Flying Saucers and the people who believe in them.

A commissioned essay by Dr David Clarke.
In reference to Project FAR. 

In August 1945 the Western world emerged, reeling, from the carnage of the Second World War. The slaughter of the bombing campaigns, the atrocities of the concentration camps and the decimation of a generation had left people blindly searching for meaning in the universe. Science’s apparent mastery over the atom only served to underscore the thin veil between the shattered certainties of the old world and the mysteries which lay beyond human existence.

Nations yearned for salvation, for some glimmer they were not alone and that there was hope for the world. Organised religion had proved powerless against evil during the Second World War, and political value systems such as communism and materialism, while superficially attractive, merely served to create further tensions setting individuals against government, country against country, ideology against ideology. People now questioned what would protect them from the outcome of a new, cold war. The smoking ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stood as witness to the certain outcome of any new conflict between the world’s superpowers and neither a political nor a religious solution seemed to be likely. For the ordinary person buffeted by events of the recent past and faced with the dawn of the atomic age a new, contemporary, source of salvation was needed. 

That salvation came not through contact with discarnate entities, but in the form of whispers from space, contact with other worlds and other intelligences. Flying saucers and messages from space rapidly became the late twentieth century’s promise of deliverance from the possibility of a nuclear conflagration. The first use of the term ‘flying saucer’ by the news media on 24 June 1947 marked the origin point of a powerful myth that penetrated all levels of society and formed the crucible in which the New Age philosophies familiar to us today were forged. Within months flying saucers, initially dismissed as a passing fad of the summer of 1947, would become one of the most powerful myths in history. The acronym U-F-O (unidentified flying object) would soon replace it in popular culture but the idea of the saucer ‘a disc or saucer-shaped object reported as appearing in the sky and alleged to come from outer space’ (John Ayto, 20th Century Words, 1999) never really left us. Nowhere did this impact more than in the British Isles.

The craze for seeing flying saucers had taken root in Britain by 1950 when it became the subject of a media frenzy. In just three years the idea of flying saucers had been successfully exported from America to Europe. Around the world, the basic foundation stones of what would become the UFO mythology were being laid down. In Britain the saucers were welcomed by those who were looking for an exciting distraction from the drab realities of post-war Britain. This was a unique time. Fears of atomic destruction, rationing and poverty existed in stark contrast with a positive and enthusiastic view of a bright future delivered through scientific and technological progress.

By 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, into orbit the idea that creatures from other worlds were observing the Earth had grown from a fringe to a mainstream belief. A host of books, newspaper articles and TV dramas including the BBC’s Quatermass helped to popularise the idea and the first UFO clubs and societies were recruiting members. One of the first magazines devoted to UFOs, Flying Saucer Review, was founded in London during 1955. In the previous year, a former taxi-driver and yoga enthusiast, George King, created the Aetherius Society, a new religious movement that was based upon belief in benevolent aliens who watched us from inhabited planets in our own solar system. He took inspiration from the Polish-American émigré, George Adamski, whose 1953 book Flying Saucers Have Landed told of his meeting with a tall, angelic Venusian spaceman in the Mojave desert. Adamski’s book, co-authored with Anglo-Irish aristocrat Desmond Leslie, became a best-seller in the UK.

Seeing and believing in flying saucers (later UFOs) quickly became a British obsession. It was a time when telepathic contact with extraterrestrials was a daily occurrence, when physical contact with extraterrestrials was expected at any moment and when vast numbers of the population believed an event of the magnitude of the Second Coming was close at hand. It impacted everyone from schoolchildren to royalty, politicians and scientists. It was during this era that amateur photographers produced some of the most iconic and mysterious photographs of ‘flying saucers’.

When I use the word myth in the context of flying saucers I am using it the context of the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word as meaning not something that is necessarily untrue, but rather ‘a traditional narrative sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.’

Perhaps disappointingly there is, as yet, no scientific evidence for the physical existence of flying saucers. But this in no way diminishes the power of the flying saucer myth or the effect it has had. Despite its subject matter, the study of flying saucers or UFOs is the study of the people who see them, who believe in them and the mechanisms by which the flying saucer myth is promulgated. 


Dr David Clarke
Centre for Contemporary Legend
Sheffield Hallam University