Greg Eghgian
Appearances
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
The idea of beings, Martians, on the planet Mars, right, is one, again, not entirely distinctive or unique to the 19th century, but it really accelerates in the 19th century when you have Some astronomers, you mentioned Percival Lowell being one of the prominent people, who using their telescopes, they see what they believe to be canals.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
Canals is a neat term to use because if there's canals, it implies engineering. And then you've got to explain, well, who's engineering them and why are they there? And, you know... An elaborate story gets concocted that if you notice them, they seem to come from the polar caps. And that means that it probably is the way in which Martians are getting water to dried out desert areas on the planet.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
It's an idea that really has some legs around the turn of the century. By the 1920s, it's pretty clear from astronomers that the problem was that these canals were really just artifacts of bad telescopes. that with more refined telescopes, you could find out that these were just mistaken shapes due to the kind of inaccuracies of the instruments themselves.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
So by the 20s and 30s, most serious scientists don't believe there's any sentient life on the planet Mars or any planet really in our solar system.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
The thing about the UFO, right, is that no matter who's behind it, if they are real, these devices are advanced technologies. These are beyond what we are used to seeing, meaning that therefore whoever is behind it
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
has access to knowledge that most of us don't have, have abilities to create things using scientific and technological understanding that is beyond anything that we typically recognize in the present. In that sense, what the UFO thing has been as a phenomenon socially is a way to imagine not only the present, but the future, right? Particularly if it's aliens, right?
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
The idea of aliens are here visiting us in these spaceships that can do these really remarkable things. This offers us a glimpse of our potential future, right? And raises all sorts of questions about whether or not we will ever have those capabilities. Can we achieve these self-same things? But even if it's not the aliens, Then what you get is, as you do today with the U.S.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
government, there are worries about, oh, are we behind in a new arms race, right? Do the Russians or do the Chinese have now these advanced drones or hologram devices or something, right? This becomes the worry. So always there's been this kind of interaction with existing technologies and the kind of just sort of the cultural infrastructure surrounding those technologies.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
It's interesting. I mean, the renewed interest of people within the US government, again, it's not an entirely unusual phenomenon. It has happened in the past. But it is something that requires a kind of critical mass. Because there's always been a politician here and there who's been interested in UFOs, tried to put it on the national agenda, the federal agenda. Harry Reid.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
Yeah, Harry Reid did it back then. There were people back in the 50s and 60s trying to do it. What you need, however, is you need usually a combination of some access to media. You usually need some compelling lobbyists behind it. And then you need to have some pivotal political figures who chime in. You get people like Gillibrand in New York. You get Rubio involved.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
You got now Chuck Schumer in New York. You get certain people with some real clout. who get on board, so to speak, and run with this. And once you get that, once you have that kind of energy, if you will, you've got enough there to make this something that can't just go away overnight. And so that's where we are. We've reached this point where you've got a certain critical mass.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
The question is for them and the people who pursue this politically, is this sustainable? In the past, this kind of interest has usually been a passing fancy. Other things usually take over. And this stuff usually then sort of moves on and they move on with their interests. So that will be the question. Is this going to be sustained over a lengthy period of time or not?
