copyright (c) 1990 by Martin S. Kottmeyer
[Reprinted from “Magonia” Magazine, Jan. 1990, by permission of the author]
Culture is an admixture of repetition and variation, convention and creativity, signals and noise. It is ever new and forever old as humanity relives old dreams and nightmares or forgets and forges new ones. Part of the delight of history is the recognition that however new a given event appears, traces of the past can generally be discerned.
If the UFO phenomenon is an artifact of culture one would reasonably expect that cultural antecedent could be recognized for the major features it presents. Extraterrestrials, however, should be independent of culture and if they are newly arrived their characteristics should represent a discontinuity with the past. Abduction phenomenon students have recently offered some provocative claims that such discontinuities exist. Implicitly they are claims for the weakness of the sociopsychological paradigm ant the converse power of the ETH.
David Jacobs argues that the imagery of the UFO phenomenon sprang up _ex nihilo_ in 1947. Budd Hopkins states that the complex, controlling, physically frail beings of abduction reports bear no similarity to “traditional sci-fi gods and devils“. Thomas E. Bullard makes the rather more modest claim that the keystone of the abduction mystery, the interrupted journey of Betty and Barney Hill, had no cultural sources from which to derive the experience they reported. They were, to quote him, “entirely un-predisposed” since they were the first. These are forceful challenges to the proponent of the cultural origin of UFO phenomena. They have “Falsify me, I dare you” plastered on them. Can it be demonstrated that culture predisposed people to have these experiences?
The boldest claim is the one by UFO historian David Jacobs. Jacobs states “there was no precedent for the appearance or the configuration of the objects in 1947” in popular science fiction films, popular science fiction or popular culture in general. They did not resemble the fanciful rocketships or earthly space travel contraptions in the SF literature. [1]
There is a trivial sense in which this is simply wrong. Disc-shaped spaceships have a number of precedents in popular culture. They appear in Buck Rogers as far back as 1930. [2] They appear in a Flash Gordon comic strip in 1934.[3] The science-fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul was drawing saucer-like craft as early as 1931 and did so repeatedly.[4]
Other SF illustrators also utilized the disc form long before 1947.[5] But these are inevitable coincidences in a large body of artistic creativity. The saucer form was not the dominant shape of spaceships in the culture; it was the rocket. In this larger sense, Jacobs is correct that one would expect an outbreak of ghost rockets over America if the images of SF were the determinant of what people should be imagining. They weren’t.
The cultural source of the UFO lies in a journalistic error. Kenneth Arnold‘s report of mysterious supersonic objects flying near Mount Rainier was a sensation that made front-page news across the nation. The speed was far beyond that of the planes of the era and no one publicized the flight in advance. It was an exciting puzzle.
The shape of the objects Arnold saw is hard to describe in a word or two. It wasn’t like a plane or rocket, or even a disc. When the newsman Bill Bequette wrote the story up for the news services he recalled Arnold’s describing the motion of the objects as like a saucer if you skip it across the water.
Jumbling the metaphorical intent of the description, Bequette labeled the objects “flying* saucers”, Arnold said the term arose from “a great deal of misunderstanding”. The public, however, did not know that.
No drawing accompanied the story.
People started looking for flying saucers and that is exactly what they found. They reported flat, circular objects that look like flying saucers sound like they should look like. Equally important: no one reported objects like the drawing in Arnold’s report to the Air Force.[6] The implications of this journalistic error are staggering in the extreme. Not only does it unambiguously point to a cultural origin of the whole flying saucer phenomenon, it erects a first-order paradox into any attempt to interpret the phenomenon in extraterrestrial terms: Why would extraterrestrials redesign their craft to conform to Bequette’s error?
This paradox is especially bad news for abduction reports. By Bullard’s tally 82% of craft descriptions fit the flying saucer stereotype.[7] This is far in excess of the approximately one-third portion saucers and discs make up in a more general population of UFO reports.[8]
If imagination and cultural expectations play a larger role in abductions than in more reality-constrained misinterpretations of mundane stimuli, then this fact makes sense. The flying saucer mythos perfectly predisposes us to include flying saucers in our fantasies and nightmares about extraterrestrials.
This takes care of the craft, but what of the entities? Budd Hopkins emphasizes that they are complex, controlling, physically frail beings who are forced by survival needs to search out and abduct earthlings. This is quite unlike the godly aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the kindly, spiritual alien of The Day The Earth Stood Still, or the aliens of War of The Worlds who “mindlessly devour and conquer us“, as Hopkins sees it. Nothing by his abductees “in any way suggests traditional sci-fi gods and devils“, he wants us to know.[9]
