American History Hit - UFOs in the US

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Alien spacecraft, phenomena from another dimension, ghosts, demons of satan, a trick of light - whatever you might believe UFOs to be, they have a long history.Don is joined by Greg Eghgian for this episode. Professor of History and Bioethics at Penn State University, Greg is the author of 'After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon'. Together with Don, he explores the origins of the 'flying saucer', the end of the stigma against researching UFOs, and much more.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 MediaAmerican History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group conducts exercises about 100 nautical miles off the coast of San Diego. It's November 14, 2004, and the strike group has deployed a number of F.A. 18 Super Hornets,

high-performance twin-engine tactical aircraft. On board the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton, the radio crackles. It has been tracking anomalous aerial vehicles on its advanced radar for weeks. They need someone now to go out for a closer look. This thing they've observed has been doing some crazy maneuvers. At one point, it seems to have descended 80,000 feet in less than a second. Two planes, piloted by Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, are dispatched to check it out.

Each aircraft has a weapon systems officer on board in the rear seat. As these four men in their two fighter jets approached the location, They are confounded by what they see. Below them is a white oblong object. Fravor later describes it, looking like a tick-tac mint. About the same size as the planes, but with no markings, exhaust plume, or even wings, the object seems to mirror Fravor's movements. But when he tries to cut it off, it accelerates away, disappearing from sight.

All four of these men, members of the U.S. Navy in good standing, are certain of what they've seen. and it seems to have been otherworldly. Dear listeners, it's Don Wildman, and on today's episode of American History hit, we're venturing beyond the bland borders of doubt and disbelief into a mystic realm of intrigue and insight to confront that which skeptics claim cannot exist. Even while year upon year, evidence seems to stack up to the contrary.

As encounters grow ever closer, and private acceptance goes public, we have gradually become a nation that embraces the possible some say probable idea that alien visitation has occurred here on Earth, a shift a long time coming considering all that's been out there in the distant and recent past, and what we can suppose is out there even now. UFOs exist, flying objects that cannot be identified, the military admits to it, but by that simple definition, the phenomenon is part of our reality, documented in so many startling videos and captured images. But what they are and where they're from and by what weird means

they are somehow propelled through the air. Well, those are still the confounding questions, the answers to which would challenge everything we know and believe about life on Earth and our existence in the cosmos. Which begs the other question, do we really want to know? Our guest today does, and that's why he's authored a major book on the subject, released this past summer from Oxford University Press, a comprehensive account of UFO sightings and close encounters around the world,

and titled After the Flying Saucer's Came, a global history of the UFO phenomenon. Its author is a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University. Hello, Greg, Agigian. Nice to have you. Thank you for having me on here. Traditionally, Greg, UFO has meant flying saucers, but unidentified flying objects have now become UAP's,

unidentified aerial phenomenon, which was recently broadened to anomalous phenomenon. What exactly are these acronyms accounting for and how has that's been changing in recent years? Yeah, so one of the biggest challenges throughout the whole history of this phenomenon has been giving it a name. Yeah. It has defied any kind of adequate description. And every label, every acronym that's been employed has been called into question. Part of the reason, of course, is because you, first of all, don't have completed agreement on what the phenomenon is. Secondly, you don't even know, is it a phenomenon?

Yeah. So it becomes really, really difficult to do it. Flying saucer was first employed. That was really a media construction in the late 40s, very popular, remained popular well into the 1970s. But it gets replaced by the U.S. Air Force in the early 50s by unidentified flying object, which was seen as being more generic, right? That was a term that would eliminate this kind of.

image of this disc-like object. The problem was other people said, well, hold it, a UFO doesn't eliminate the problem. It too implies that this thing's a physical object. It implies that if it implies flying, it implies there must be a pilot, right? So that was seen as a problem. Now we have the UAP, as you point out, a term that was seen as a way to, again, get it something generic. But the other idea behind it by the people who were in government circle study in this stuff, their thinking was this would eliminate any associations with the whole history of this phenomenon, that all that, quote unquote, noise would no longer be relevant. We can start from scratch as a historian.

