Il y a peine un peu plus de 20 ans, le problème des Objets Volants Non Identifiés (OVNIs) éclata aux yeux du public. En ne serait-ce qu'une période de 2 semaines de l'été 1947, le problème ovni fut exposé en un ordre confus devant le public américain au moyen de titres de journaux et de dépêches à profusion. En retrospective, il semble clair que la trace visible de l'émergence en 1947 du problème ovni est principalement une trace journalistique. Bien que les scientifiques, les militaires, et quelques portes-paroles du gouvernement aient joué des rôles mineurs dans l'entrée dramatique des ovnis sur la scène moderne, les journalistes ont écrit et fourni les lignes clés qui ont rendu prépondérant le rôle des journalistes dans le drame.
Par conséquent, pour reconstruire cette émergence publique, remplie d'événements, du problème ovni, on doit se tourner vers les journaux de la nation et examiner le déploiement jour-par-jour (parfois heure-par-heure) des différents indices ? indices que quelque chose de nature véritablement inhabituelle se produisait.
Quelques auteurs ont déjà nibbled at the edge of a journalistic review de cet épisode de 2 semaines curtain-raising fin juin et début juillet 1947. Dans le présent ouvrage, Bloecher nous donne ce qui en viendra problablement à être considéré comme l'analyse définitive de cet épisode important dans l'histoire journalistique et celles des ovnis.
Son approche fut directe : parce que son travail professionnel l'a amené en diverses parties du pays, il commença il ya plusieurs années à consacrer le maximum de temps possible à fouiller les archives de journaux des bibliothèques locales, afin d'en extraire le matériel de presse d'origine de 1947 relatant le problème ovni dans toutes ses dimensions. Ses dossiers grandissant il se tourna vers d'autres sources, dont les archives du projet Blue Book de l'Air Force et les archives de groupes d'enquête indépendants. A partir de tout ceci, il a assemblé et mit en ordre bien plus clair que cela n'aurait pu être apparent pour les lecteurs de 1947 un récapitulatif systématique de la naissance du problème ovni en 1947. Ce livre est le résultat de ses études. Je le recommande à toutes personnes étudiant sérieusement le problème ovni.
Sans nul doute, la plupart des autres lecteurs seront aussi sonnés que je l'ai été de réaliser que déjà dans les 2 premières semaines après le signalement du Mont Rainier par Kenneth Arnold le 24 juin 1947, des signalements dans la presse d'autres observations américaines d'objets aériens particulièrement non-conventionnels se comptaient non pas en la douzaine ou presque dont la plupart d'entre nous se souvient, mais en centaines. Bloecher concédant avec prudence que sa propre recherche ne pourrait avoir glané tous les signalements des dossiers de presse de 1947, nous pouvons sans risque arrondir au supérieur sa collection de près de 800 signalements à l'estimation qu'au moins 1000 observations observations d'objets non-identifiés ont eut lieu aux Etats-Unis à milieu de l'été 1947, dont le gros arrive lors d'un pic assez précis centré autour du 7 juillet. Comme Bloecher le souligne de manière adéquate, ceci marque clairement l'épisode comme étant l'une des vagues d'observations les plus proéminentes à ce jour.
(Il serait certainement peu sage de tirer la conclusion que 1000 signalements en environ 2 semaines confèrent à cet épisode la distinction d'être la plus proéminente des vagues connues ; malheureusement aucun chercheur sur les ovnis n'a fait pour d'autres vagues américaines le même type de recherche diligente que Bloecher a accompli pour l'épisode de 1947. Ainsi, l'épisode de novembre 1957 pourrait bien dépasser l'épisode de l'été 1947, si seulement une documentation raisonnablement complète était disponible. Et puis, il existe aussi des vagues à l'étranger ; septembre-octobre 1954, comme l'a montré le travail de Michel, a constitué une vague d'observations particulièrement remarquable en France et dans les parties voisines de l'Europe.)
