JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I want to spend only a few minutes on this subject as I have just now come upon a nicely-written and logical response to the "flying saucer" issue in the pages of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society1 for 1952. Rather than discuss it I'm just going to reproduce the two pages of the piece below. I did bend to curiosity a bit here and checked out "flying saucer" and "U.F.O." in the Oxford English Dictionary, just to get a sense of how quickly they came into being following the hysteria of 1946. Turns out that the BIS is no stranger to the term, the OED listing it second in usage back in 1948, back when the word still had its new-car-smell, though as you can see it hardly registered so with the members of the Society.
“Flying saucer” n.: the fanciful name given to various unidentified disc- or saucer-shaped objects reported as appearing in the sky.
- 1947 Times 8 July 4/4 During the past fortnight reports that dish-like objects, nicknamed ‘flying saucers’, have been seen travelling through the air at great speed..have come from the United States and Canada.
- 1948 Jrnl. Brit. Interplanetary Soc. 7 199 I haven't examined the details carefully, but the ‘flying saucers’ bear all the hall-marks of mass-suggestion.
- 1953 D. Leslie & G. Adamski Flying Saucers have Landed i. i. 13 Ever since the cliché ‘flying saucer’ was coined, the greatest and most exciting mystery of our age has been automatically reduced to the level of a music hall joke.
“U.F.O.”, n.: An unidentified flying object; a ‘flying saucer’.
- 1953 D. E. Keyhoe in Air Line Pilot Oct. 9/3 The UFO was estimated to be between 12,000 and 20,000 feet above the jets.
- 1956 E. J. Ruppelt Rep. Unidentified Flying Objects 13 UFO is the official term that I created to replace the words ‘flying saucers’.
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