A decade after the Kenneth Arnold and Roswell incidents, theories about flying saucers were flying around as much as the saucers themselves. UFO sightings had increased enormously and the public clamored for as much information as could be served up by so-called "experts".
I remember while in grade school devouring with rapt attention Frank Edwards' book, "Flying Saucers, Serious Business". First published in 1966, it contained a string of accounts of sightings and encounters with unidentified flying objects. I became just as captivated as the next person.
So, ten years after Roswell, the venerable pulp magazine, AMAZING STORIES published a special UFO issue (Vol. 31 No. 10, October 1957). After two fiction stories, the rest of the issue was dedicated to the discussion of flying saucers. Articles were written by former AMAZING STORIES editor, Ray Palmer, Richard "Dero" Shaver, and a number of other contemporary researchers and speculators.
A interesting window into the phenomenon that is still with us today!
The seventies were the decade of UFO mania. There were UFO documentaries, Project UFO on TV, even a UFO Flying Saucers comic book by Gold Key.
ReplyDeleteOne of the better made UFO documentaries was "UFOs It Has Begun" with Rod Serling as the narrator.
In one of the segments, Dr. Jacques Vallée explains why a UFO hasn't been captured by land based space scanning radar, since space tracking radar was designed to track things that are known to be in a particular orbit, such as rockets and satellites, but not everything in space such as meteorites.
UFOs are still a subject to debate even today.
Thank you for this thought provoking post.