Lors des 2 décennies passées depuis 1947, there has been distressingly little progress made towards elucidating the true nature of the unidentified flying objects. But, elucidated or not, they have refused to go away. Press fun-poking and curiously fallacious official "explanations" have most assuredly held up real scientific progress by conveying the distinct impression that the UFO problem has been only a nonsense problem. But ridicule and snide comments notwithstanding, citizens in all walks of life have continued to report, often in the deepest puzzlement and often in a state of suddenly-enhanced concern, that they have witnessed objects fitting no conventional natural or technological categories -- unidentifiable aerial objects of craft-like nature. This being so, it seems long overdue for the scientific community to put aside arrogance and prejudgment, to overlook preconceptions and past glib comments about all the unbalanced persons who just don't know what they are seeing, and to dig into the facts. That those "facts" are, today, not objective instrumental meter-readings but anecdotal accounts of things seen by persons other than Nobelists, is unfortunate. If only science had not been so casual back in 1947, so ready to believe what so many feature-writers and ill-informed official spokesmen had to say about UFOs, we might today have an abundance of meter-readings with which to work. But 1947 began a two-decade period of misinformation, so we are still hardly at the start of an adequate scientific examination of UFOs.
To understand how that lamentable situation came about, one must begin by reviewing the manner in which various patterns of reaction to the UFO problem became established almost within days of the Arnold report. Bloecher's work lays before us a fascinating summary of those crucial days of initial journalistic confrontation of the UFO puzzle.
To keep the record entirely clear, it is necessary that I draw special attention to the adjective "journalistic" in that last sentence. Bloecher does not here purport to present results of his own investigative reporting of UFO sightings in mid-1947. Nor is he able to vouch, on the basis of independent checking, for the reportorial accuracy of the hundreds of press accounts whose rise and fall he explores. Since we all know that standard press reporting falls well short of 100 per cent accuracy, we must not here equate press reports to scientific accounts.
To form my own estimates of the probable order of reliability of these 1947 reports, I undertook a search for witnesses in several dozen of the more intriguing 1947 cases discussed in the text. The results of this sampling were interesting; they were also encouraging in the sense that they pointed to the generally correct impression one draws from reading all these press accounts: Even after reportorial errors and the like are allowed for, the mid-1947 episode seems to constitute a period of remarkable sightings by many level-headed persons.
In the course of my cross-checks, I found that the UFO problem has been with us so long that some key witnesses of the 1947 period are already dead. Others have moved away from the locales of their 1947 sightings and are not any longer to be found by the type of telephone-searching to which my own check had to be limited. A few, but only very few, have forgotten key details of what they saw and reported; but most emphasized the vividness with which they can still recall the unusual objects they saw, or the unprecedented performance characteristics that stunned them, back there twenty years ago.
In my search, I found one outright hoax that was exposed within a day of the initial press report. The victim gave full details to the same reporters that put the hoax on the wires; they weren't interested in clearing up the hoax, and it stood uncorrected in the files for Bloecher to add to his initial collection.
And in the search I found many cases in which details of the sightings were erroneously reported, both in local and in wire stories. Newspaper reporting, to repeat, leaves a great deal to be desired in the way of accuracy -- whether journalists care to admit it or not. But what I found to be true from the checks I was able to make on about twenty-five more or less randomly selected 1947 cases for which I was able to locate one or more key witnesses was this: Even after one corrected the reporters' errors (wrong times, wrong directions, wrong shapes, wrong names, etc.), one still had left a high percentage of exceedingly interesting and basically unexplainable accounts of unconventional aerial objects. And frequently I found by telephone-interviewing of the witnesses that there was much more significance to the full sighting account than the original reporter had been able to put into his own press story.
Hence, I feel justified in asserting that Bloecher's account is much more than a journalistic review per se; I believe the picture that takes shape as one reads his account is a generally quite correct picture, the random defects of which are admittedly unfortunate but do not spoil the over-all image of an episode of great scientific significance.
I believe that it is important that many more such studies now be undertaken -- with resources that permit a full recheck of the type that I was able to conduct merely on a small-sample basis. Many physical scientists (unlike their confreres in the social sciences) scorn interview methods of acquiring data. I share their strong preference for meter-readings; but I deplore their unwillingness to look at anecdotal data when that's all there is immediately at hand. To escalate concern for the UFO problem to the level where funds and energies will he poured into the design of objective techniques of data-gathering (electromagnetic sensors, improved radar reporting, etc.) will require that science begin by carefully sifting anecdotal data. A first step therein is that of assembling reports; and for the mid-1947 episode Bloecher has done just that for us.
