‘The truth is, we're the UFOs’: New study's wild theory on phenomenon

“There are nine odd objects flying in formation at really impressive speeds,” Professor Greg Eghigian explains. “When Arnold lands, he reports it to local newspapers and military officials.

“His supposition was it’s probably some secret, new plane the air force was testing. It’s a slow news period because it’s summer, so reporters start asking him questions about how these things moved. He says they moved like a saucer would if you skipped it across a lake. Enterprising journalists thought ‘Here’s a headline! Let’s call them flying saucers’.”

And so was born a phenomenon that’s shaped human culture profoundly in the intervening years. Eghigian isn’t some saucer-eyed – forgive the pun – obsessive who spends his time watching the skies for aliens. He’s an acclaimed history professor at Pennsylvania State University.

I caught up with him to talk about the publication of his latest book After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History Of The UFO Phenomenon. The book was funded by Nasa, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the American Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society.

Professor Greg Eghigian

Eghigian isn’t concerned about whether UFOs exist. Instead, he’s taken an historian’s approach to the phenomenon. How did it start? Why did it became a global craze? And in what way has it influenced human culture?

He’s doing what present-day historians do when they look back on weird events in the past. Imagine an historian, 500 years from now who specialises in the mid-20th century and early 21st century asking themselves ‘what the hell was going on with that UFO stuff?’. That’s precisely what Eghigian is doing.

After Arnold’s strange tale hit the headlines, the notion of “flying saucers” became “a meme”, Eghigian explains. It spreads rapidly through the media, burying itself as an idea in popular culture. “We see it all across the United States and very quickly in other parts of the world. People start saying ‘I’m seeing flying saucers too’.”

Six weeks after Arnold’s sightings, the polling company Gallup found that 90% of Americans had heard of flying saucers.

Theories

Initially, the flying saucer sightings weren’t solely attributed to aliens. At the beginning, it was simply a mystery. Was it enemy spy planes? Secret US military tests? Hallucinations? Mass hysteria? A visitation from outer space was just one of the theories doing the rounds.

An industry quickly sprung up around this new phenomenon. On one side there are the “true believers”, and on the other “the debunkers”. Both were obsessed with unravelling what was going on – and their claims, counterclaims, pamphlets, newspaper articles and books put rocket fuel (again forgive the pun) into the flying saucer craze.

Both the believers and debunkers approached the phenomenon “like a criminal investigation. They study it forensically, asking: what really happened? Is this witness reliable”.

But that’s not what interests Eghigian. “The question for me isn’t ‘why did these things appear’. But rather ‘why didn’t the phenomenon disappear’: why didn’t it fall apart and just become a fad that maybe an historian writes about decades later and says ‘I bet you’ve never heard this story’.

“My question was: ‘how did this get such legs that it not only preoccupied the American people but people all over the world’.”

It’s not until 1949 that the notion of flying saucers as “spaceships” really comes to dominate. One of the early theories was that this was a phenomenon similar to the “airship craze” decades earlier.

In America in the late 1890s, and Britain between 1912/13, so-called “phantom airships” were seen by thousands. Was this test flights of early aircraft? Mass hysteria amid the drumbeats of war? To people in 1947, there seemed parallels between flying saucers and the airship panic of old.

After the Second World War, America was still a tense place. Cities on the west coast had feared Japanese invasion. There was also much speculation that perhaps the government was testing some top-secret plane.

Suspicion of government, particularly “big government” – which would go on to play such a major role in the later UFO phenomenon – was high post-war.

After all, as Eghigian explains, the US government had kept the Manhattan Project secret from the world and then used a super-weapon against Japan. If the government could keep the atom bomb secret, they could keep anything secret. Until the 1930s, Eghigian explains, the US government was “a pretty small-scale operation”. Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, with its huge social programmes under the New Deal, changed all that. Government became much bigger. That worried some. “This becomes part of the story too,” Eghigian adds.

Culturally, a lot had gone on in the inter-war years as well, laying the imaginative ground for the shape the flying saucer craze would take. The pulp fiction stories of Buck Rogers, and the science fiction of writers like HG Wells took outer space from the science lab into the living room.

