Flying saucer

So.

In our last episode, Gray Barker launched his publishing career, first with his speculative zine, The Saucerian, and then with the highly fictionalized They Knew Too Much About the Flying Saucers, the account of the men in black.

Taking inspiration from Pulp Magazine publisher Raymond Palmer, Barker enjoyed sort of stirring the pot of the flying saucer community, essentially running these stories that drove interest but weren't exactly what you would call, you know, factual.

Now, his contemporary was James Mosley, an untrained ex-archaeologist and practical joker.

And he's treating Gray Barker as if Gray Barker is also a serious researcher.

But nothing could be farther from the truth.

Barker thought this whole thing is kind of dumb and that anyone who believed in flying saucers was just easily duped.

I love, can I just say that I love Gray Barker so much and I love James Mosley.

Subject, Mrs. Blank, Informant.

There is attached hereto a letter received from the captioned individual, postmarked July 12, 1947, concerning flying saucers.

There is also attached a letter of acknowledgment to blank, blank, together with a letter to the War Department for approval.

It is recommended that the letter to the War Department be forwarded to the liaison section for transmittal to that agency.

Void where prohibited.

Visit SpinQuest.com for more details.

Subject, Flying Saucers.

Special Agent Blank of the Liaison Section contacted Lieutenant Colonel Blank, Army Air Force Intelligence, inquiring about an article which appeared in the West Coast newspapers recently, stating in substance that an airplane carrying recovered flying saucers crashed en route from Portland, Oregon to Los Angeles, California.

That is not what the original Spanish newspaper text says.

It talks about enemy aircraft, not flying saucers, not unidentified objects,

not machines

from inside the

The United States was interested in the military importance of the polar regions.

And Byrd really did warn about... attacks coming across the poles.

But none of that is automatically means that American forces was fighting flying saucers.

And now the rabbit hole gets deeper because if the UFO story did not come directly from Bert's interview,

Shortly after they do all this, Marjorie Cameron says she saw, effectively, a UFO, before they were known as that, over Parsons' house.

And then the following summer in 1947, we have the Summer of the Saucers.

Everybody was seeing UFOs.

Is it a coincidence that these things all start showing up shortly after Parsons and Hubbard engaged in this magical ritual to try and bring about no less than a moon child? Something that sounds very much like a space being, almost like something out of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Is the creature perhaps to blame for some of these strange disappearances in the park? Or are Sasquatch just keeping their distance, so they mean us no harm? Let us know what you think.

Next up, Flying Saucers.

Famously, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold saw something near Mount Rainier that changed the public's perception of extraterrestrials forever.

At the time, Kenneth Arnold was 32 years old, married with two children, and lived in Meridian, Idaho, where he sold fire extinguishing equipment for a living.

We would call it going viral.

Even the vocabulary regarding UFO sightings changed after Kenneth's bizarre encounter.

The term flying saucers wasn't really around before Kenneth's report.

But after word got out, there was a wave of people who came forward to back his story.

It wouldn't be until the mid-20th century that the sightings were once again reexamined, this time against the backdrop of modern science and the recent UFO craze sweeping the United States.

In his 1958 book, Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Swiss psychologist and author Carl Jung examined the Basel incident and other such cases with an eye for both human psychology and natural phenomenon.

Perhaps his decades-long study of UFOs was in part based on these incidents having taken place in his homeland of Switzerland.

But Jung was never an outright believer in the existence of UFOs as concrete physical objects.

During his lifetime, Vesco would go on to write 11 books on the supposed origins of UFOs.

Though most were only published in Italian, his two most popular works, Intercept UFO and Man-Made UFOs 1944-1994, 50 Years of Suppression, co-authored with David Hatcher Childress, gained enough traction to warrant English translations.

In these books, Vesco states that the Foo Fighters and Flying Saucers weren't alien visitors.

They were the terrifying result of Nazi efforts to construct a new kind of weapon, one that the Germans called the Feuerball or fireball.

What? Look ahead there.

A flying saucer to end all flying saucers.

As we rounded a huge boulder, there stood an enormous cylinder of metal.

It towered at least 750 feet into the air and rested on a stern which could not have been more than four feet in diameter.

He's spoken at more MUFON conferences than any.

He's written lots of books and he's kind of weird.

We were joking around in the studio earlier.

He's like the godfather of ufology.

I was a young nuclear physicist, 24, working for General Electric Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Department in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1958.

And I'm a cheapskate.

I was ordering books from a mail-order book place.

And I needed one more book so I wouldn't have to pay shipping.