Who – or what – pilots the saucers?
Once the idea that UFOs were structured craft under apparently intelligent control but not from the Soviet Union, the question of where they came from naturally arose. Among UFO enthusiasts, the answer was obvious: outer space. And if they were spacecraft, they must be piloted by sentient beings from elsewhere.
Aliens were a staple element of science fiction and had been since at least the 1930s.
The E.T. Hypothesis
During the 1980s, opinions about the nature of UFOs became much more polarised than previously. In the 1950s and 1960s, there had been two badic positions: those who did not believe that UFOs represented an unknown phenomenon and thos who believed that they did and that they were consequently spacecraft of alien origin. What happened to polarise the position within Ufology was the development of the psycho-social hypothesis, with the original, nuts-and-bolts spaceships viewpoint remaining dominant among the general public and American Ufologists. Around the same time, the term ‘E.T. (Extraterrestrial) Hypothesis’ became more commonly used to refer to this position.
Within the E. T. Hypothesis, there is little consensus (other than, perhaps, a widespread belief in the reality of the ‘gray’ as a dominant – if not sole – alien type).