Among other things the Annals of Saucerology can teach us is that some endeavors in life are engineered for men and others for women.  That is the way it is—not because anti-feminists like me say so, but because Nature makes it that way.

ALAN writes:

As a diversion from current goings-on that are bad, worse, or still worse, I offer the following reminiscence from ancient times:

Many boys who grew up in the 1950s-‘60s had the good fortune to become cub scouts and boy scouts.  I did not have that good fortune.  But in the late 1960s, I became involved in another masculine endeavor.

One day in 1968, eight men sat around a table in a private home in St. Louis County and agreed to establish an informal organization.  Among them were a chemist, a mail carrier, a newspaper worker, two aerospace engineers, and a high school student.  I was that student and the youngest one there.

What we had in common was a desire to explore the controversy about Extraordinary Flying Objects.  Some of us had spoken with airline pilots or police officers who had reported seeing such objects in the sky.  The purpose of the group was to investigate and study any such reports originating in or near St. Louis.

In looking back to those years, nothing stands out more clearly than that our project was a decidedly masculine undertaking.  Such a project appealed to many teenage boys, young men, and engineering types.  It involved elements of astronomy, optics, aviation, eyewitness testimony, and detective work, things of interest primarily to men.  It was also a good introduction to the work of evaluating ideas and conflicting truth claims.

Thousands of men across the nation—businessmen, writers, engineers, professors, outdoorsmen, amateur astronomers—volunteered their time and interest in pursuit of the truth behind reports of Extraordinary Flying Objects.  But very few women did likewise.  I can remember fewer than 20 women who took an interest in that subject.

The most well-known was Coral Lorenzen [yes, “Coral”, not “Carol”], a housewife and mother of two.  She founded the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in 1952.  For more than half her life, she edited and printed a regular newsletter from her home/office in Arizona.  I exchanged a few letters with her and met her one day in 1970 at a symposium on a university campus.  A snapshot I took that evening shows her seated on the stage during a panel discussion.  All the other participants were men.  Her hair was attractively coiffed and she wore a light green dress.

A photograph from the mid-1960s shows her and her husband standing in front of their home, each of them well-dressed and her hand clasped in his.  Since everything in that picture is so right, it clearly comes from another lifetime and another metaphysical universe where men and women knew how to dress and act in public places, a quality that many Americans today offer irrefutable proof they have never learned.

She was utterly sincere and she impressed me as a thoughtful and intelligent person, although eventually I came to disagree with her.  Her interest arose partly because she had seen a strange object in the sky when she was a girl in Wisconsin and partly because she had worked in the 1950s at an air force base where Flying Saucers were a topic of discussion.  I remember her now, many years after she died, because she was kind to a young man seeking to learn the truth about the Saucer Mystery.

In the St. Louis group over a span of 10-12 years, I can remember five women who expressed an interest in the Saucer Controversy.  I spoke with them many times.  All of them were decent, thoughtful women, wives, and mothers.  Other women were also there at monthly meetings and lectures—the wives of some of the men.  But they had no interest in the realm of ideas.  They volunteered their time and energy to provide coffee and refreshments.  They were happy to do so and did not whine about being “demeaned” or “unequal”.  They provided a feminine touch at events that were almost exclusively a masculine endeavor.

One of those women and her husband went to the considerable effort of organizing a picnic for all of us every summer for ten consecutive years at beautiful Carlyle Lake in Southern Illinois.

Of all the researchers who held a skeptical attitude toward the Flying Saucer Mystery, I can recall only one woman:  Mrs. Lyle Boyd, co-author with Dr. Donald Menzel of The World of Flying Saucers (Doubleday, 1963).  All the other skeptics were men, and my journey through Saucerland made me one of them.

 It is one of the ironies of my life that I exchanged letters in the 1970s with a fellow skeptic who was a high school English teacher in Nebraska.  The irony is in the fact that only forty years later, long after we had fallen out of contact, did I discover that he had written a lengthy appreciation of the actor Robert Taylor, who came from Nebraska and testified before Congress in the 1940s about Communist involvement in the motion picture industry.  (He was against the Communists and for Americans.)  That was significant to me because my mother talked sixty years afterward about seeing Robert Taylor in the 1935 motion picture “Magnificent Obsession”, a story that impressed her; because I remembered his performance in the 1951 motion picture “Westward the Women”; and because on evenings in 1959-’60 she and I sat in our living room and watched Robert Taylor’s television series “The Detectives”.

