The Flatwoods Monster Six West Virginia boys aged ten to seventeen observed a UFO descent near the village of Flatwoods at dusk on September 12, 1952. The thing came from the sky like a fireball, landing on a hill that was part of the nearby Fisher farm. The boys dashed to a nearby house and … Read more
Close Encounters of the Unnerving Kind: Aggressive Aliens, Seven Degrees, and a Cop on the Front Line Because the human imagination is essentially catastrophic—mayhem and mystery are, after all, more fun to contemplate than scenarios of peaceful certitude—documented UFO reports marked by varying degrees of physical interaction between craft and witness are inevitably engaging. “Friendly … Read more
From Commercial to Lowbrow UFO and extraterrestrial art made cultural heroes of illustrators such as Frank R. Paul (the first great SF illustrator), Edd Cartier (described in chapter two), Hannes Bok, Alex Schomburg (Deco airbrush), Chesley Bonestell (documentary futurism and planetscapes), Frank Kelly Freas (a master of luminous color), Ed Emshwiller, Jack Gaughan, Richard Powers … Read more
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 … Read more
Selected UFO Sightings of the 1950s and 1960s The plentitude of sightings dated 1952 and 1965 (below) reflect the dramatic increase in UFO reports during those years. February 19, 1951: Crew and passengers aboard an East African Airways Model 18 Lodestar airliner observe an enormous, cigar-shaped object hover over Mount Kilimanjaro. The object—with dull silver … Read more
Go Down Together NICAP staff naturally stayed abreast of Blue Book activity, and often collaborated with the USAF group via free exchanges of files. As a retired military man, the calm and methodical Keyhoe understood the value of shared intelligence, particularly when tepid Air Force support of Blue Book could mean an eventual end to … Read more
NICAP and Keyhoe Inventor and antigravity researcher Thomas Townsend Brown established the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in Washington, D.C., at the end of 1956. As NICAP struggled to get its financial footing, Donald Keyhoe, a retired U.S. Marines aviator with a strong inclination to accept the reality of UFOs, accepted a 1957 offer … Read more
The Condon Report In 1966, as Washington readied to kick Blue Book to the curb, the Air Force invited University of Colorado physicist Edward Condon to investigate UFOs by enlisting other qualified people for the Colorado Project, which came to be known as the Condon Committee. What the government wished the committee to do (to … Read more
Things That Are Not There During the 1960s, the “flying saucer” term persisted, connoting (variously) alien craft, flying discs created by other nations, and, possibly, discs controlled by the United States. When a noticeable bump in UFO reports occurred in 1965, popular publishing reacted with UFO/flying saucer magazines and comic books. Because most of the … Read more
Practical Futurism, Part II The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. September 1959. That message is stamped on a metal pennant deposited on the Moon by the Soviet Union at the dawn of the space race. On September 14, 1959, forty-one hours after the pennant settled in Moon dust, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev arrived in Washington, … Read more