I don't think you get to just rename something and give it a new brand name. And somehow you're released from all that legacy. That doesn't kind of work that way. My subjective experience, I have to say, has been through television work. I have stood on Roswell, you know, crash site. I have camped outside of Area 51 looking for, you know, unexplained phenomenon at night. I've done all these things because I was paid to do so, frankly. But it was very interesting to me once you're sort of inside this world how very, very serious people are about it. Really, people have very serious arguments. How much has that infiltrated the government levels, the military levels, finally? as far as taking these people seriously and all these reports. Yeah, so I think there's no question that in recent years, and certainly by at least 2020, that the intelligence services within the U.S. government have come to at least acknowledge, and this is fairly unprecedented, have acknowledged not only our physical objects being seen

that at least on the surface can't be accounted for, but that they themselves have historically played a role in stigmatizing people reporting this stuff, particularly within military circuits, particularly military pilots, but also civilian pilots, that there's been disincentives created to report these things because it was seen as a blemish on your record.

It was seen as something that indicated that you might not be qualified for promotion down the road. So they've come out very clearly and made it clear that they need to adopt a new approach to their. And so now the attitudes, at least in those circles, at least what they're saying, is they are taking those reports seriously. They're trying to create channels for communicating this information without any stigma attached to it or consequences.

That said, in the end, intelligence services, and I would also say that civilian scientists kind of agree on one thing. And that is, they will never get the truth about this phenomenon by just relying on eyewitnesses. eyewitnesses are not enough. They're going to need instruments detecting things. They're going to need something that's incontrovertible, and that is not eyewitnesses from their standpoint. This conversation and all the current noise, as you say, is in the context of these new reports that have been done and commissioned in the teens, 2018, I believe, and then another 2021, there's 23. A lot of different agencies have been okaying this and moving ahead with different commissions to do this. So it's against that backdrop that we're having this conversation.

But really the sightings of strange things in the skies goes all the way back, really. But our modern reference points begin very specifically with June 24, 1947. Always surprised me how few people realize this. The sighting near Mount Rainier in Washington really starts the modern age of uphology. Let's nail down why flying saucers are called flying saucers. You mentioned a media construct. So on June 24, 1947, this prime. private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold is flying his small plane around Mike Rainier.

He's looking for the wreckage of a cargo crap that had crashed around there. There was a reward for anybody who spotted it. And he said that later on that when he was flying around there, he sees these nine, he first described them as pie pan-shaped objects that were flying in close formation at very high speeds. Hadn't seen anything like it before. he was convinced that these were probably military aircraft, but he thought in any of any needed to report it. He lands. He reports it to media sources, media outlets, newspapers. He reports it to the military.

And he gets interviewed. He gets interviewed. And within just a day or two, he gets reporters who are following up on this. And one of them asks him, how did this thing move? How did they move? How would you describe? He said, well, they moved like a saucer might if you skipped it across water. He did not utter the phrase flying saucer, but a very, very clever journalist who knew a good headline when he heard one, said, ah, flying saucer. And it became flying saucer. And we know that this becomes a kind of very ready-made meme out there. It goes viral, really, way before the Internet, because Gallup Poll does a, there.

survey and finds that nine out of ten Americans, six weeks later, know of this term flying saucer. It's really amazing. I met a man on a park bench in Portland, I remember. It was a secret meeting kind of framed that way for television. And he pulled out all these newspapers from his briefcase of that summer. And the tracking that was done up and down the West Coast was pretty chronological, like they could, and geographical, they sort of moved logistically down the coast. And they could, and they were seeing these things from one place to the next. He was showing this to me as like a duh kind of look. Look at this.

This has been lost to history, but it just went on for a sustained period of time. And then basically lands, so to speak, with Roswell, which is at the end of all of that. And supposedly that's one of those vehicles that would have gone down in that farm field. It was really a big deal. And it really changed the culture, didn't it? It launched everything in terms of UFOs in the 40s into the 50s. Right. I mean, from that point on, that summer of 1947, as you're talking about, there were hundreds of reports across the United States. And then they started up in other parts of the

world as well. And this whole phenomenon, this wave of sightings, Kenneth Arnold's citing, that summer also gets worldwide international news coverage. So it becomes a kind of focal point and an origin point, right, for what's going to follow? Because from that point on, this thing that wasn't just a one-off, it's clear that there's other people seeing very similar things. That becomes the cause for people to now begin to ask the question, what is it? How do we make sense of it? If it is a set of objects, who's are they? What are they doing? What's the intention here? The idea of aliens being behind it was not high on people's list. That was not where people instantly went, and that was going to take a while before that actually

gains any kind of real ground with people. But nonetheless, it was a mystery, and it was one that unsettled people, particularly if you remember the context, which is this is just very shortly after World War II. People had seen what secret weapons could do. So this was a really, really perplexing, baffling, and even kind of scary thing for a lot of people. Right. And also in the context of the Cold War.

