Greg Eghgian
speaker
51 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Greg Eghgian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're going to need something that's incontrovertible, and that is not eyewitnesses from their standpoint.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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