One of many books written in the 50s and 60s  about flying saucers

In Saucerology, as in much else in modern life, there was a passionate desire not to know and not to learn.  I saw this in the way journalists and Saucer Fans reacted when it was determined that a certain Flying Saucer incident involved the planet Venus. It was typical for them to say “It was just Venus” or “It was only Venus.” The key words there are “just” and “only.”  

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ALAN writes:

Nearly half a century has gone by since I last spoke with my friend Arthur. He was a chemist who worked for a company in south St. Louis. I never called him Arthur. He called himself “Art” and encouraged me to do likewise, even though he was old enough to be my father.

He was born in St. Louis but at one point moved to California and attended Hollywood High School. He then came back to St. Louis and worked as a teacher, swimming instructor, and with the Boy Scouts.

We met in 1967 because of our mutual interest in science and the Flying Saucer controversy. Separately, each of us had read many accounts by people like military and commercial airline pilots who said they had seen extraordinary objects in the sky.  Each of us had read the 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by USAF Captain Edward Ruppelt, whose job it had been to investigate and evaluate such accounts.  I bought my paperback edition at a small bookshop next to the Ritz Theater on South Grand Boulevard (both demolished years ago).  I remember reading that book in my bedroom on the night in January 1967 when a tornado struck St. Louis County.

I was a misfit at age 17. Nearly all teenage boys liked sports, cars, and girls. I liked girls but had zero interest in sports and cars. I preferred to read and to think. The Saucer Mystery provided an opportunity to do both.

While eating breakfast on the morning of Nov. 2, 1966, I heard a radio news announcer say that a UFO was in the sky at that very moment.  So I went outside to see it, and there it was: A small silvery object high in the clear, blue southwestern sky.  But it wasn’t a UFO.  It didn’t even have the letters “UFO” painted on it. I was rather disappointed that no alien beings were standing on the top deck and waving to me.

What it was was a research balloon kept aloft by high-altitude cross currents of wind. It made the front page of that evening’s newspaper [“Balloon in Sky Creates UFO Flurry Here”, St. Louis-Post Dispatch, Nov. 2, 1966]

Several months later, Art and I became friends and talked at length, by phone and in person.  His interest in the subject began in 1957, prompted by news accounts from Levelland, Texas, about an airborne object that people said caused their cars to stop functioning.  Mine began in 1963-‘64, prompted partly by visits to the McDonnell Planetarium and partly by the TV series “The Outer Limits” and classic 1950s’ science fiction movies that I saw for the first time on late-night television.

“Have We Visitors from Space?”, Life magazine asked in 1952 in response to a flurry of Flying Saucer reports.  Fifteen years later, there was still no definitive answer, but it was a question that inspired our interest.  So did John Fuller’s 1966 book Incident at Exeter, about police officers and other residents in that historic New Hampshire town who said they had seen strange objects in the sky.  We did not know then that the Flying Saucer photo on the cover of that book was a hoax perpetrated by two teenaged boys in Pennsylvania.

Bear in mind that all of that took place in the same years when Project Gemini spaceflights were very much in the news.  The Space Age was “in the culture”.

The Flying Saucer idea had also become a focus of attention in television programs like CBS Reports, in magazines like Look, Life, Science, Saturday Review, and the Saturday Evening Post, in presentations at planetariums in four states in 1967 and to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics in 1968, and in a 2-year study at the University of Colorado.

Those, we thought, were good reasons to consider that reports of strange objects in the sky might indeed add up to a bona fide mystery.

Art was one of the few men in those years with whom I could talk and expect to be taken seriously.  He invited me to his home, where we walked down the stairs into the basement and he showed me his collection of books and his workshop.  He read widely and collected articles on the subject in periodicals ranging from Science Digest to Grit to Mechanix Illustrated to Capper’s Weekly  to Science to True magazine.  (But he did not clip any articles from False magazine.)

Art and his wife were grown-ups at a time when most grown-ups still had enough good sense to act that way.  They had a certain manner of restraint and polish that was typical of American grown-ups in those years.

Over the next four years, I was a guest in their home on what must have been ten or twelve occasions.  They were extremely kind to a young man who was earnest but who knew very little about very little.  We met there for conversation, to compare notes, to share books or magazine articles, and to talk with other men and women who shared our interest and curiosity.  They included engineers, photographers, businessmen, blue-collar workers, and housewives.  We thought of ourselves as pioneers exploring uncharted territory on the borderlands of knowledge.  What we actually explored was a realm as old as history (more about this below).