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
I came down on this, my approach to this that I make very clear at the beginning is I'm not going to be writing a book that gives the definitive answer, are they really, are they here or not? I wasn't going to be advancing anybody's pet theory one way or the other. I also was not going to be a debunker. I felt all along that we were not being served well
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
in the conversation by having these two sides of the true believer and the die-hard skeptic just fighting it out all the time. Rather, what I wanted to do was historicize that. Talk about the history of how the conversation got that way. for us to see things. And so what I start to see when you do that, I think you start to see some things that are maybe a different perspective.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
And one of the things I came away from this was to understand that the phenomenon has been more of a mystery than a puzzle. A puzzle you can solve. A puzzle can be put together. You can get the answer one day. This is something that has always been really shrouded in a sense of mystery. And mystery is not only something that never really has an end.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
There are many people who are invested in preserving the mystery. rather than answering questions, or see the mystery as really the answer for everything. So that, I think, was one of the things I came away from. The other thing I came away from the book was an enormous amount of admiration, if that's the right term,
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
For all of these people who over the years have been fascinated with this and decided to create an organization or to write up a news bulletin about it, to investigate cases, these are people who did this. This was a grassroots phenomenon. This was not centrally organized. It was done out of a great love of the field.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
They did it by spending money out of their own pockets that they often didn't have. They did it in their free time because you couldn't get a job doing this. So they were coming home and working late at night. I came away thinking, you know, this is one of the most impressive citizen science projects we've ever seen in that regard.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
And so I really came away thinking, you know, that's one of those things you need to capture. You know, the speculation about UFOs and some of the organizational dimensions of it at the top, those things are a lot of different people who at times, I think, come in and out of those circles and are really looking for fame and fortune.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
There's very little, by the way, to be had in this field of fortune. What I was really caught by with all these other people who are really lost names, they are not people who are seeking fame or fortune, who just felt compelled to look into this. And I thought their stories really needed to be told.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
Yeah, yeah, weird stuff. Trust me, you know, when you dive deep into this stuff, you see and hear lots and lots of weird stuff. And I will have people all the time ask me, so what's your explanation? And I throw up my hands and say... Don't ask me. I'm a historian. I mean, go ask an engineer. Go ask a physicist. Go ask a pilot. Those are the people who I defer to in a lot of these things.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
But I don't deny for one minute that people see and have witnessed things that are absolutely bizarre, weird, anomalous. I just don't see how anybody can say definitively what they are. And I think most serious people who've looked into this over the years will often say the exact same thing. And that's part of, I think, I guess, the allure of this whole phenomenon.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
I often like to say that the thing about the UFO mystery is that it's an invitation. It is amazingly inviting. It has space for everybody and everybody's voice. Nobody's going to stop you from chiming in and getting involved, throwing your hat in the ring and throwing some ideas out there. And it's a wonderful world in that regard, but it's a cacophonous world.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
Yeah. So one of the biggest challenges throughout the whole history of this phenomenon has been giving it a name. Yeah. It has defied any kind of adequate description. And every label, every acronym that's been employed has been called into question. Part of the reason, of course, is because you, first of all, don't have complete agreement on what the phenomenon is.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
Secondly, you don't even know, is it a phenomenon? Yeah. So it becomes really, really difficult to do it. Flying saucer was first employed. That was really a media construction in the late 40s, very popular, remained popular well into the 1970s. But it gets replaced by the US Air Force in the early 50s by unidentified flying object, which was seen as being more generic, right?
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
That was a term that would eliminate this kind of image of this disc-like object. The problem was other people said, well, hold it. A UFO doesn't eliminate the problem. It too implies that this thing's a physical object. It implies that if it implies flying, it implies there must be a pilot, right? Mm-hmm. So that was seen as a problem.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
And now we have the UAP, as you point out, a term that was seen as a way to, again, get at something generic. But the other idea behind it by the people who were in government circles studying this stuff, their thinking was this would eliminate any associations with the whole history of this phenomenon. that all that quote-unquote noise would no longer be relevant. We can start from scratch.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
As a historian, I don't think you get to just rename something and give it a new brand name, and somehow you're released from all that legacy that doesn't kind of work that way.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
Yeah, so I think there's no question that in recent years, and certainly by at least 2020, that the intelligence services within the US government have come to at least acknowledge, and this is fairly unprecedented, have acknowledged not only are physical objects being seen that at least on the surface can't be accounted for, but that they themselves have historically played a role in stigmatizing people reporting this stuff.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
particularly within military circles, particularly military pilots, but also civilian pilots, that there's been disincentives created to report these things because it was seen as a blemish on your record. It was seen as something that indicated that you might not be qualified for promotion down the road.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
