Blue Book and Bubble Gum

Blue Book and Bubble Gum

And now, a brief detour into popular culture.

Although the Air Force and other Washington entities dedicated themselves to marginalizing Project Blue Book and dissipating its influence, Blue Book developed and sustained a hardy cultural presence. Generous newspaper and magazine coverage of project activity, plus occasional television documentaries, intrigued the public and cemented the connection between Blue Book and “flying saucers.” Out of such stuff came a flood of accessible and fanciful interpretations of UFOs.

Aliens and flying saucers came to dramatic radio of the 1950s via X Minus One, Dimension X, Beyond This World, the BBC’s Journey into Space, and numerous other anthology shows. Later, talk radio hosted by the likes of Long John Nebel and Art Bell turned UFOlogy into hyper burlesque. In a special moment, radio handled the UFO phenomenon with taste and intelligence in April 1950, with The Case for the Flying Saucer, a thirty-minute CBS radio documentary produced and hosted by Edward R. Murrow.

UFOs have been expressed in pop songs since the 1950s. A few highlights: “Flyin’ Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll” (performed by Billy Lee Riley); “Knocked-Out Joint on Mars” (Buck Trail); “(You’d Better Pray to the Lord) When You See Those Flying Saucers” (the Buchanan Brothers); “Have You Seen the Saucers” (Jefferson Airplane); “UFOs, Big Rigs and BBQ” (Mojo Nixon); “Rocket Ship” (Kathy McCarty); “Rosetta Stoned” (Tool). A good deal of this novelty material is collected on CD compilations; likewise vintage instrumental “space music” by composer-performers Harry Revel, Les Baxter, Ferrante and Teicher, and Esquivel.

Even Ella Fitzgerald, a sublime interpreter of the Great American Songbook, weighed in with “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer.” The kicker of that one is that the ETs catch a game at Ebbets Field, gape at women’s hats, listen to a bloviating politician, and then decide we’re all nuts.

Amusement parks regarded flying saucer rides as must-haves for many years.

The most notable is Disneyland’s Flying Saucers, which had a place in the park’s Tomorrowland section during 1961–66. The attraction operated like an air hockey table, with sixteen single-rider saucers floating on a narrow cushion of forced air. (Ceaseless maintenance on the ride’s plenum chamber, air valves, and retracting-disc floor spelled the attraction’s doom.)

“Cook It!”

UFOs, aliens, and the movies were made for each other. Keep Watching the Skies!, historian Bill Warren’s study of science-fiction movies from the 1950s only, runs a robust 1,004 oversized pages. So prolific has the genre become that UFO movies threaten to outpace UFOs themselves. Whether high-profile, B- grade, or pure underground, the films are accessible via streaming or DVD. (The same goes for television shows, from The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, to Falling Skies and Colony.) One “saucer” movie that has endured for sixty-five years captured the “UFO moment” as that moment existed just a few years after Kenneth Arnold and Roswell. Howard Hawks’s Winchester Films produced The Thing from Another World for 1951 release by RKO. This is a marvelous movie by any standard, with smart, crackling dialogue; intelligent male and female protagonists; and (mostly) cool-headed professional men that marshal themselves to battle a dangerous interloper. All of those are trademarks of Hawks (who eschewed on- screen credit in order to help his editor, Christian Nyby, get into the Directors Guild). The Thing is set inside an isolated Arctic base staffed by a few scientists and soldiers. The place is cold and claustrophobic, and thus hobbling to the humans, who can’t just depart (the weather is punishingly frigid) or easily hide (the maze of buildings is small). The group quickly learns that the humanoid extraterrestrial they have released from an icy prison (after a long-ago saucer crash) isn’t just ill-tempered and literally bloodthirsty, but more akin to plant life than animal. Leave it to the Hawksian heroine (Margaret Sheridan) to suggest how to deal with the monster: cook it.

That’s witty, but The Thing has real historical importance, inviting Cold War audiences to “read” the alien as the Communist menace. Even more significant is that The Thing has a central image, a synecdoche that exploited current events and startled audiences: the alien’s flying saucer. A bit of fin sticking from the Arctic ice is the first evidence. When a dozen or so men array themselves around the dimly perceived perimeter of the craft and link hands, we can see that the group stands in a perfect circle. “We’ve got one!” somebody shouts. “We’ve finally got one! A flying saucer!” UFO enthusiasts get chills because the Thing’s saucer perfectly encapsulates the Kenneth Arnold era, and the chilly wonder of Cold War science and discovery.

UFO/film historian Bruce Rux mounts a thin argument about The Thing from Another World in his 1997 book Hollywood vs. the Aliens, claiming that because industrialist Howard Hughes—a man, Rux says, with ties to the CIA—owned RKO, The Thing is purposeful disinformation, an attempt to make the whole UFO phenomenon seem sufficiently ridiculous so that nobody who sees the movie will ever take UFOs seriously. Rux (who goes on in this possibly facetious vein while analyzing fifty years of UFO movies) fails to reckon with the cinematic power of The Thing. The film’s signature line of dialogue, “Keep watching the skies!”—uttered by a broadcast journalist who has witnessed the whole adventure—inspires a frisson laced with awe. Nobody laughs at that cautionary declaration.

Years later, a benevolent alien temperament informed two of Steven Spielberg’s most popular films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982). These beautifully crafted movies are rightfully popular, but the nasty little cabbage-heads of Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1956, with classic bug-eyed-monster design by Jackie and Paul Blaisdell) are far more typical of Hollywood’s notion of alien visitors.

Wrathful aliens in the Hawks mold have burst forth more recently in The Puppet Masters (1994), Independence Day (1996, and 2016 sequel), Mars Attacks! (1996), Starship Troopers (1997), the Men in Black series, War of the Worlds (2005), Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), The Invasion (2007, one of numerous remakes of the 1956 gem Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Cloverfield (2008), Battle: Los Angeles (2010), Skyline (2010), the Transformers series, Cowboys & Aliens (2011), and The 5th Wave (2016).

Dullumentary

By 1956, the UFO phenomenon was nine years old. Hollywood thrillers had been exploiting saucer-mania since 1950, and the time seemed right for a documentary treatment of the subject: Unidentified Flying Objects (1956), a ninety-one-minute slog that was (and remains) a test of one’s patience rather than the vivid account saucer enthusiasts wanted. Voice-over narration sets a portentous tone, but nearly all of the film is comprised of stock footage of everyday military activity: jets taking off and landing; ground crews filling bomb bays with ordnance; radar techs staring at their screens. Grainy and unsatisfying footage of two UFO sightings, one in Utah and the other in Montana, shows up disappointingly late in the film. Saucer fans are far better served by another 1956 release, Fred F. Sears’s fictional Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. That dynamic thriller, very loosely based on the Donald Keyhoe book Flying Saucers from Outer Space, has all the documentary-like verisimilitude that the real documentary lacks.