Everyone is worried about what the Russians are doing and how they're infiltrating. Sputnik happens and therefore we're convinced they're watching us and all the rest of it. And so all of this sort of melds together in this state of mind that really does fuel the whole passion for understanding this thing. But it's not like it hadn't been done before. I mean, people have been spying objects in the sky all the way back to ancient times. You have to wonder how much UFOs contributed to the mankind's idea of the divine, honestly. the sky associated with deities and such. When did it become associated with other worlds?

That implies an understanding of our place of the universe, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, the idea that people would see anomalous things in the skies and the heavens and that these were meaningful, these were significant. The sky wasn't just observed, it was read for messages. Yes. That goes back to ancient times. The idea that we are not alone, that we might not be alone in the universe is also an old one. I think a lot of people are surprised by that, but even the ancients were debating, at least debating the issue about whether we are alone.

And even by really by the 17th century, I think most educated people in the world would have assumed that human beings aren't the only sentient beings out there in the universe. What's different is this idea that they are visiting us, that they are coming here and they are looking at us or they're communicating with us. that is in fact a very new idea. It's science, the first science fiction authors, right, the most famous probably being H.G. Wells in the 1890s, right, are really the first to imagine that in sort of a concrete way. But this idea that they are visiting us is really going to only take off with the UFO phenomenon. Other people had set up the ducks already, but it's going to be the UFO thing that says, No, no, no, I know what this all adds up to. And they are here and they are here now.

Your book concerns itself primarily with the years after World War II when all these things take off. Of course, 1947 starts so much up and you see so many movies and so forth. But 50 years before that or more, in the late 1800s, 1896 and 7, there are sightings in Northern California, a guy named H.G. Shaw, traveling in a carriage with a companion. I assume he's corroborated on this as a result. they encounter three strange beings, seven feet tall, fingers elongated, no nails, a large egg-shaped eyes sound familiar, no clothing, skin soft as velvet, he describes. This was just out in the middle of nowhere in his carriage. That's how long these have been going on. Right. It's often referred to as the great airship scare or airship mystery of the 1890s. What's interesting about it is the term airship scared doesn't really quite capture what went on because most people weren't scared. The airships that were being described in newspapers at the time described people mostly being

really fascinated with it, not terribly disturbed, really interested in sort of getting to the bottom of what they were and who was behind them. The Shaw case is also interesting because in many ways it really is an outlier too. Most of these incidents that get described don't involve the idea of strange beings from possibly other worlds. Most people who said they caught sight of or even communicated with who was piloted, the people piloting these strange aircraft, which most of the time, by the way, looked like balloons or dirigible. Yeah. Most of them described the pilots as being human beings. They were oftentimes foreigners. They spoke Spanish or they spoke German or something. So the most common scenario at that time was that these things were really

the work of a kind of an eccentric tinkerer, a kind of a Thomas Edison, right, savant of some kind who was behind it all. You get a little of this stuff that Shaw describes of aliens. But again, that line of argument tends to be an outlier. It's almost like a steampunk, isn't it? It's like these renderings that you see of these airships are quite elaborate. They couldn't possibly have been up there. So therefore, it's some sort of storytelling thing that's going on here. But it's interesting. It reminds me of growing up in South Jersey when the Jersey Devil was told to you as a Boy Scout and you'd hear these stories. And it turns out the Jersey Devil was most likely a large bird that came from Africa on, you know, stowed away on a boat from Africa and

then started scaring the heck out of South Jerseyans because it was so big and scary. There are no reference points at this point, you know. And so things we get very colorful, very quickly, whenever somebody see something that surprises them. The other backdrop of this is, of course, scientific advancement and new observations of the cosmos. Of course, most famously, we have Lowell, the astronomer, who has been identifying what become called canals on Mars, this notion that there are these signs of civilization on the surface of Mars, which is because there are new observatories, his becomes the Lowell Observatory in New Mexico. Yeah. The idea of beings, Martians, on the planet Mars, right, is one again, not entirely distinctive or unique to the 19th century, but it really accelerates in the 19th century when you have some astronomers. You mentioned Percival Lowe being one of the prominent people