So they've come out very clearly and made it clear that they need to adopt a new approach to this. And so now the attitudes, at least in those circles, at least what they're saying is they are taking those reports seriously. They're trying to create channels for communicating this information without any stigma attached to it or consequences.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
That said, in the end, intelligence services, and I would also say that civilian scientists, kind of agree on one thing, and that is they will never get the truth about this phenomenon by just relying on eyewitnesses. Eyewitnesses are not enough. They're going to need instruments detecting things.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
They're going to need something that's incontrovertible, and that is not eyewitnesses from their standpoint.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
So on June 24th, 1947, this private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold is flying his small plane around Mount Rainier. He's looking for the wreckage of a cargo craft that had crashed around there. There was a reward for anybody who spotted it. And he said that later on that when he was flying around there, he sees these nine, he first described them as pie pan shaped objects.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
that were flying in close formation at very high speeds. Hadn't seen anything like it before. He was convinced that these were probably military aircraft, but he thought in any event he needed to report it. He lands, he reports it to media sources, media outlets, newspapers. He reports it to the military. And he gets interviewed.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
He gets interviewed, and within just a day or two, he gets reporters who are following up on this. And one of them asks him, how did this thing move? How did they move? How would you describe it? He said, well, they moved like a saucer might if you skipped it across water.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
He did not utter the phrase flying saucer, but a very, very clever journalist who knew a good headline when he heard one said, ah, flying saucer, and it became flying saucer. And we know that this becomes a kind of very ready-made meme out there.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
It goes viral, really, way before the internet, because Gallup Poll does a survey and finds that nine out of 10 Americans six weeks later know of this term flying saucer.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
I mean, from that point on, that summer of 1947, as you're talking about, there were hundreds of reports across the United States. And then they start up in other parts of the world as well. And this whole phenomenon, this wave of sightings, Kenneth Arnold sighting that summer, also gets worldwide international news coverage.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
So it becomes a kind of focal point and an origin point, right, for what's going to follow. Because from that point on, this thing that wasn't just a one-off. It's clear that there's other people seeing very similar things. That becomes a cause for people to now begin to ask the question, what is it? How do we make sense of it? If it is a set of objects, whose are they? What are they doing?
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
What's the intention here? The idea of aliens being behind it was not high on people's lists. That was not where people instantly went. And that was going to take a while before that actually gains any kind of real ground with people. But nonetheless, it was a mystery.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
And it was one that unsettled people, particularly if you remember the context, which is this is just very shortly after World War II. People had seen what secret weapons could do. So this was a really, really perplexing, baffling, and even kind of scary thing for a lot of people.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
Yeah, I mean... The idea that people would see anomalous things in the skies, in the heavens, and that these were meaningful, these were significant. The sky wasn't just observed, it was read for messages. Yes. That goes back to ancient times. The idea that we are not alone, that we might not be alone in the universe is also an old one.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
I think a lot of people are surprised by that, but even the ancients were debating, at least debating the issue. about whether we are alone. And even really by the 17th century, I think most educated people in the world would have assumed that human beings aren't the only sentient beings out there in the universe. What's different is this idea that they are visiting us.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
that they are coming here and they are looking at us or they're communicating with us, that is, in fact, a very new idea. The first science fiction authors, the most famous probably being H.G. Wells in the 1890s, are really the first to imagine that in sort of a concrete way. But this idea that they are visiting us is really going to only take off With the UFO phenomenon.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
Other people had set up the ducks already, but it's going to be the UFO thing that says, no, no, no, I know what this all adds up to, and they are here, and they are here now.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
Right. It's often referred to as the great airship scare or airship mystery of the 1890s. What's interesting about it is the term airship scare doesn't really quite capture what went on because most people weren't scared. The airships that were being described in newspapers at the time described people mostly being really fascinated with it, not terribly disturbed.
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
really interested in sort of getting to the bottom of what they were and who was behind them. The Shaw case is also interesting because in many ways it really is an outlier too. Most of these incidents that get described don't involve the idea of strange beings from possibly other worlds. Most people who said they caught
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
sight of or even communicated with the people piloting these strange aircraft, which most of the time, by the way, looked like balloons or dirigibles. Yeah. Most of them described the pilots as being human beings. They were oftentimes foreigners. They spoke Spanish or they spoke German or something. So the most common scenario at that time was that these things were really the work of...
American History Hit
UFOs in the US
of a kind of an eccentric tinkerer, a kind of a Thomas Edison, right, savant of some kind who was behind it all. You get a little of this stuff that Shaw describes of aliens. But again, that line of argument tends to be an outlier.