UFO entrepreneurs combined scraps of reliable information with wild conjecture. Investigators often ended as befuddled as when they began.
On June 24, 1947, a civilian pilot in Washington state spotted nine bright lights apparently moving at incredible speed near Mount Rainier. Interviewed by local reporters, he described the objects as saucer-like. Articles about the Mount Rainier “flying saucers” soon appeared in newspapers across the country. In the coming days more sightings poured in—from Alabama, Nevada, Oregon—and these too made headlines. “Flying ‘Whatsits’ Supplant Weather as No. 1 Topic Anywhere People Meet,” reported the Los Angeles Times.
Then, in early July, a rancher near Roswell, N.M., told authorities he’d found a jumble of crumpled foil and wooden dowels on his land. Army officers from a local airbase investigated, then quickly announced they’d captured a “flying disc.” What a sensation! But almost as quickly, Army higher-ups pooh-poohed that assertion, claiming that the debris was merely scraps from a crashed weather balloon. The attempted debunking didn’t work, and the rest is history—or myth, depending on how deeply one ventures into the maddeningly murky lore of “ufology.”
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, cohost of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.
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