A Sober Appraisal of "the Flying Saucer" (1948)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This slightly engaging cover of Popular Science offers its readers a sober appraisal of the still very popularly new phenomenon of “the flying saucer”. Not “flying saucer” plural--”the” flying saucer phenom, complete at this point with a definite article...I have no idea when the “the” disappeared. In any event it is a pretty good explanation, though there is no mention here of “The Battle of Los Angeles”, when in 1942 aircraft batteries and searchlights blazed away into the high night air trying to stop a supposed Japanese attack. Six people on the ground were killed by shrapnel and debris, with no damage to anything flying overhead reported. There were some wild theories about what the “attack” was, along with accusations of cover-ups and political/economic conspiracies, and that seems to have been the extent of the matter. In any event, Pop Sci takes up the case of the weather balloon as a general explanation to people seeing intelligent life forms scooting around in our sky but not bothering to stop and say “hello”.

Just in case anyone is interested, here's the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “flying saucer”:

--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.
• 1965   New Society 9 Sept. 14/2   When Kenneth Arnold saw something from his airplane near Mount Rainier in June 1947, he gave them the happy name of flying saucers.