On June 24th, 1947, a private pilot and fire suppression equipment manufacturer named Kenneth Arnold was flying south of Mount Rainier, bound for Yakima, Washington. At about 3 PM he saw a flash of light in the air to the north of the mountain, and subsequently he saw a long chain of flying objects passing in front of the mountain. He described them as having convex shapes, and this was soon changed to the term “flying saucer".

Arnold’s was in fact not the first UFO sighting following the Second World War; nor was it even part of the first wave of sightings of strange things in the sky. Yet something unprecedented did happen after 1947, not only in the United States, but around the world–not necessarily involving aliens, but very much involving humans. As Greg Egighian observes in his new book After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon, UFO sightings “have made people wonder, fret, question, probe, and argue. In that regard, they have revealed more about human beings than about alien worlds. And that is a story worth investigating.”

Greg Eghigian is a Professor of History and Bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth Century Germany and the editor of The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, among other works.

For Further Investigation

Greg Egighian suggests the following books for your UFO history reading list:

Matthew Bowman, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill

David Clarke, How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth

D.W. Pasulka, American Cosmic

Sarah Scoles, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers

Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here – and Out There

Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs

From the HT archives, if you haven't heard them, then give a listen to somewhat related episodes: Iwan Rhys Morus on "How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon," and Tom Misa on the "History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet"

D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

Peter Berger on Secularism and Relativism; and a full-length video of the same lecture