who, using their telescopes, they see what they believe to be canals. Canals is a neat term to use because if there's canals, it implies engineering. And then you've got to explain, well, who's engineering them and why are they there? And, you know, an elaborate story gets concocted that if you notice them, they seem to come from the polar caps. And that means that it probably is the way in which Martians are getting water to dried out desert areas on the planet. It's an idea that really has some legs around the turn of the century. By the 1920s, it's pretty clear from astronomers that the problem was that these canals were really just artifacts of bad telescopes. That with more refined telescopes, you could find out that these were just mistaken

shapes due to the kind of inaccuracies of the instruments themselves. So by the 20s and 30s, most serious scientists don't believe there's any sentient life on the planet Mars or any planet really in our solar system. I'll be back with more American history. after this short break. It goes all hand in hand, of course, with technology moving along, which is why in the 20th century we're seeing so many more of them because suddenly we have the jet age coming upon us. And these fast-moving pilots are going around at speeds they didn't encounter before.

Who knows if that's how they're seeing these things differently than they did before. But it sure seems to skyrocket, so to speak, the sightings of UFOs going into the 20s. But again, it's also against the backdrop of war, World War I, World War II, it's always hand in hand, isn't it? This view of UFOs as an outgrowth of cultural change and the pressures that we're encountering. The thing about the UFO, right, is that no matter who's behind it, if they are real, these devices are advanced technologies. These are beyond what we are used to seeing, meaning that therefore whoever is behind it has access to knowledge

that most of us don't have, have abilities to create things using scientific and technological understanding that is beyond anything that we typically recognize in the present. And so in that sense, what the UFO thing has been as a phenomenon socially

is a way to imagine not only the present, but the future, right? Particularly if it's aliens, right? The idea of alien tech, the aliens are here visiting us in these spaceships that can do these really remarkable things. This offers us a glimpse of our potential future, right, and raises all sorts of questions about whether or not we will ever have those capabilities. Can we achieve these self-same things? But even if it's not the aliens, then what you get is, as you do today with the U.S.

government, there are worries about, oh, are we behind in a new arms race, right? Do the Russians or to the Chinese have now these advanced drones or hologram devices or something, right? This becomes the worry. So always there's been this kind of interaction with existing technologies and the kind of just sort of the cultural infrastructure surrounding those technologies. How is it that we've come up with this new age of commissions and so forth? Is it the internet and the proliferation of the imagery? I mean, has that just put too much pressure on the government? They finally have to own up to the fact that they have a lot more information than they've been letting on about? It's interesting. I mean, the renewed interests of people within the U.S. government, again, it's not an entirely unusual phenomenon. It has happened in the past, but it is something that requires a kind of critical mass.

Because there's always been a politician here and there has been interested in UFOs, tried to put it on the national agenda, the federal agenda. Harry Reid. Yeah, Harry Reid did it back then. There were people back in the 50s and 60s trying to do it. What you need, however, is you need usually a combination of some access to media. You usually need some compelling lobbyists behind it. And then you need to have some pivotal political figures who chime in. You get people like Jillebrand in New York.

You get Rubio involved. You got now Chuck Schumer in New York. You get certain people with some real clout who get on board, so to speak, and run with this. And once you get that, once you have that kind of energy, if you will, you've got enough there to make this something that can't just go away overnight. And so that's where we are. We've reached this point where you've got a certain critical mass. the question is for them and the people who pursue this politically is, is this sustainable? In the past, this kind of interest has usually been a passing fancy.

Other things usually take over. And this stuff usually then sort of moves on and they move on with their interests. So that will be the question. Is this going to be sustained over a lengthy period of time or not? I have to tell you, the report to read, I mean, there's several of them, as we mentioned, but I just printed off the internet, the NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon, Independent Study Team Report, 2003, I believe it is. It's really refreshing to read. First of all, it's very readable. It's not too heavy-handed in terms of one way or the other. Are they there or are they not? It's very objective, is what I'm saying. But it's also

fun to go through and see how you could look at this differently than you might have thought of, you know, because data matters and they're not finding the data that supports this. And it's just a refreshing kind of take on the whole thing. This again was repeated earlier, more famously a few years earlier, when they finally said, yes, we're going to do this thing. And we thought, oh, we're going to have all the answers. It's like the Kennedy assassination. Finally, we're going to know. And that did not happen. We're still sort of in the lurch, which is really where we probably will always be, frankly, which is frustrating to many, including myself. You were obviously drawn to this subject matter passionately to write such a book about this. Where did you come down on this? What were your

feelings about it yourself? I came down on this, you know, my My approach to this that I make very clear at the beginning is I'm not going to be writing a book that gives the definitive answer, are they really, are they here or not? I wasn't going to be advancing anybody's, you know, pet theory one way or the other. I also was not going to be a debunker. I felt, I felt all along that we were not being served well in the conversation by having these two sides of the true believer and the diehard skeptic just fighting it out all the time. Rather, what I wanted to do was historicize that, right?