Suspicion of government, particularly “big government” – which would go on to play such a major role in the later UFO phenomenon – was high post-war.

Invasion

INDEED, following the Arnold sightings, many thought this was a hoax or hysteria similar to the infamous 1938 radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds. Orson Welles turned his play into a news broadcast, and thousands of Americans reputedly believed Martians were invading.

Eghigian says the first few years of the flying saucer craze “were wild and riotous – the most fascinating period of the UFO phenomenon, as people are at an absolute loss about what’s going on. There’s no one big theory out there, no huge overarching narrative”.

That all changed at the end of 1949 when pulp fiction writer and former navy pilot Donald Keyhoe published The Flying Saucers Are Real. It would become one of the most widely read books in history. Keyhoe claimed the government was covering up the existence of flying saucers – and not only that, the crafts were extraterrestrials.

Out go all the other theories and Keyhoe’s claim “takes hold. It becomes the default setting”, Eghigian adds. From now on, it’s the only theory in town. “It becomes a very clear-cut narrative that people glom on to and the story spreads around the world.”

Soon papers from South America to Central Europe are serialising Keyhoe’s book. Eghigian is rather kind to Keyhoe. He doesn’t accuse him of outright lies. Keyhoe claimed defence industry and military sources had confirmed his claims. Rather, Eghigian says: “I believe he believed it. There’s every indication he took this seriously.”

However, Keyhoe was a master of spin and exaggeration. “Certainly, there are people at the time critical of him who thought he made too much of what little evidence he had in order to sell books. So it wasn’t necessarily that he’s perpetrating a fraud, but maybe he wasn’t above hyping.”

For the rather square 1950s, many responded to claims of alien visitors in a distinctly hippy fashion. “There are people who view this as religiously and spiritually significant,” Eghigian says. “Remember, this was 1950 – we’re 50 years from the millennium.

“There are many who see this as a sign of something very important happening –that it’s a significant moment in human history. Our space brothers and sisters are here – it’s an opportunity for cosmic community.”

You can see how, amid the looming horror of the Cold War and potential nuclear annihilation, that idea could maybe ease panicked minds.

Mystical

HOWEVER, there were also many in the now-burgeoning 1950s “UFO community” who hated this “quasi-mystical way of thinking”. This is the wing of ufology which is still known as “the nuts and bolts folks” – those who want to figure out how these crafts fly, what the power source might be, and don’t much care for any of the touchy-feely stuff.

Indeed, many “nuts and bolts folk” weren’t sold on the alien idea at all and remained focused on military testing, or weather balloons. Eghigian explains that it’s in Europe where these more sceptical UFO investigators are prevalent. The U2 spy plane incident in 1960 would only solidify their much more terrestrial take.

However, at the heart of the entire phenomenon – whether you’re believer, debunker, or just an average punter – lies one key element: the human love of mystery.

Flying saucers were one giant puzzle that everyone had an opinion about. Theories and debates by believers and debunkers captured the public imagination. Evidently, UFOs remain a mystery to this day. When an answer to a puzzle can’t been found, humans will always be fascinated.

Both debunkers and believers latched on to earlier folklore. Myths abound across the world of fairies and demons. To debunkers, these myths prove humans have been either fantasising or lying about weird visitations for millennia. To believers, it’s proof of alien visitors – only our ancestors interpreted ETs as fairies.

There was also a god-shaped hole beginning to emerge in the Western world as the flying saucer craze began. Organised religion was waning. In terms of spirituality, “things really opened up”, Eghigian says. There was a craze for all things paranormal – like the occult, telekinesis, cryptozoology (the “study” of creatures like Bigfoot or Nessie), and ghosts.

Come the 1970s and 80s, with the launch of shows like Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, all this weird and wonderful material would be folded together into a giant goulash which fed a growing appetite for the strange. Many people, it seemed, were hungry for something to add meaning to their increasingly meaningless lives.

The flying saucer craze became much more serious in the 1950s, when organisations began springing up all over the world with amateur ufologists investigating sightings, and writing pamphlets and magazines. The mass media, inevitably, reported on this strange trend.