The point I stress is that my own sample-check convinces me that the bulk of these 1947 reports must be viewed as reasonably well reported. This, in itself, carries very important implications. For it implies that within about two weeks hundreds and hundreds of American citizens saw phenomena for which science has no ready explanations. Venus, fireballs, sundogs, and the rest of the "misidentified natural phenomena" of which we have subsequently heard so much in official disclaimers, must be suspected in many more than a few of those reports. But then, as now, one has a large residue of quite inexplicable phenomena reported by persons who appear to be entirely sane, reliable, and often very articulate. And here and there, one finds true gems of the world of reports, cases where highly experienced persons saw objects which they could describe in no other terms than "machines" or "craft" or "vehicles" -- UFOs, briefly.
Ce que je vois de plus important dans tout cela est l'abondance de matériel sous forme de bons cas éparpillés dans une écume de rapports moins fiables -- une abondance que les agences officielles auraient dû reconnaître fin 1947 comme constituant un problème de la plus grande importance scientifique. Aucune reconnaissance de ce type se semble avoir eut lieu. La Force Aérienne de l'Armée des Etats-Unis (qui est devenue l'U. S. Air Force en janvier 1948) a assez naturellement acquis la responsabilité officielle du problème des ovnis avant que 1947 soit terminée ; il y eut une préoccupation compréhensible quant au fait que ces disques supersoniques puissent être des armes de quelque puissance étrangère hostile. Ils manoeuvraient dans notre espace aérien, et donc notre force aérienne reçu et garda (ou, comme le suggèrent certains développements ultérieurs, ne put se débarasser de) la responsabilité de clarifier le mystère des ovnis. Le projet Sign fut formellement créé au sein de l'U. S. Air Force le 22 janvier 1948, 7 petits jours après que l'USAF ait acquis son statut distinct au sein de notre Département de la Défense. Le projet Sign, suivi du project Grudge et du projet Blue Book, devinrent les véhicules administratifs in which headway was supposed to be made towards the goal of explaining the UFOs. En fait, ces véhicules ne firent pratiquement aucun progrès ; et donc en regardant maintenant en arrière sur 20 années de confusion et d'inepties, on se demande comment il a pu être possible que ce bulk of evidence qui éclata mi-1947 devienne, de lui-même, la plus grand corps de "phénomènes mal interprétés", officiellement, de l'histoire scientifique. On doit, je pense, lire le travail de Bloecher avec cette question clairement à l'esprit. Comment tant d'éléments ont-ils pu être balayés de côté, ignorés et raillés ? Quelle était la significativité des signalements d'ovnis déjà largement ignorés en 1947 ? Les historiens des sciences sont, je pense, condamnés à ne pas croire que tant d'éléments se sont perdus dans un administrative shuffle and became only a first stratum underlying 20-years-later deposits of more such startling evidence for the existence of a new scientific problem of extraordinary interest.
I write these introductory comments at a moment when I have behind me about eighteen months of intensive examination of the UFO problem. That examination has convinced me that, far from being a nonsense problem, the UFO problem is perhaps the outstanding scientific problem confronting mankind. Those are strong words, and I intend them to be; they are not lightly written. I believe we must radically reorient scientific attitudes towards this steadily-growing body of UFO reports and that we must enlist the aid of really top-notch scientific talent in the difficult task of bringing ultimate order out of the chaos into which twenty years of ridicule have brought the subject.
Bloecher's study has, for me, brought out at least one very significant insight into the "ridicule-lid" that has so long kept the bulk of the UFO evidence from open scrutiny. The populace itself has well-imprinted patterns of rejection of observations that do not seem to fit within the established world scientific picture.
I shall enlarge a bit on this. I have seen so much press and official ridicule of UFO witnesses in the course of my recent study that I have evidently overlooked somewhat the ingrained tendency for even untrained laymen to be reluctant to report openly something they have seen with their own eyes when it flies in the face of familiar experience. Bloecher's material shows, on close inspection, that even before any Air Force pronouncements, before any press-reported scientific scoffing in début juillet 1947, witnesses were exhibiting quite definite reluctance to report the unprecedented aerial phenomena they had seen. This, for social scientists, deserves bold underscoring as an index of the scientific attitudes of our times. I smiled to hear an eminent American physicist deplore, on a recent television program, the public's credulity as evidenced by its willingness to take seriously the "flying saucer" reports. He shook his head in dismay that years of scientific education of the public had produced so little effect. In fact, he need have little worry on that score. Anyone who has done a substantial amount of direct witness-interviewing in UFO cases knows all too well how unwilling most persons (even those with no formal scientific training) have become with respect to open reporting of UFO sightings. But what I see in Bloecher's early press material is surprising evidence that this reluctance predates official and journalistic fun-poking concerning "flying saucers." Science has built into our population a very definite resistance towards acceptance of the odd and unusual, the bewildering and inexplicable. Exceptions there are, needless to say, but the bulk of the populace tends to be quite close-mouthed about observations of unexplainable phenomena. This disposition was quickly and powerfully enhanced by official scoffing, by scientific pronouncements made ex cathedra by the end of the first week of juillet 1947, and since repeated over and over. But that disposition, Bloecher's studies reveal, was not created by those pronouncements. This I find exceedingly interesting, exceedingly significant, and rather surprising.