Art and I looked at a famous Flying Saucer photograph that had been taken in Santa Ana, California, and was printed on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in September 1965.  Some people claimed it showed a “ground disturbance” caused by the Saucer flying above it, thereby proving it was a real object.  We did not know what the Saucer was, but Art knew immediately that the “ground disturbance” bit was nonsense.  Having lived in Southern California, he knew that the “ground disturbance” illusion was nothing more than a patch of dirt or weeds around a common standpipe alongside the road shown in the picture.

In 1967, astronomer J. Allen Hynek spoke at Washington University in St. Louis on “The UFO as a Scientific Problem”.  He had been a consultant to the USAF’s Project Blue Book since 1948.  He was a legitimate scientist and spoke with caution and moderation.  He suggested that there might be something in the nature of “scientific paydirt” to be found in Flying Saucer anecdotes.  Art and I were in the audience that evening, as we were also when Hynek spoke at the McDonnell Planetarium in 1970, and at a dinner meeting of the St. Louis Aero Club in 1971.  We also attended lectures by astronomers Donald Menzel and Peter Van de Kamp.

In February 1968, I accompanied Art as he drove to a dairy farm near Walsh, Illinois, to speak with a woman who, with her children, had seen a mysterious airborne object over her garage one evening the previous year.  We took notes and made sketches.  Our purpose was not to confirm or dispute such accounts but to investigate, weigh, and consider what might be learned from them.  Our impression was that some such reports were indeed mystifying.  Many times I heard Art say that we were engaged in what he called “the greatest detective story of all time.” It seemed that way to us in those years.

One Sunday in August 1968, Art and I drove to a combination potluck picnic-meeting at the home of a fellow researcher.  On another day we drove to the small, sleepy town of Freeburg, Illinois, to meet a high school student with whom we had exchanged letters earlier that year and who wanted to learn more about the subject.  The other “Art” I remember from 1968 was Art Fleming on NBC-TV’s “Jeopardy”, whom I thought was the perfect host and whose program I had the pleasure of watching on some weekdays that summer.

I spent many hours in two antiquarian bookshops, looking for certain old books and magazine articles and then telling Art what treasures I had found.

Art arranged for us to use a meeting room in the historic Christ Church Cathedral building in downtown St. Louis.  It was right across the street from the gleaming exterior of the Sheraton-Jefferson Hotel.  (It was gleaming then.  It is indescribably ugly, boarded-up, and deteriorating now.)

On a cold night later that year, Art and I attended a lecture by a young science writer from England in the 3^rd-floor meeting room of the St. Louis Public Library.

In 1969, Art and I met and became friends with the assistant director of the McDonnell Planetarium.  I write these words in 2019 on the day after Christmas. It was exactly fifty years ago that the three of us appeared as guests on a radio program in Centralia, Illinois, on the day after Christmas in 1969.

Art gave a speech in Quincy, Illinois, spoke with some of his co-workers who had seen airborne lights that puzzled them, and was interviewed on KXOK Radio by veteran St. Louis deejay Mort Crowley.

In Saucerology, as in much else in modern life, there was a passionate desire not to know and not to learn. I saw this in the way journalists and Saucer Fans reacted when it was determined that a certain Flying Saucer incident involved the planet Venus. It was typical for them to say “It was just Venus” or “It was only Venus.” The key words there are “just” and “only”.

Venus is in fact one of the most majestic sights in the sky. (See it now in the western sky at evening twilight.)  It was shot at by the U.S. Navy during World War II, mistaken for the headlight of an approaching locomotive, reconnoitered by helicopters over Washington, D.C., and reported as a UFO hundreds of times by police officers and other “reliable observers”.  I often heard Allen Hynek say that he could find at least ten thousand people who couldn’t tell Venus from a hole in the ground.  And he was right.  Misidentifications of Venus offered excellent opportunities to learn about auto-kinetic illusions, line-of-sight illusions, the illusion of lateral movement, and the common tendency to misinterpret or over-interpret what the eye sees. But Saucer Fans were too busy looking for Space Aliens to bother with lessons like those. They wanted to find what was not there, not to see what was there.

In June 1970, Art and his wife and I were at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, to attend a day-long conference where professors and researchers offered their assessment of the Flying Saucer question and whether it merited continued scientific study.  They said it did, and we agreed.

Midway through that day’s presentations, we walked outside and I took a snapshot as Art and his wife stood on a walkway on the campus.  Framed and hanging on a wall in my apartment for many years now, it shows them wearing their characteristic warm smiles, Art in a brown suit with pastel shirt and tie, and Virginia in a bright yellow dress.  It is a silent but vivid reminder of two of the kindest people I have ever known.  So young was I in those years and so unaware of how friendships could be short-circuited by events beyond our control.

