William J Birnes - The Everything UFO Book: An investigation of sightings, cover-ups, and the quest for extraterrestial life

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Lisa Laing, my editor at Adams Media, for her patience and skill in shepherding this manuscript. Thanks also to Nancy Hayfield, my wife and the editor of UFO Magazine. And finally, thanks to the cast and crew of Historys UFO Hunters and to my fellow hunters Pat Uskert, Ted Acworth, Kevin Cook, and Jeff Tomlinson for their dedication over three seasons of grueling travel and filming.

sorry something went wrong loading your content. Check the table of contents or try paging forward. Or contact us at support@bookshout.com

sorry something went wrong loading your content. Check the table of contents or try paging forward. Or contact us at support@bookshout.com

CHAPTER 1
Flying Saucers and UFOs

What is a flying saucer? Simply stated, a flying saucer was the name a newspaper editor gave to the way a strange crescent-shaped craft, sighted by test pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947, skipped through the airjust like a saucer skipping over the water. Flying saucer didnt mean spacecraft or hostile extraterrestrial craft, but the media liked the concept and ran (or flew) with it. However, there are legitimate distinctions between UFOsan object one cant identifyand a flying saucer, just as there are distinctions between kinds of unidentified craft and even craft you might call flying saucers. For the beginner in UFO hunting, knowing these differences and what different witnesses have described is an important first step.

The concept of flying craft with otherworldly origins goes back millennia. In the Bible, for example, the prophet Ezekiel saw a wheel, turning, with flames coming out of it. To him it was not a UFO but a flying wheel.

The Indian Vedic text talks about vertical cylindrical craft flown by the Vimana, ancient aliens who fought with each other from their flying craft. The descriptions of these craft were so precise and the descriptions of the propulsion systems so meticulous that the Nazis sought to reinvent them as weapons.

Native Americans talk of flying shields navigated by the Star People, who came to Earth and established human civilization. In times of trouble, the Star People moved entire tribes to new lands so they would survive.

During the Middle Ages, narratives of strange flying craft described them sometimes as flaming shields, spears, or moons that created fear and havoc among townspeople.

According to the Mutual UFO Network, over 95 percent of all UFO sightings turn out to be conventional craft, optical illusions, or downright hoaxes. Its the remaining 5 percent that they investigate.

In modern times, there is much talk about flying giant triangles, flying cylinders, flying crescents, flying orbs, and flying rods, all of which fit into the category of UFOs because most people cant identify the craftthey can only describe the shape.

The majority of sightings are simply lights in the sky. Rarely do people see structured objects clearly. There are those fortunate enough to catch the structure of an object because of the angle of light or as a result of their locationas many people did in a major sighting in 1997 called the Phoenix Lights incidentbut usually its just a light that seems unconventional in the way it moves or in the way it is self-illuminating. As a result, most witnesses cant make a specific judgment about the object theyve seen. They usually say it was something that didnt look conventional and, therefore, was unidentifiable. This, then, became the origin of the term UFO. It is an object that is flying that witnesses cannot positively identify as something they recognize.

Its important to stress the unidentifiable nature of the object, because when people say to a friend that theyve seen a UFO, the almost immediate thought is that theyve seen a spacecraft. This is not necessarily true. How can you tell a spacecraft from an interdimensional craft, or even a time ship? How do you know what a time ship looks like? Does it have a big rear spinning wheel like the time machine from the 1962 George Pal film The Time Machine? The truth is that no one probably can identify a time ship, an interdimensional craft, or even a craft from another planet. Therefore, what most people see are UFOs, structured or unstructured, lights or dots in the sky, because these are objects that are unconventional and there is no criteria with which to categorize them other than to say theyre unidentified.

Semantic creep occurs when a term or a word expands its meaning to something else. UFO, which was originally a neutral term denoting a flying object that could not be identified, has come to mean an extraterrestrial craft. The term has crept semantically from neutral to colorful.

However, once you say UFO, a whole boxcar of meaning slides along the track because over the course of sixty years of sightings, flaps, and incidents, UFO has come to mean extraterrestrial craft. That being the case, the careful scientific community, not wanting to be thought of as spaceman crazy, came up with a new term, UAP, which stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Does that sound like six of one, half-dozen of another? Of course it does, on the surface. However, there is a major difference. Because the connotation of UFO means flying saucer and the connotation of UAP is probably unknown, the scientific community can use UAP and escape the true believer label while sounding more nuts-and-bolts within a scientific context. Its all a matter of how one wants to be perceived.

On June 24, 1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold was searching for a missing plane over Mount Rainier in Washington State. While searching for the plane, Arnold saw nine silvery objects flying in formation through his cockpit window. At first he thought they were birds, but they seemed metallic and didnt fly like birds. The more he observed them, the more he saw they were unconventional, wingless craft. They were shaped like crescents or soft-edged triangles. To his eyes, they seemed to skip through the air, appearing in one spot, then winking out and appearing in another spot as if they were bobbing in and out of reality. Arnold thought they were experimental aircraft from the U.S. Army Air Force.

He called in his sighting to the local airfield. When he arrived, people were already there to question him about what he saw. In describing the motion of the strange craft to a local reporter, Arnold said that they moved through the air just like a saucer that was skipping across the surface of water. And the newspaper reporter coined the phrase, flying saucers. The name stuck, and soon every sighting of a strange craft was called a flying saucer.

UFOs appear to witnesses in all sizes and shapes, which makes the term flying saucer, referring to any type of extraterrestrial ship, a misnomer. For example, the craft that Kenneth Arnold referred to in 1947 as skipping through the air like a saucer skips over water werent saucer-shaped at all. They were soft crescents. Witnesses said this was the same type of craft that crashed at Roswell in July 1947.

The traditional shape associated with flying saucers, especially in the 1950s, are just thatdisks. Captured in photographs by Paul Trent of McMinnville, Oregon, and Rex Heflin of Santa Ana, California, these craft look like flying hubcaps or wheels and are depicted in classic motion pictures, including The Day the Earth Stood Still and This Island Earth.

Photos taken by Ed Walters in Gulf Breeze, Florida, show a multilayered circular craft, similar to the huge mother ship depicted in the movie