Alien spacecraft, phenomena from another dimension, ghosts, demons of satan, a trick of light - whatever you might believe UFOs to be, they have a long history.Don is joined by Greg Eghgian for this episode. Professor of History and Bioethics at Penn State University, Greg is the author of 'After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon'. Together with Don, he explores the origins of the 'flying saucer', the end of the stigma against researching UFOs, and much more.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 MediaAmerican History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What event sparked the modern age of ufology?
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.
It's almost like a steampunk, isn't it? It's like these renderings that you see of these airships are quite elaborate. They couldn't possibly have been up there, so therefore it's some sort of storytelling thing that's going on here, but it's interesting.
It reminds me of growing up in South Jersey when the Jersey Devil was told to you as a Boy Scout, and you'd hear these stories, and it turns out the Jersey Devil was most likely a large bird that came from Africa, stowed away on a boat from Africa, and then started scaring the heck out of South Jerseyans because it was so big and scary.
There are no reference points at this point, you know, and so things get very colorful very quickly whenever somebody sees something that surprises them. The other backdrop of this is, of course, scientific advancement and new observations of the cosmos. Of course, most famously, we have Lowell, the astronomer, who has been identifying what become called canals on Mars.
this notion that there are these signs of civilization on the surface of Mars, which is because there are new observatories. His becomes the Lowell Observatory in New Mexico. Yeah.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did the media influence the term 'flying saucer'?
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.
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.
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.
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
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It goes all hand in hand, of course, with technology moving along, which is why in the 20th century we're seeing so many more of them because suddenly we have the jet age coming upon us. And these fast-moving pilots are going around at speeds they didn't encounter before. Who knows if that's how they're seeing these things differently than they did before.
But it sure seems to skyrocket, so to speak, the sightings of UFOs going into the 20s. But again, it's also against the backdrop of war, World War I, World War II. It's always hand in hand, isn't it? This view of UFOs as an outgrowth of cultural change and the pressures that we're encountering.
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
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?
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