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	The Fifties in America follows the publisher’s successful The Sixties in America. The Fifties, however, has expanded coverage with 640 entries that... prove important enough to make this a priority purchase.
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Fifties in America
Flying Saucers

Definition: Unexplained aerial phenomena

During the 1950's, fascination with flying saucers reflected not only the curiosity of Americans at the dawn of the space age but also their fears of invasion and conquest during the Cold War.

Reports of anomalous objects in the skies of the United States date back at least as far as the nineteenth century. Such objects were first dubbed "flying saucers" in the summer of 1947, when amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing metallic objects flying in formation over Mount Rainier in Washington State. A reporter coined the term "flying saucers" when he mistook Arnold's description of how the objects moved through the air--as flat objects skim across water--for an description of their shapes. The misnomer was maintained in media and public usage, however, and Americans routinely used it in discussing the frequent sightings of airborne oddities throughout the decade, regardless of the shape of the purported objects.

A popular debate raged across North America about the validity of witnesses' claims, with skeptics attributing the accounts to hoaxes, lies, hallucinations, and misidentification of conventional aircraft and meteorological phenomena. "Believers" tended to see the saucers as craft, probably extraterrestrial spaceships piloted by visitors from other planets.

Tales and Texts
Flying-saucer reports during the 1950's offer some of the most colorful stories in the history of what has come to be called "ufology" (the study of UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects, which became a less sensational phrase later adopted by both skeptics and believers alike). For example, one night in September of 1952, a saucer supposedly set down on a hilltop in Flatwoods, West Virginia, discharging a strange mist, a fetid odor, and a tall, monstrous humanoid alien with fiery orange eyes that chased a woman and some children who had come to investigate. In August of 1955, members of a family were allegedly besieged in their house in a remote region near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, by a band of hideous, goblinlike aliens with clawed hands.

Such stories inspired much derision during the decade; however, it is also true that the 1950's provided some of the more credible UFO incidents to date and witnessed the publication of some of the most credible and serious-minded investigations into the mystery. For example, photos of metallic-looking disks speeding through foggy skies near McMinnville, Oregon in May of 1950, resisted debunking as a hoax or depiction of conventional objects. In the summer of 1952, a widely publicized spate of sightings in Washington, D.C., provided dozens of credible witnesses, and the objects sighted actually registered on local radar screens.

Both the American and Canadian governments set up official entities to investigate saucer sightings--Project Grudge in the United States, Project Second Storey in Canada--and a retired Marine Corps officer, Major Donald Keyhoe, wrote a number of best-selling books on the subject, including The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950) and Flying Saucers From Outer Space (1953). In 1959, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who remains the most respected figure ever to undertake an investigation of the subject, wrote Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. In it, Jung considered sightings from the standpoint of mythic and psychological archetypes but without wholly ruling out the possibility that some saucers may represent a physical reality.

Hopes of Contact, Fears of Conquest
As reports of sightings appeared in newspapers and magazines around America, flying saucers also became a major presence in films of the decade that reflected the era's worries about communist infiltration and Soviet invasion. Film after film--including Invaders from Mars (1953), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), and Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)--dealt explicitly both with imminent threats of violent attacks on America by outsiders or with more subtle, insidious invasions by "fifth-columnists" of other-worldly origin.

One of the best of era's saucer films--The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)--demonstrated an opposite reaction to the phenomenon, one of a near-religious hope for planetary redemption. In this film, a messianic alien lands his flying saucer in Washington, D.C., to preach a gospel of brotherhood and pacifism. This movie captured the spirit of a reaction that contrasted quite sharply with fears that many Americans held of invasion and conquest by "others": The hope that saucer aliens would prove to be "Space Brothers," highly advanced humanoids that could save Earth from war, pollution, greed, and nuclear annihilation. This interstellar gospel of good will was spread by colorful prophets and pundits such as George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, and Orfeo Angelucci, who claimed contact with the saucer beings and presented themselves as the aliens' messengers, sent forth to proclaim doctrines of nonviolence and the essential confraternity of all sentient beings. Dubbed "contactees," these people traveled America throughout the decade giving lectures on the dangers of war and nuclear weapons and regaling their audiences both with accounts of tours of the solar system that they had taken with their alien friends and with reports of the tranquility of the utopian societies on the saucer beings' home worlds.

Impact
As humanity began to venture out into space during the late 1950's, it was only natural that curiosity about what was "out there" would consume Americans. In many ways, the flying-saucer mythos of the decade constituted a popular, folkloric manifestation of that curiosity, but, more importantly, it mirrored the fears of conquest by outsiders and destruction by nuclear warfare that haunted people during this era. Moreover, in the tales of the contactees, flying-saucer lore addressed Americans' hopes and dreams that perhaps their current problems might have a peaceful outcome.

Further Reading
Evans, Hilary, and Dennis Stacy. UFOs 1947-1997: Fifty Years of Flying Saucers. London: John Brown, 1997. A concise history by two UFO historians and investigators, containing a very thorough chapter on the phenomenon during the 1950's.

Peebles, Curtis. Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. A thorough history of the topic from a skeptical viewpoint.

Rux, Bruce. Hollywood vs. the Aliens: The Motion Picture Industry's Participation in UFO Dis-Information. Berkeley: Frog, 1997. A worthwhile analysis of saucers and aliens in films, which includes interesting information on 1950's saucer films.

Thompson, Keith. Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1991. An overview from a folklorist's standpoint.

Thomas Du Bose

See Also
Army-McCarthy hearings; Atomic bomb; Cold War; Comic books; Day the Earth Stood Still, The; Destination Moon; Fads; Forbidden Planet; Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Pulp magazines; Space race; Sputnik I; Thing from Another World, The.