A UFO ALBUM

The most famous of all Contactees was George Adamski (1891 - 1965), who said his very sharp, closeup saucer photos were taken with an astronomical telescope, and showed a Scout Ship launched from a giant mother ship in earth orbit. [He had photos of it too, and later claimed to visit it.] His photos are sharp enough to show the Scout Ship is the top of a chicken brooder of the day, complete with dark infrared lightbulb. Reflections in the bulb show the photo was taken indoors using 3 floodlights, and the photo is sharp enough to show no glass in the "portholes" (actually vent holes in the brooder).  Adamski was the leader of a tiny religious cult, The Royal Order of Tibet, based on Theosophy.  His saucer pilots were friendly, telepathic blonde human males from the planet Venus, a planet highly significant in Theosophical teachings. Here is a recent profile of Adamski and his era.

The most famous saucer photos other than those of Adamski were probably those from farmer Paul Trent, living near McMinville, Oregon, taken in 1950. Modern analysis of the two sharp photos he took indicates the saucer is the hollow metal shell intended to protect the side view mirror of a truck of the day, hung by a thread from the lowest of the two overhead wires clearly seen in the photo. Examination of the original negatives shows photos of a childrens' birthday party, then one saucer photo, then more birthday party images, then the other saucer photo, then other photos for a Mother's Day party!  Making an animated gif from the two photos, which lines up the overhead wires, shows that the saucer is the same distance from the camera as the two wires.

On the same roll of film before the UFO photos is a shot of Trent's son on a stepladder right below the wires where the UFO was to be hung!

Not famous any more, but here are some of my personal favorites. The then 14-year-old Allan Smith won a prize from a local Tulsa, Oklahoma newspaper in August 1965 for his color closeup of a UFO! [Beginning in circa 1960, almost all UFO photos were in full color!] 1965 was one of the banner years for UFO photos; a record number were taken in that year alone. Smith's photo is unique enough and clear enough to identify what it is a photo of, very conclusively.

My other all-time favorite UFO photo was also taken in August 1965, from the inside of a pickup truck, by Rex Heflin. He got three Polaroid shots of a lid-shaped UFO flying over Myford Road, South of Santa Ana, CA. It's obvious that the image shows a jar lid, suspended by thread from a board lying across the top of the cab of the truck. But like all the hundreds of UFO photos taken in the late summer of 1965, all heavily publicized by newspapers and TV, it served the main purpose of touching off another huge "flap" of UFO sightings all across the US.  And UFO fanatics still proclaim this and other similar photos to be "undeniable evidence" of extraterrestrial jar lids just arrived from outer space, freely flying around in the earth's lower atmosphere. A good exercise for them would be to take a UFO photo too, with no UFO being present... using ordinary  small items readily available in the immediate environment.



So far, all media reports of, and books about, people supposedly being "abducted" by space aliens have been crude and often laughable hoaxes.

So far, all reports of crashed UFOs and associated corpses of space aliens have been laughable hoaxes, except for the very first report, from Roswell, NM in 1947. The seed of this later much fictionalized report was an actual event, the finding of some pieces of a high altitude research balloon and parts of its instrument package. The balloon flight was part of the so-called Project Mogul. The balloon fabric, of mylar, and the frame of the instrument package, made of white plastic, were baffling to the finders... both mylar and plastic consumer items were largely unknown in 1947, though they quickly became familiar a few years later.


Inspiration from the past!

• A hilarious survey of what's in British archives of UFO sightings!

• Gosh darn it, they make it way too easy now!!!

• The legendary Ann Arbor Saucer Landing!



One of the very first plastic model kits ever sold, in the very early 1950s, was a flying saucer with pilot!
This cover of the November 1929(!) issue of a pulp magazine was the very first to depict a flying saucer, here kidnapping a skyscraper. The cover did not illustrate a story in the magazine, but was a collaboration of the magazine's editor and staff artist.



In the mid-1950s, MGM was the first large studio to make a space adventure movie. The script was based on Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST, and the explorers from earth investigating a lost interstellar colony traveled in a flying saucer! The movie? FORBIDDEN PLANET!  This film made a big impression on Gene Roddenberry, the later creator of the TV series STAR TREK, and in that series the main space ship, the Enterprise, is also a sort of flying saucer, although it also has outrigger engines.


Like medical quackery, belief in UFOs/UAPs is increasingly considered a widespread social problem rather than just a fringe interest, negatively influencing political discourse and public trust. Continually revived by the mass media, and often conspiracy-driven, such constantly reinforced beliefs threaten to further erode scientific evidence standards, foster vague anti-elite sentiments, and create a "political tsunami". This trend shifts focus from objective analysis to, in a number of cases, dangerous, paranoid and unfounded speculation. "The government is hiding a situation that could end our civilization... at any time, the space aliens could enslave us!"  Pseudoscience has already enslaved us, when no one was watching.

EXOPLANETS