{"id":4553,"date":"2016-09-22T13:14:24","date_gmt":"2016-09-22T13:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/?p=4553"},"modified":"2016-09-22T15:00:27","modified_gmt":"2016-09-22T15:00:27","slug":"the-rise-and-fall-of-the-ufo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/2016\/09\/22\/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-ufo\/","title":{"rendered":"The rise and fall of the UFO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted on behalf of Daniel Cressey<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"ARC028<\/a>It seems amazing that anyone ever believed in them. In the mid-twentieth-century heyday of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), grainy pictures of flying saucers hovering in the sky were a staple<\/a> even in \u00a0respectable magazines such as Time<\/em> and Life<\/em><\/a>. Volumes were written earnestly detailing the visits of aliens. This novel form of cold war paranoia seemed to seep into the collective psyche on both sides of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

For believe they did. A sizeable section of the public ate up cheap books on saucers and devoured tales of visitors from beyond our planet, whether their intent was good or ill. Fortunately for anyone enamoured of American subcultures in all their garish glory, the speculative-fiction writer Jack Womack<\/a> has amassed a huge collection of these books, from sex-obsessed adult novels to earnest pseudo-academic treatises. He reproduces many of these gems in his lavishly illustrated menagerie of the tracts, Flying Saucers Are Real<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"ARC028<\/a>

A 1955 title.<\/p><\/div>\n

They range from what Womack calls the \u201cfinest science fiction cover to ever appear on a non-science fiction book\u201d (The Flying Saucers Are Real<\/em> by Donald Keyhoe<\/a>) to the mundane (Richard S. Shaver\u2019s 1948 I Remember Lemuria<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n

While Womack is deeply invested in these books, he doesn\u2019t spare them. UFO Photographs Around the World<\/em> Vols 1 and 2, he notes, \u201coffers the most complete compilation of lens flares, camera smudges, film imperfections, blurs and jiggled shots ever published\u201d. Womack points out that British linguist Gavin Gibbons (author of The Coming of the Space Ships<\/em> (1956) and They Rode In Space Ships<\/em> (1957)), and others from the UK brought \u201ca wide-eyed if not overly creative spirit to the field\u201d. Gibbons rewrote other people\u2019s UFO encounters, \u201cmanaging to make their accounts far less interesting\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is no attempt to deconstruct the reasons behind the rise and fall of the UFO. Instead, Womack seems to be attempting to understand a bizarre lost cult by collecting the artefacts they left.<\/p>\n

We learn of George Adamski<\/a>, born in Poland in 1891, who ended up founding the \u201cRoyal Order of Tibet\u201d in California (and co-writing the 1953 Flying Saucers Have Landed<\/em>) before setting up an eatery. Adamski\u2019s \u2018close encounters\u2019 include a man who claimed to be from Venus \u2014 evidenced by the fact that his \u201ctrousers were not like mine\u201d.\u00a0In Britain, Leonard G. Cramp\u2019s 1966 UFOs and Anti-Gravity<\/a><\/em> purported to lay bare the engineering of the flying saucer, complete with detailed blueprints, which he apparently thought revealed an anti-gravity system \u201csimilar to one of his own devising\u201d.<\/p>\n

Womack describes another book, Flying Saucer from Mars<\/em> (1954), as written by \u201cCedric Allingham\u201d \u2014 a hoax said to have been perpetrated by a now-deceased British astronomer and his friend. This friend apparently admitted pretending to be Allingham to give a talk<\/a> to a flying saucer club, during which he wore a false moustache.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Harold<\/a>

Harold T. Wilkins’s 1954 text.<\/p><\/div>\n

Womack\u2019s book can be as confusing to follow as the arguments of his UFO proponents. The typefaces switch to signal passages from source materials, and covers, photos and drawings abound. Following the huge numbers of authors mentioned and whether they are believers, hoaxers or fictional becomes something of a task. There is no clear logic to this collection of what science-fiction luminary William Gibson calls \u201ctestimonials to certain human needs\u201d in the introduction.<\/p>\n

Some of the notes accompanying the awesome images are brief and baffling. We read on page 10:\u00a0\u201cWhen John C. Sherwood was seventeen, Gray Barker published his book, Flying Saucers are Watching You<\/em> (1967), a dry account of events during the 1966 Michigan Flap. Barker\u2019s congratulation, post-publication, \u2018Evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp.\u2019\u201d Who Sherwood and Barker are, and what the \u201cMichigan Flap\u201d was, we can only guess.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Womack\u2019s collection is heading to Georgetown University Library in Washington DC, to be preserved<\/a> among its special collections. It may stand as a monument to collective lunacy, a testament to how easily people can be led down the garden path, or simply a collection of egregious publishing mistakes. Whichever it is, Womack has preserved a record of something that felt very real to a great many people. These books began emerging, after all, around a decade after the filmmaker and theatre impresario Orson Welles inadvertently frightened an estimated<\/a> 1.2 million US listeners during his famous 1938 radio broadcast<\/a> of an adaption of H.G. Wells\u2019s The<\/em> War of the Worlds<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, the ubiquitous advanced cameras mean the lack of convincing photographs is more and more of a problem for believers. The evidence collected here is as \u2018real\u2019 as flying saucers will ever get.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Daniel Cressey is a senior reporter for Nature<\/em> in London. He tweets at @dpcressey. Flying Saucers Are Real<\/em> is the first book release of New York City publisher Anthology Editions<\/a>, a partnership between Boo-Hooray Gallery<\/a> and Anthology Recordings.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For\u00a0Nature\u2019<\/em>s full coverage of science in culture, visit\u00a0<\/strong>www.nature.com\/news\/booksandarts<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems amazing that anyone ever believed in them. In the mid-twentieth-century heyday of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), grainy pictures of flying saucers hovering in the sky were a staple even in \u00a0respectable magazines such as Time and Life. Volumes were written earnestly detailing the visits of aliens. This novel form of cold war paranoia seemed to seep into the collective psyche on both sides of the Atlantic.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3353,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,21,45,545341],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","category-psychology","category-science-fiction","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3353"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}