How UFOs Exploded Into Public View

Above, yours truly with a couple of other attendees of the 2018 Roswell UFO Festival.

Ever wondered how the flying saucer or U.F.O. phenomenon burst into the public consciousness?

The New York Times, in an article posted on August 3, takes a look back on how flying saucers became serious business.

It starts with:

In the early morning of July 20, 1952, Capt. S.C. “Casey” Pierman was ready for takeoff at Washington National Airport, when a bright light skimmed the horizon and disappeared. He did not think much of it until he was airborne, bound for Detroit, and an air traffic controller told him two or three unidentified flying objects were spotted on radar traveling at high speed. 

The controller told Captain Pierman to follow them, the pilot told government investigators at the time. Captain Pierman agreed, and headed northwest over West Virginia where he saw as many as seven bluish-white lights that looked “like falling stars without tails,” according to a newspaper report. 

The sighting of whatever-they-were garnered headlines around the world. And in the decades since, U.F.O.s have become part of the pop culture zeitgeist, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “The X-Files.” In September, a star of that long-running series, Gillian Anderson, will appear in “UFO,” a movie about a college student haunted by sightings of flying saucers. A “Men in Black” remake is in the works. And the History Channel plans to air “Project Blue Book,” a scripted series about the government program that studied whether U.F.O.s were a national threat.

On the Roswell incident in 1947, the article states:

The events in Washington were not the first unexplained encounter report. Debris from what observers called a “flying disc” had been spotted in Roswell, N.M., five years earlier, which Army officials said was from a “weather balloon.” By 1952, though, a number of sightings of U.F.O.s were being reported across the country and the nation was on edge.

To read more, go here.