In 1492, Christopher Columbus, sailing the ocean blue aboard the Santa Maria, saw an unidentified flying object "glimmering at a great distance." It vanished and reappeared several times during the night, moving up and down, "in sudden and passing gleams." It was sighted 4 hours before land was sighted, and taken by Columbus as a sign they would soon come to land.
Columbus wasn't the first to witness some-thing strange in the sky and, Lord knows, he wouldn't be the last. More after the jump.
From Life Magazine Special - Strange But True: 100 of the World's Weirdest Wonders
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There were many more sightings worldwide in the 15th through 20th centuries, of course, but we must skip along here, so let's fast-forward to June of 1947, a seminal month in the annals of ufology. In one incident that occurred in the state of Washington, Harold Dahl was in his boat with his son and dog when he saw, over by Maury Island, six UFOs. According to Dahl, some hot slag fell from the spaceships onto his boat, killing the dog and injuring the boy. Furthermore, Dahl said, the next morning he was told by a so-called Man in Black, whom he took to be a military or government official, not to discuss the episode or some unspecified harm could befall his family.
Only three days later, also in Washington, Kenneth Arnold was flying his small plane near Mount Rainier when he saw a squadron of nine mysterious conveyances traveling astonishingly fast and looking "like a saucer if you skip it across water." When his account was reported the next day, flying saucers had a name.
The third incident, mysterious from the get-go, stands today as the most famous and controversial UFO episode ever.
On or about June 14,1947, Mac Brazel, foreman of the Foster ranch, 70 miles north of Roswell, New Mexico, found some curious debris on the property. He eventually told Sheriff George Wilcox about it, and Wilcox informed Major Jesse Marcel at the Roswell Army Air Field. On July 8, the Air Field issued a press release stating that its 509th Bomb Group had recovered a wrecked "flying disc" from the ranch. Later in the day, official word came down that it was in fact a crashed weather balloon that had been found, and some of the debris shown at a press conference seemed to support this revised conclusion.
The story might have ended there, had not Major Marcel granted an interview to ufologist Stanton T. Friedman in 1978 in which Marcel plainly stated that the military had covered up the recovery of a flying saucer. Ever since, the Roswell incident has been hotly debated, even as its narrative has continued to evolve and grow. Reports came forth that aliens had been discovered at the crash site, and that alien autopsies had been performed. (As might be imagined, an alien autopsy film surfaced, though it is widely regarded to be a hoax.) Serious folks got involved.
At one point, Barry Goldwater, senator from Arizona, hearing that UFO evidence was being kept in a top-secret place at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, tried to gain access to that area and was denied. A former major general in the United States Army Air Corps, Goldwater continued to press his request with his friend, General Curtis LeMay, who finally grew livid and, as Goldwater told The New Yorker in 1988, gave him "holy hell." LeMay was clear: "Not only can't you get into it but don't you ever mention it to me again!' Asked that same year by Larry King whether he thought the government was with-holding UFO evidence, Goldwater replied succinctly, "Yes, I do?'
Goldwater was by no means the only government official to take UFOs seriously. During his 1976 presidential election campaign, Jimmy Carter recalled a 1969 sighting he had made in Leary, Georgia: "It was the darndest thing I've ever seen. It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors and it was about the size of the moon ... I'll never make fun of people who say they've seen unidentified objects in the sky?'
There have been, in the decades since the incidents 0 f '47, several governmental panels convened to look into UFOs, from which a number of reports have been issued. Project Sign was followed by Project Grudge and then Project Blue Book, which was headquartered at Wright-Patterson from 1952 to 1969. During this time it investigated 12,009 sightings and determined about 10 percent of them could not be satisfactorily explained by known astronomical, atmospheric or human-caused conditions.
J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer at Northwestern University, was involved in all three of those official projects, and came to the conclusion that a very few of the soundest sightings did indeed imply extraterrestrial life. He was moved to found the Center for UFO Studies, whose "purpose is to promote serious scientific interest in UFOs and to serve as an archive for reports, documents and publications about the UFO phenomenon?"
Of that there is no doubt: It is a phenomenon. It may be fake, it may be something else entirely. But it is definitely a phenomenon, and has been fora long, long time.
From Life Magazine Special - Strange But True: 100 of the World's Weirdest Wonders
Purchase here!
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