“Keep looking, keep watching the skies!” Douglas Spencer proclaims during the final moments of the 1951 sci-fi horror film The Thing From Another World. From 1947 onwards that’s just what America was doing as the nation became gripped by a flying saucer frenzy. The birth of the UFO phenomenon is one of the most intriguing moments in late 1940s and ’50s popular culture. During this period some of the most infamous UFO sightings of the 20th century occurred, and places like Roswell became synonymous with visitors from other planets and sinister conspiracies. But as the world entered one of the hottest phases of the Cold War, just why was America obsessed with “watching the skies”?
As far as historians have been able to tell, the beginning of the flying saucer craze can be traced back to events that occurred on 24 June 1947 when businessman and amateur aviator Kenneth Arnold witnessed something strange in the airspace above Mineral, Washington. Arnold was circling in his small private plane a round the area surrounding Mount Rainier where a Marine Corps plane was said to have recently crashed. There was a $5,000 reward for anyone who located the wreckage, but Arnold would find something far more eerie in the skies above the mountains. It began when he was startled by a blue flash in the periphery of his vision. The surprised pilot looked around desperately but could see nothing except a DC-4 aircraft roughly 25km away, – little did he or the journalist realise the effect that his story would have. According to , by the end of 1947 there were almost 300 UFO sightings – the United States was in the grip of a ‘flying saucer frenzy’.
