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| The space shuttle Endeavour is hoisted onto a wheeled transporter at Los Angeles International Airport on Sept, 22, 2012, in preparation for its move to a display at the California Science Center. Endeavour was flown from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to LAX in California atop a modified 747 jumbo jet during a three-day, cross-country voyage. |
But, before there even was a Space Shuttle, many of us believed that we had been visited by people traveling around in flying saucers.
A flying saucer (also referred to as a flying disc) is a type of described flying craft with a disc or saucer-shaped body, though has also been used generically to refer to any reported anomalous flying object of any shape. The term dates from 1947 and was later supplanted by the USAF in 1952 with the even more-generic unidentified flying objects or (UFO's). These are usually described as silver or metallic, sometimes reported as covered with running lights or surrounded with a glowing light, hovering or moving rapidly, either alone or in tight formations with other similar craft, and exhibiting high maneuverability.
Disc-shaped flying objects have been interpreted as being sporadically recorded since the Middle Ages, the first highly publicized sighting by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947, resulted in the creation of the term by U.S. newspapers. Although Arnold never specifically used the term "flying saucer", he was quoted at the time saying the shape of the objects he saw was like a "saucer", "disc", or "pie-plate", and several years later added he had also said "the objects moved like saucers skipping across the water." (The Arnold article has a selection of newspaper quotes.) Both the terms flying saucer and flying disc were used commonly and interchangeably in the media until the early 1950s.
Arnold's sighting was followed by thousands of similar sightings across the world. Such sightings were once very common, to such an extent that "flying saucer" was a synonym for UFO through the 1960s before it began to fall out of favor. The term is still often used generically for any UFO.
J. Allen Hynek, a trained astronomer who served as a scientific advisor for Project Bluebook, was initially skeptical of UFO reports, but eventually came to the conclusion that many of them could not be satisfactorily explained and was highly critical of what he described as "the cavalier disregard by Project Blue Book of the principles of scientific investigation."
Declassified files about a U.S. Air Force flying saucer simply reveal more about a known military project from the 1950s that ended up more in the realm of science fiction rather than science fact.
Drawings of the saucer like vehicle come from "Project 1794, Final Development Summary Report" — a 1956 document recently uncovered by the National Archives that describes a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft capable of hovering at ground level and reaching supersonic speeds in the sky. But tests at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio soon showed that the concept fell far short of its supposed promise.
Beam me up Scotty…
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