The last time I saw Art was in the summer of 1971 when we sat and talked in the driveway outside his home.  He spoke more slowly than usual, and he and all the rest of us knew he was not well.  Several weeks later he died in middle age from the effects of Hodgkin’s disease.  At the funeral parlor I spoke with his wife to convey my sympathy, and she thanked me for copies of photographs I had given to them during the years of our friendship.

In 2010, I visited the St. Louis Public Library and walked up and down the same marble staircase and stood right outside the same meeting room where Art and I had walked and spoken on that night 42 years earlier.  I tried to remember how it felt to be there with him and other friends.  I had long since abandoned my interest in the Saucer topic but I could never forget my friend Art.

Nothing lasts.  I am now older than all the people mentioned above were in the years when I knew them.  On a corner at a busy intersection where we would turn on our way to Art’s home, there was a tavern built of white and grey stone.  It was a neighborhood landmark and had been there forever. A year ago I went by that location, only to see that it had closed and been torn down.

Years after Art died, I came to the conclusion that we had been mistaken and that there are no Flying Saucers, although there were thousands of anecdotes claiming otherwise.  The anecdotes were real.  The Flying Saucers were not.  Captain Ruppelt himself arrived at the same conclusion several years after he published his book, expressing his final judgment that Flying Saucers were a Space-Age myth.

If he were here today, would Art agree with that judgment?  I am not sure.

“Among my souvenirs” from those years are both editions of Capt. Ruppelt’s book, a letter from one of his friends, a few letters from Hynek, snapshots of Art and other friends, and Dr. Menzel’s inscription in my copy of his 1963 book The World of Flying Saucers.

I spoke with Allen Hynek several times and attended ten of his lectures. He was a dear, sweet man who, in later years, wrote much that I thought was nonsense (about “parallel universes” and alien beings with magical powers).  In the same years when Hynek was becoming more receptive to the Flying Saucer idea, I was becoming more skeptical.  At the Aero Club that evening in 1971, I took a snapshot that shows Hynek making a point in conversation with my friend Art in the moments after the dinner. I sometimes wonder what Art would have thought about Hynek’s highly fanciful writing only five years later.

Art died long before Americans began telling elaborate stories of being kidnapped and experimented upon by Alien Beings, and of highly-advanced Alien Spaceships that traveled millions of miles through the darkness of interstellar space but nevertheless crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947, thus providing a sensational “case” about which people could write books and make movies.  Art was a practical-minded, down-to-earth fellow. I doubt he would have found such colorful tales any more credible than I did.

Did we waste our time and efforts in those years when we pursued the Saucer Mystery? No. The Flying Saucer idea provided a superb opportunity to observe the birth and development of a modern myth.

Chasing the Saucers taught us nothing about exotic spaceships (there were none) or alien beings (there were none). But the Saucer Mystery was great entertainment and a tremendous boon to the mass communications industry.

[A measure of how firmly the Flying Saucer idea had established itself in American life in the 1950s-‘60s can be seen in the wonderful illustrations of books, magazines, comic books, toys, and merchandising gimmicks at the website UFOPOP, here: UFOPOP: Flying Saucers In Popular Culture. ]

The Annals of Saucerology are filled with lessons about the limitations of eyewitness testimony, how to evaluate such testimony, how to navigate the night sky, atmospheric and optical-physiological illusions, and men’s capacity to deceive themselves and be deceived.  There are also lessons about how the shallowness of modern journalism was a key factor in the promotion of the Flying Saucer idea.

That idea generated a tremendous volume of literature, and I think it is worth preserving and studying as a chronicle of 20^th-century folklore, fake-lore, and myth-making.  My friend David Marler has worked many years to create one of the most impressive and comprehensive private collections of Saucer and UFO-related books, pamphlets, periodicals, news clippings, letters, photographs, films, audio recordings, video tapes, and ephemera.  Dave is such a decent fellow that he agrees to speak even with me, although he knows I am a hopeless UFO Skeptic.  When the day comes when he decides it is no longer practical for him to oversee his vast collection, he will deed it to the University of New Mexico. I can only hope that its custodians there will take as much care to maintain and expand it as Dave did to create and build it.

My friend Art was right when he said we were involved in a great detective story.  But the solution that proved satisfactory to me turned out not at all to be other-worldly, as I know he expected it would.  The truth, I concluded, lay in the wonder-filled realm of human imagination, error, fallibility, deception, self-deception, and storytelling — not in the stars or alien visitors from other planets, a “parallel universe,” or another dimension.

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