So, by now the bedrock of the UFO phenomenon was well and truly laid. Then, in the 1960s, matters take an even more bizarre turn – one that obsesses the mass media: the rise of the contactee.

“It’s the emergence of people who come forward claiming they’ve actually met the occupants of flying saucers. It’s the new hot thing.”

Soon they’re everywhere: on the lecture circuit and on TVs which are now in most living rooms. Curiously, contactees all tell very similar stories. The aliens they meet are kind, handsome, morally superior, and from our solar system – Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn or Jupiter.

“They say the aliens have a message: that they’re here to save us, because they saw that we’re exploding atomic weapons and risk destroying ourselves.” Some claim to have travelled on spaceships with these charming extraterrestrials and visited their planets.

“There’s almost a travelogue element,” Eghigian says. “And these contactees all assume the mantle of prophets.”

Henry Thomas talking with ET in a scene from the film 'E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial', 1982. (Photo by Universal/Getty Images).

Contactees

Culturally, it feels very 1960s: lots of Cold War paranoia mixed in with the rise of the peace and love generation. The “prophet contactee” faze of the UFO phenomenon “dies out by the end of the 1960s” though. The contactees eventually become seen as frauds. Advances in science didn’t help as the world learned that nothing could live on planets like Saturn or Venus.

As the Age of Aquarius dawned in the 1970s, the phenomenon took on a new shape: paleo visitology, or what we’d today call “the ancient alien theory” – that spaceman visited the Earth millennia ago and we can see the evidence, if only we look hard enough, in Bible stories like Jacob’s Ladder, and other world myths.

These “ancient astronauts” were supposed to have built everything from the Pyramids to Stonehenge. The idea of our space brothers and sisters coming to warn us of our hubris therefore changes to a story of “our space fathers and mothers”.

It’s another sign of the god-shaped hole in the West, with ETs filling it.

These wild claims were popularised by the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken – but his pseudoscience was quickly rejected by almost every imaginable authority and respected expert going. Still, he made a fortune.

As we emerged from the 1970s into the 80s, the UFO phenomenon takes a “dark, sinister” turn. Aliens are no longer kind and loving, or wise and parental – they’re “pernicious and malicious”.

Sometimes they work alongside government officials – the so-called Men in Black – developing secret technology or “hybrid human babies”. Rather than taking us off to their planet to talk peace and love, they abduct us and experiment on us, sometimes sexually.

Another theory floated at this time has it that the phenomenon isn’t related to “extraterrestrials but ultraterrestrials – entities from another time and dimension – who are just monkeying with us, messing up our lives for sheer delight, like vicious sprites”. There’s a distinct echo of the mischievous fairies from folklore here.

It’s now that the alien abduction story takes off, with all its horror movie elements of medical experiments, kidnap, and forced impregnation.

“This takes the oxygen out of the room for all other UFO stories and narratives,” Eghigian says. The UFO dream had switched to a UFO nightmare.

It’s not hard to see why. The 1980s were frightening, the Cold War was at its height. America had gone through Vietnam and Watergate – churning more fear and paranoia about government into the cultural mix. In Britain and America, harsh economic policies under Thatcher and Reagan were brutalising people, and racism was in the air. “From a cultural standpoint, we must reflect on the zeitgeist. There was a much darker view of life.”

For Eghigian, “the UFO phenomenon has always been a way for us to imagine a possible future: could we be capable of what they’re doing? Is that our future”?

He adds: “It’s a way for us to reflect on a possible prognosis, and in the 1980s, the prognosis looked pretty bleak. I think that gets reflected in these stories”.

Nightmare

It’s been said that culture is humanity dreaming. If so, our dreams of aliens in the 1980s were rather nightmarish. The UFO phenomenon, Eghigian adds, is like “a Rorschach test” – we see what we want to see in it, and it’s often a reflection of our collective subconscious.

These dark tales of abduction would eventually inspire one of the biggest cultural hits of the late-20th century – The X Files, which became a global obsession in the 1990s.

However, tales of alien abduction were so outlandish and so discredited, that by the late 1990s, the mainstream media had lost interest.