The people who ran Hollywood in later years did not like the fact that a building at MGM Studios had been named in honor of Robert Taylor.  So they removed his name.

And then I discovered it was too late to contact my Nebraska correspondent and tell him about that additional convergence of our interests, because he died last month at age 85.

There was no one among Saucer Researchers or in tales of encounters with UFO Aliens to match the militant females depicted in motion pictures like “Abbott and Costello Go To Mars” (1953) or “Queen of Outer Space” (1958).  Most UFO Aliens were said to be men or the alien equivalent of men—with the notable exception of the Alien Female who seduced a young farmer in Brazil in 1957 (at least he said she did).

[Cary Grant, John Payne, Charlton Heston, Gary Cooper, Stewart Granger, Cornel Wilde, Steve Reeves, and Rex Harrison were available in the Northern Hemisphere…..but she chose a poor farmer in Brazil.  It must have been an example of Alien Feminist Logic, a subject pregnant with possibilities for scholars who study odd and weird things like Interplanetary Feminism.]

Among other things the Annals of Saucerology can teach us is that some endeavors in life are engineered for men and others for women.  That is the way it is—not because anti-feminists like me say so, but because Nature makes it that way.

Nearly all the men and women who became my friends in those years are gone now.  The wife of one of those men outlived her husband by 49 years and died last year at age 103.  I remember the electric feeling of adventure and discovery that we shared in those years.  The homes where we met, the meeting rooms in banks and libraries, the radio station studios, the small drugstore and big drugstore where I scouted for current magazine articles, the antiquarian bookshops where I searched for old books, the planetarium, the lakeside picnics, the sounds of those years in popular music…..all are linked in memory with those men and women.

It was a series of ideas and possibilities that inspired our interest.  I remember lengthy conversations about those things with my father, a chemist, a small business owner, aerospace engineers, an optical engineer, photographers, an attorney, an English teacher, the assistant director of the planetarium, and amateur astronomers.  It was a time when we exchanged dozens of letters that required paper, envelopes, and stamps.  Scarcely a week went by when letters or postcards did not arrive in my mailbox.  But the developments that they and I expected might take place did not in fact take place.  That I am able to remember all those people so well and hear their voices in memory is a reminder of how short life is.

We do not hear much today about Flying Saucers.  That is because the idea of Flying Saucers has outlived its appeal.  Trendy ideas are invented, live for a short while, usually because of the sensationalism of the mass communications industry, and then fade away.  Such is the fate of the Flying Saucer idea.

I remember when Saucer proponent Donald Keyhoe spoke in St. Louis in 1966.  He wrote The Flying Saucers Are Real in 1950 and repeated that claim every year for the rest of his life.  In 1966 I heard him say that within a year or so, the evidence would become so overwhelming that it would prompt the U.S. Air Force to acknowledge the existence of Flying Saucers qua Interplanetary Spaceships.  Of course that did not happen.  But Saucer fans have been making such “predictions” for decades; many are chronicled in Martin Kottmeyer’s delightful 1998 article “Still  Waiting: A List of Predictions from the UFO Culture”, here:  Anomalist Feature: Still Waiting Part 1.

After a newspaper reporter coined the term “flying saucer” in 1947, all kinds of things in the sky—wholly unrelated—got noticed, reported, and attributed to that bright, shiny new idea: The Flying Saucer.  That made about as much sense as attributing thousands of deaths—wholly unrelated to each other—to another bright, shiny new idea called “COVID-19”.  In the former case, there was no evidence or credibility to support such attributions.  In both cases, other causes abounded.

But the Flying Saucer Myth was innocuous compared with the Great Flu Fraud:  The Saucers were great fun to read about and investigate and form friendships upon; they did not destroy anyone’s business or livelihood, did not brainwash people to believe they are at deadly risk from an invisible enemy, and did not enhance the power of a central government.

And so it is, 53 years later, that I say goodbye to the Saucers and the Saucerians, who existed only in the realm of imagination inflamed by the mass communications and entertainment industries.

Saucerology was a significant chapter in mid-to-late 20th century American history, a chapter filled with colorful characters, anecdotes, illusions, tall tales, absurdities, improbabilities, literary and photographic hoaxes, and logical fallacies.  Memories of that era and those people should certainly be preserved as part of American cultural history and as the record of a science-fiction idea that was mistakenly depicted as a scientific mystery.

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