane. His description of their motion as being “like a saucer would if you skipped it over water” led to an inspired newspaper sub-editor dubbing the objects ‘flying saucers’, despite the fact that Arnold saw them as crescent shaped, with wings but no tails. Although it is now tolerably certain that what Arnold saw were pelicans or geese (see the detailed analysis by James Easton at http://www.ufoworld.co.uk/saucers.htm), the sighting caught the popular imagination and over the next few months, huge numbers of sightings were reported, many of which conformed precisely to the shape of an upturned saucer, something Arnold had not described. Arnold’s claims about the objects—that they were 37 km (23 miles) away, flying at 2100 to 2750 kph (1300 to 1700 mph) and each were two-thirds the length of a nearby DC-4—was based on his mistaken observation that the objects passed behind a peak close to Mt Rainier, whereas the birds had more than likely become invisible against it. Nevertheless, acceptance of his estimates indicated that the objects showed a technology completely unknown on the earth. The ET hypothesis was born.

The immediate impact of Arnold’s sighting is shown by the unfolding of events at Roswell, New Mexico, barely two weeks later. According to the official press release of 8 July 1947, “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when … [the] Air Force … was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc…”. The matter was soon settled; within hours, the Air Force issued a retraction and showed pictures of Major Jesse Marcel, who had recovered the alleged disc, holding what were clearly the remains of a balloon, said to be the material recovered from the crash site. According to documents released in the 1990s, the original press release was put out in an attempt to divert attention from the fact that the balloon was a classified military test, but it was one that completely misjudged public attitudes to the ‘Flying Saucer’ phenomenon. Roswell might have remained a footnote in the history of Ufology had it not been for a series of publications that began to suggest a massive government cover-up had taken place. According to these reports, beginning a whole generation after the event, alien bodies had been recovered from the wreckage, including one that was still alive at the time of recovery. Subsequent investigation has merely served to confirm the conspiracy theory for believers in the ET hypothesis, as no evidence for the events alleged to have occurred by Berlitz and Moore has ever been found. The supposed ‘alien autopsy’ footage, screened worldwide in 1995, and supposed to be secret government film from Roswell, has since been exposed as a poor hoax.

Almost six months after Roswell, on 7 January 1948, residents of Godman, Kentucky, reported to their local Air Force base that a large, glowing and stationary disc was hovering above the town. It took Air Force personnel some time to spot the object, but they agreed to divert a routine flight of P-51 aircraft to investigate. The flight commander, a Captain Thomas Mantell, agreed to fly to it. The aircraft gradually had to back off, as they were not equipped with oxygen masks and despite continued climbing, could not reach it. Only Captain Mantell continued. His last radio message, sent from 4600 m (15,000 feet), reported that the object was still above him. At that point, contact was lost and the remaining aircraft, which had landed to fit oxygen masks, then took off again to search for him. While they were in the air, it was reported that Mantell’s aeroplane had crashed nearby. There is little doubt that oxygen starvation had caused him to black out. As for the object he was chasing, it seems that the original observations by local residents were of the planet Venus (in the right position and just about visible in daylight), which explains why the Air Force had difficulty spotting it, whereas Mantell appears to have given tragic chase to a Skyhook balloon. This had been released in Ohio earlier in the day and flying above the 6100 m (20,000 feet) at which oxygen masks were necessary.

By the end of July 1947, a mere forty days after Kenneth Arnold’s first report, some 850 stories had appeared in American media about ‘flying saucers’. A Gallup poll carried out in August found that while 33% of respondents did not know what the ‘flying discs’ might be, 15% thought they might be a secret American device, perhaps connected with the atomic bomb, while only 1% thought they might be a Soviet device. At this stage, no-one suggested an extraterrestrial origin. In the context of global politics, the post-war period was one of growing international tension that would eventually lead to the Cold War and the construction of the Berlin Wall. In the United States, there were fears of Soviet attack and while the government was quick to dismiss any suggestions that the UFOs reported in increasing numbers after mid-1947 were any threat to national security, at the same time, it took an active interest just in case they were secret Soviet aircraft. A Top Secret document Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the United States, Study 203 (Analysis), issued 10 December 1948 by the USAF Directorate of Intelligence and released under the Freedom of Information Act (and now available in transcript at http://www.project1947.com/fig/1948air.htm) assumes that the phenomenon consists either of misidentified domestic aircraft or of foreign (and presumably therefore Soviet) aircraft.