Two events happen which all but kill off the UFO phenomenon: first, the internet arrives, and all those magazines and organisations start to wither and die. There’s much weirder stuff online to obsess about than what was by now seen as boring old tales of aliens.

Come the millennium, it all seemed so last century.

But much more important was the end of the Cold War. By the mid-1990s, the standoff between democracy and totalitarianism was well and truly over. We were told that we were now living “at the end of history” (though that turned out to be a rather stupid claim).

“The UFO phenomenon always drew its inspiration from – and was energised and powered by – the Cold War. It was the spectre that haunted us.”

Once peace breaks out, the hysteria within humanity seems to abate. Flying saucers are a great subconscious metaphor for invasion and attack by a foreign enemy.

As a cultural historian, Eghigian notes in this period that horror movies about aliens are few and far between. Instead, there’s the rise of the zombie movie. “What are zombies?” Eghigian asks. “They’re us.” Metaphorically, a zombie is just a horrible form of human. In the era of 21st-century mass terror, we became the monster.It all seemed over for the UFO craze. But suddenly the aliens returned. “When I started this book, I thought I was writing about the end of the UFO era, a nostalgic obituary. But then – bam!”

In 2017, the New York Times and other major media outlets revealed that there was cockpit footage from US navy jet fighters of what came to be called “unidentified aerial phenomena’(UAPs)”. If you haven’t seen the footage, it’s extraordinary, showing apparently unusual shaped objects moving extremely fast and executing manoeuvres seemingly beyond the capabilities of conventional aircraft.

With hindsight, many UFOs sightings in the past are today put down to test flights of planes with stealth technology. So, unsurprisingly, many sceptics (myself included) suspect these so-called “Pentagon UFO videos” may be down to the testing of advanced drones, perhaps by enemy states.

As Eghigian says, these sightings were observed by pilots, they weren’t “figments of imagination, or computer glitches”. Nonetheless, there’s still zero proof, he adds, “that this was from outer space”.

Whatever the truth, UFOs hurtled back into public consciousness. TV shows like Ancient Aliens are now globally syndicated.

Panic

SIGNIFICANTLY, this renewed interest came as the world entered a new Cold War between East and West. In 2023, a high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon sparked panic over America. Sightings of UFOs have also shot up – though evidently in the era of mass-market drones that’s unsurprising.

Curiously, the feedback loop between entertainment and UFO sightings “doesn’t play out in the way you’d expect”. In the 1950s and 60s, most movies featured evil aliens trying to destroy humanity. Yet at the time – as Eghigian has explained – this was the era when people were reporting that they’d met kindly alien visitors.

Skip forward to 1977 with Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and you’d think a film that big would trigger a flood of people claiming they’d just seen flying saucers.

Well, that didn’t happen either. “We didn’t see any uptick in sightings, what we saw instead was an uptick in people reporting having seen UFOs earlier in their life.”

In other words, Close Encounters didn’t trigger new sightings, it “gave permission” to people to say they saw something strange many years earlier. In Britain, “sightings actually went down” after Spielberg’s movie ET came out.

There are culturally specific aspects to the phenomenon. In the Soviet Union, alien visitors resembled Bigfoot. In Malaysia, they’re “tiny beings”. In France, aliens tend to be mischievous, stealing flowers from old ladies, smacking people in the face and running away laughing.

So there’s obviously an element of “local traditions and folklore history” at play. One theory by French sociologist Arnaud Esquerre is that “the UFO phenomenon is just the late-20th century version of the ghost story”.

In essence, Eghigian explains, UFOs are like ghosts as “they’re apparitions. What makes them so mysterious isn’t that they appear, but that they disappear. We can never capture them. So Esquerre thinks they’re really just refashioned, recycled ghost stories. It’s a nice theory”.

Certainly, the phenomenon appears to be some sort of cultural “goulash” – a bit of folklore, some Cold War paranoia, new technologies being tested, a modern twist on the ghost story – that’s all coming together in our collective imaginations. That, plus lights in the sky, and strange objects, which science still can’t explain.

