Flying Saucers

Ed Ayers: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia and the Robert and Joseph Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan C.: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains a history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: And I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh: Each week, Nathan, Ed, our colleague Joanne Freeman and I, all historians, take a topic from the news and we try to see how we got here.

Nathan C.: And we’re going to start off today in 1947, playing over Mount Rainier in Washington State.

Brian Balogh: And was it rough here, Nathan?

Ed Ayers: And who is playing this thing?

Nathan C.: It’s all right, all right. We’re in a plane of a businessman named Ken Arnold and we’re actually out here helping with a recovery mission.

Jeffrey Kripal: A military plane went down somewhere in the mountains in Washington State and a call went out to private pilots to go look for this plane.

Nathan C.: This is historian Jeffrey Kripal.

Jeffrey Kripal: Ken Arnold was one of these pilots that was flying around Washington State looking for a downed military plane.

Nathan C.: While Ken Arnold was in the air, he came upon something peculiar.

Jeffrey Kripal: Nine objects flying in perfect formation whizzing around the sky at speeds that he knew as a pilot were not possible for any ordinary plane.

Nathan C.: Since this happened in the early days of the Cold War, Arnold assumed they were enemy aircraft.

Jeffrey Kripal: The assumption was if the Soviets were going to bomb us, they were going to come from the Northwest, so he radioed in like a good patriot and reported exactly what he saw.

Nathan C.: But based on what he was seeing, Arnold wasn’t so sure they were even aircraft at all.

Jeffrey Kripal: They were round and they had a kind of manta ray-like tail behind them.

Nathan C.: He said they flew at speeds no human pilot could survive and moved erratically like fish or the tail of a kite. Word of Arnold’s encounter spread throughout the aviation community and eventually to reporters who were eager to hear the details.

Jeffrey Kripal: One of them was a guy named Bill Bequette, and when Arnold described what these objects looked like and how they were flying, he said they skipped like a saucer or a teacup across the water. In other words, they didn’t fly. They kind of skipped across the sky and Bequette picked that up and it was Bequette actually that coined the phrase flying saucer.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, I could live with those flying saucers if I wasn’t worried that they being driven by alien invaders.

Nathan C.: Well, now, this is the Cold War and there were certainly ideas and fears of invasion of various kinds especially in the late 1940s.

Jeffrey Kripal: This is went people are building bomb shelters in their backyard and this is shortly after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so there’s tremendous fear around nuclear warfare and tremendous fear around the Cold War and so the idea of an extraterrestrial invasion I think was a very powerful way of expressing all of these anxieties and these fears.

Nathan C.: But Ken Arnold who actually saw these things drew other conclusions.

Jeffrey Kripal: Arnold did not believe that what he saw were mechanical. He didn’t think they were flying machines. He thought that they were alive and that they had emerged from some other world or some other dimension and he even thought that they were emerging from some other world that was related to the place where we go when we die, so he had a kind of spiritual reading of what he witnessed.

Nathan C.: Kripal says this spiritual reading is often lost in a world that demands scientific proof.

Jeffrey Kripal: We’ve lost the ability to think about things in spiritual or religious terms and we can only understand things in scientistic or technological ways and so you get these mythologies.

Nathan C.: So today on the show, we’re talking about things in the sky that we can’t explain, unidentified flying objects.

Stephen Finley: He claimed to have been taken into what he calls the mother wheel and those are his words.

Benjamin Z.: Their bodies would rise from the dead. A UFO would come down and hoover and pick them up with a tractor beam.

Jeffrey Kripal: Sometimes it’s machine-like, sometimes it’s plasma-like or a ball of light and completely changes how they think of the world.

Thomas Bullard: And even though these objects are unidentified, they can still tell us a lot about ourselves and about American History.

Stephen Finley: We’ll talk about why many African Americans view UFOs as friendly.

Jeffrey Kripal: Why a group of Americans believe a spacecraft would take them to heaven and why some people believe that a scientific framework may not be the best way to understand the UFO phenomena.