Nuts-and-bolts UFOs
By the late 1940s, most people in countries where UFO reports were becoming commonplace had come to accept that if there was anything mysterious behind the phenomena, it probably involved extraterrestrials and their technology. The initial Cold War hysteria that had led Americans to wonder if the objects were a secret new technology from the USSR was being replaced by the realisation that the phenomean were world-wide and that they apparently performed feats that ought to be impossible with human technology.
That does not preclude an earthly origin, but it makes it unlikely. If those phenomena that seemed to be of structured objects were part of our objective reality, then they must belong to some non-earthly power with a technology quite different from ours. By about 1950, most reports simply assumed that UFOs were spacecraft, piloted by aliens visiting the earth for some purpose. This view remains the dominant public perception of the phenomena and is still the principal paradigm by which many Ufologists –especially those in the USE – work. These are the people I refer to throughout this site as “True Believers”, without intending anythign derogatory by the term. It reflect what I would see as a ‘fundamentalist’ approach to the phenomena, which assumes that the early hypoetheses of alien origin are correct and that later hypotheses, such as the psycho-social, are in error.
According to those who claimed to have made contact with the pilots and crew of these craft, their intention was peaceful: they had come to warn humanity about impending disaster, usually through the mis-use of atomic energy, especially in weapons. Others were not so sure. They found the claims of the contactees hard to swallow and the messages of Universal Brotherhood seemed too akin to earth-bound mysticism to be truly alien. Instead, Ufologists tried to learn what they could about the forms of the supposed craft in order to distinguish different types, perhaps thereby showing how many separate alien species were visiting earth. In this way, the scale of any percieved threat might be assessed.
That there was potentially a threat seemed obvious, especially to American citizens, whose government was known to be investigating the phenomena. Even though the Air Force, the branch of government responsible for eaxmining reports, expressed scepticism and declared that UFOs posed no threat to national security, Ufologists found that hard to believe. Instead, a feeling that governments, and the US government in particular, were hiding an unpalatable truth about UFOs began to take hold. Conspiracy theories were developed, many of which are so USA-centred that they defy belief: even in the early twenty-first century, when the USA is the world’s only superpower, it is inconceivable that the US government could suppress a hidden truth about the phenomena by controlling the governments and media of the whole world. This was even more implausible in the 1950s.
Last updated 17 March 2006