A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

Thus began the famed 1938 Mercury Theater broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” As
is well known, the broadcast was met with mass panic. Minus the demarcation between “fact”
and “fiction,” Orson Welles’ adaptation of the H. G. Welles’ 1897 serialized novel was
interpreted by the listening public as a news broadcast of an actual alien invasion. The timing
was propitious. Some seven months previously, the American public had heard, via the
airwaves, accounts of Germany’s March 13 invasion of Austria. The Japanese and Chinese were
at war. The Loyalists and Falangists continued their struggle in mainland Spain. Europe was
careening toward one of the major conflagrations of the twentieth century, and in America, the
Martians had arrived.
Beginning in 1947, some eight years after Welles’ celebrated hoax, the American public
was confronted with an alien presence not so readily dismissed. As noted in a July 6 New York
Times article, on June 24, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported that he had “observed nine objects
flying at ‘1,200 miles an hour in formation, like the tail of a kite,” over Washington State’s
Cascade Mountains. Arnold gauged the speed (at 1656.71 mph rather than the Times more
conservative 1200) by timing the objects’ passage between Mt. Adams and Mt. Rainier. He
described the motion of these objects, stating, “they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it
across the water.” On the following day, newspaper reporter Bill Bequette of the Pendleton,
Oregon East Oregonian, coined the term “Flying Saucer” to describe what Kenneth Arnold had
seen. This incident, cited by ufologists as the originary moment of the “modern age” of flying
saucers, was followed by an unprecedented flurry of sightings nation-wide. Americans coast-tocoast
were observing flying “dimes, “hubcaps,” and “ice cream cones.” Thus began the first in a
series of American flying saucer “booms.”
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