Indeed, the UFO phenomenon is at heart a giant conspiracy theory. Although while there have been many conspiracy theories throughout history – especially anti-Semitic conspiracies – the UFO craze effectively begins the modern trend. Central to the phenomenon is the belief that governments are hiding the truth from us. The same idea runs through the assassination of John F Kennedy, the death of Princess Diana, Covid conspiracies, and the dangerous QAnon cult.

One of the biggest wings of ufology today is the so-called “Disclosure Movement” – those demanding the release of files they believe the government holds on contact with aliens. Even though governments in Britain and America have released material on state investigations into unexplained sightings, “it’s still not enough for those who believe more is being kept secret”.

Eghigian doesn’t condemn people who feel information is being kept back. “Who can be critical when we know governments lie?” he asks. What’s important for Eghigian is to approach even the most outlandish claims with respect.

“Medieval historians looking at Christian mystics in the 13th century don’t sit there saying ‘OK, let’s look at how dumb these people are’. That doesn’t make you a terribly sophisticated historian. We must try to understand people on their own terms.”

Historians of the future won’t look at the UFO craze and laugh. They’ll ask “what purpose was this serving? What preoccupations did this feed into? How did it reflect political values, aspirations and ambitions – not just of individuals but society?

“They’re going to see pettiness, grand visions, prophetic statements, people who get things really wrong, and people who seemed prescient.”

Future

FROM the perspective of 2024, Eghigian says the flying saucer craze is best seen as something that’s “remarkable plastic. It’s given us ways of having conversations about all sorts of things: the status and future of science, our own plans to explore and colonise space, what kind of technologies we’re creating when it comes to surveillance”.

He adds: “The UFO is a way to talk about trust: how much can you trust witnesses, how reliable are our memories, why do we trust instruments more than humans reflecting on their own experiences –who’s an expert?”

While Eghigian is open-hearted to even the most devout believer, he’s also alert to “the cynicism” that lurks within the phenomenon. He’s not much bothered about hoaxers –like the prankster schoolboys in the late 1940s who nearly scared a neighbour to death and saw the FBI called out when they built their own flying saucer – but he’s contemptuous of the conmen, of whom there have been plenty.

There’s the gang in the 1950s who claimed aliens gave them technology to locate oil, and hustled money from the gullible. They were convicted. Another chancer, in the 1960s, said aliens from Saturn gave him gemstones which could heal the sick, and tried to con widows out of their savings. He was jailed partly on the evidence of a young astronomer who took the stand to say that aliens couldn’t come from Saturn. That astronomer’s name? Carl Sagan.

Who knows if modern AI technology will see a whole new slew of hoaxers and conmen appear?

However, most people who spend their lives as ufologists never get rich, Eghigian explains. “They died in poverty. I think more than anything else they like the fame and attention. Maybe they think they’re going to make money but very few get that. It’s celebrity that motivates a lot of these characters.”

Clearly, there’s been scientific spin-offs. SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Life – was set up by scientists around the world to hunt for proof of aliens. Stephen Hawking was a fan. Today, there’s the Society for UAP Studies, an academic organisation comprised of astronomers and scientists along with sociologists, political scientists and historians – Eghigian is a member.

However, although the study of UFOs as a cultural phenomenon is now entirely respectable – as the warm reception from the academic community to Eghigian’s new book proves – the world of science still keeps ufology at arm’s length. Eghigian thinks that’s a mistake. Scientists need to seriously investigate what those weird lights in the sky actually are. It merits proper study, he believes.

Even if scientists fail to discover alien visitors, or prove their non-existence, the endeavour would likely bring other discoveries, Eghigian suggests. After all, without the Apollo missions, there would be no memory foam, freeze-dried food, space blankets, or cochlear impacts. As an academic, Eghigian can’t dismiss any possibility until science has properly investigated the phenomenon. “That’s why I label myself a sceptically open-minded agnostic. As a scholar, I begin with scepticism.”

Eghigian feels it’s entirely “reasonable” to not take a position on the existence or non-existence of UFOs until scientists have done some “heavy lifting”. Pending that, he’ll “simply defer any conclusion”.

What he can say unquestionably, though, is this: the UFO phenomenon is “a mirror of us. In that sense, we’re the aliens”.