Official explanations usually invoked the planet Venus or weather balloons (often, as seen at Roswell and Goodman, with good reason), and the public saw this as evidence for a cover-up. Many people find it hard to believe that such ordinary objects can be so badly misidentified; experience shows otherwise. By the early 1950s, it was being assumed by the public that as the disks were not part of an imminent Soviet invasion or secret domestic aircraft, they had to be an imminent invasion from another world. The authorities, on the other hand, were genuinely puzzled by an inexplicable but apparently relatively common phenomenon. A general feeling developed that the government knew what was happening and that what it knew was so devastating that it had to be covered up. Nevertheless, reports of actual aliens were rare until the worldwide flap [i] of 1954.

In fact, Arnold’s were by no means the first sightings of unidentified objects in the sky. There was a wave of sightings of cigar-shaped objects in 1896-7 across the United States. The objects were propeller-driven cigar shaped dirigibles, whose inhabitants spoke American English, although in one case the alleged witness suggested that the pilots “were inhabitants of Mars, who had been sent to earth for the purpose of securing one of its inhabitants”. Although the first recorded airship flight was in 1901, it is possible that some of these reports derive from observations of experimental craft, but the sheer numbers of reports cannot be explained solely in these terms. In short, many of the reports are simply not credible as straightforward observations. The charitable view is that they are misinterpretations of other phenomena; a less charitable view is that they are hoaxes. The later history of ufology shows that both interpretations are possible. A third explanation sees it as evidence for an otherwise paranormal phenomenon.

What is of interest here, though, is that in the 1890s, the occupants of the craft were mostly human and of indigenous, if out-of-state, origin. They were friendly and often either in need of help or offering it. A second wave of airship sightings took place in Europe between 1909 and 1913. Here, the occupants were more sinister and ‘foreign’, perhaps a reflection of the tensions developing in the years that led up to the outbreak of the European Great War in 1914. Some were reported as having ‘oriental’ characteristics, while others were said to speak a guttural language. Between the wars, the major focus of activity was in Sweden, where so-called ghost rockets were observed from 1933; while some of these may have been experimental Soviet or German missiles, viable rocket technology is not known to have existed until the 1940s. During the Second World War, American fighter pilots (particularly in the Pacific) reported small glowing balls, known as foo fighters, which followed their aeroplanes. Overall, nothing in the technology displayed by these early unidentified objects was more than a decade ahead of developments in terrestrial technology, with the exception of the foo fighters, which appear more supernatural than technological. If these early reports are of the same phenomenon, there is little reason for ascribing an extraterrestrial origin to it, as it anticipates and keeps pace with human technology.

The ET hypothesis in ufology, then, developed during the late 1940s as a consequence of politics, particularly the mounting tensions between the Unites States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Indeed, the UFO as a concept did not exist before 1947, and within three years, it became associated with extraterrestrials. The involvement of the US government in the analysis of reports of unidentified flying objects created a climate in which conspiracy theories could flourish and which encouraged the development of an explanation that did not involve terrestrial military powers. Perhaps it is for this reason that the ET hypothesis has had almost universal acceptance for over fifty years among American (and, it now emerges, Russian) ufologists, whilst Europeans have tended to resort to a wider variety of explanations. The public perception, nevertheless, is that UFOs are evidence for alien visitations, something that is reinforced by the media, particularly the popular press, Hollywood and American television (notoriously, science fiction series such as The X-Files or fundamentally flawed ‘documentaries’ on the subject such as those produced periodically for cable and satellite television channels).