Talk about the history of how the conversation got that way for us to see things. And so what I start to see when you do that, I think you start to see some things that are maybe a different perspective. And one of the things I came away from this was to understand that the phenomenon has been more of a mystery than a puzzle. A puzzle you can solve. A puzzle can be put together. You can get the answer one day. This is something that has always been really shrouded in a sense of mystery. And mystery is not only something that never really has an end. There are many people who are invested in preserving the mystery rather than answering questions or see the mystery as really the answer for

everything. So that, I think, was one of the things I came away from. The other thing I came away from the book was an enormous amount of admiration, if that's the right term. For all of these people who over the years have been fascinated with this and decided to create an organization or to write up a news bulletin about it, to investigate cases, these are people who did this. This was a grassroots phenomenon. This was not centrally organized. It was done out of a great love of the field. They did it by spending money out of their own pockets that they often didn't have. They did it in their free time because you couldn't get a job doing this. So they were coming home and working late at night. I came away thinking, you know, this is one of the most impressive citizen science

projects we've ever seen in that regard. And so I really came away thinking, you know, that's one of those things you need to capture. You know, the speculation about UFOs and some of the organizational dimensions of it at the top, those things are a lot of different people who at times, I think, come in and out of those circles and are really looking for fame and fortune. There's very little, by the way, to be had in this field of fortune. What I was really caught by were the all these other people who are really lost names. They are not people who were seeking fame or fortune, who just felt compelled to look into this. And I thought their stories really needed to be told. Yeah, I agree with you. I think it's such a relevant subject matter, as I have mentioned

already, as a cultural story element. So much of our media and so much of our entertainment world comes from this world. And it's important to understand how it came to pass, the events that really triggered all of this thinking. Not to mention the great minds that are behind it, imagine it, you know, the imaginations that are behind this, H.G. Wells being one of those, these are important cultural landmarks to the way we move through our lives and understanding another realm as part of that. It goes for ghosts and all the rest of it, you know, and there's a mystery to life and it's really worth embracing and understanding how people are kind of stretching out the definitions of our existence. That all being said, when you look at one of

those videos, especially of that little cigar shape that the Air Force pilot is looking at and commenting on, oh my God, you can't deny the fact that there is some crazy stuff going on there. Yeah, yeah, weird stuff. Trust me, you know, when you dive deep into this stuff, you see and hear lots and lots of weird stuff. And I will have people all the time ask me, so what's your explanation and I draw up my hands and say, don't ask me. I'm a historian. I mean, go ask an engineer, go ask a physicist, you know, go ask a pilot. Those are the people who I defer to in a lot of these things. But I don't deny for one minute that people see and have witnessed things that are absolutely bizarre, weird anomalous. I just don't see how anybody can

say definitively what they are. And I think most serious people who've looked into this over the years will often say the exact same thing. And that's part of, I think, I guess the allure of this whole phenomenon. I often like to say that the thing about the UFO mystery is that it's an invitation. It is amazingly inviting. It has space for everybody and everybody's voice. Nobody's going to stop you from chiming in and getting involved, throwing your hat in the ring and throwing some ideas out there. And it's a wonderful world in that regard.

But it's a cacophonous world. A lot of voices, and they get very animated and very loud. It's wonderful until you're on that steel table with those guys looking down at you and the probes going on. I'm on team quantum physics. I think that there's something that we have yet to get to that is being scratched at the surface of

by scientists and physicists and so forth. that really stands up to speculation anyway, that there's another realm here that we will get to down the road of life. And I think that these visitors, if they are visitors, are already there. Or we're just, you know, existence interacts with that realm

from time to time and suddenly something happens. I chalk it up to that because I need some kind of answer, but who knows? Otherwise, you're existing in the land of, you know, science fiction, which is just not fair to yourself. It's fun, but it's not fair. The book is called, After the Flying Saucers came, a global history of the UFO phenomenon.

The author has been with us all this while. Greg Agigian. Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thanks very much. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays,

all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.