Il pourrait être pertinent, si l'espace le permet, pour moi de donner un résumé d'en gros les 2 douzaines de cas de 1947 que j'ai réussi à vérifier dans mon échantillonnage. I found it especially interesting to speak with a number of police and sheriff's deputies in the Portland, Oregon, area concerning the unusual 4 juillet 1947, sightings.
Cet épisode est officiellement expliqué dans les dossiers de l'Air Force par des "paillettes radar" (des bandes d'aluminum larguées pour troubler le radar ennemi), yet it involved repeated sightings of numerous disc-shaped objects moving rapidly across the daytime sky over Portland. To listen to those officers retell what they saw, how they reacted, and how their colleagues ribbed them was more than amusing. But to try to square all those sightings with "radar chaff" is simply annoying; the evidence bears absolutely no resemblance to observations of falling radar chaff. And so it has gone, over the ensuing years.
Un cas de 1947 case that does warrant more than passing mention here is a report that is not in Bloecher's material because it was never reported to press or official
agencies. (One comes to realize that there must be a very large volume of other such reports that still lie fully
covered by the ridicule lid.) The report came directly to me from a Tucson woman who happened to read a Time article
on UFOs (Aug. 4, 1967) that made passing mention of Arnold's report of seeing nine disc-like objects erratically
moving through the air near Mount Rainier in 1947
. Thinking that here, at last, must be a confirmatory report of
what she and a friend had seen in early 1947 in Tucson, and noting my name in the same article, she telephoned me,
thinking that I might be interested to know that she had seen "the same nine objects." But by the time we had gone
over details, it was not obvious that she had seen the same objects as Arnold; but it was clear that her report must
be entered into the UFO record.
Here is a brief summary: Mrs. H. G. Olavick and Mrs. William Down were the witnesses, and the date was Tuesday, April 29, 1947, according to Mrs. Olavick's reconstruction of related events and dates. (there is a possibility that this date is one week off, she pointed out; but that it was a Tuesday in late April or early May she regards as quite definite.) Mrs. Olavick was in her kitchen at 2101 East Hawthorne Street, Tucson, while Mrs. Down was out in the backyard patio. Suddenly Mrs. Down called her out excitedly, and both proceeded to observe what had caught Mrs. Down's eye. The time was just after the noon hour; Tucson's skies were completely cloudless. Somewhat north of their zenith lay an unusual, isolated, "steamy-fleecy" cloud at an altitude which Mrs. Olavick found difficult to estimate, though she recalled that it seemed lower than average for that time of year (thus, perhaps at or below 10,000 feet, say). No other cloud was to be seen in the sky. In and out of the cloud moved a number of dull-white disc-like objects that rose and fell in an erratic manner, occasionally disappearing into or above the unnatural cloud. She said that these objects were round in planform but were not spherical, for they frequently tipped a bit, exposing a flattened-sphere form. She estimates that they watched these objects cavorting near the cloud for perhaps five or six minutes before the entire group suddenly disappeared within the cloud or perhaps above it.
After a minute or so, as she now recalls it, a new object, perhaps three or four times as large as the little objects, came out of the cloud on its east side. After it emerged, the small objects began to emerge also, taking up a V-formation pattern behind it. The V comprised a line of four-abreast just to the rear of the large object, then a line of three-abreast behind that, and finally two-abreast in the rear. Thus, the point of the V was to the rear (in the sense of the emergent and subsequent motion). This formation permitted the first accurate count of the small objects, nine in all. No sooner had the last pair emerged than all ten objects shot off to the northeast, climbing out of sight in a time that she thought was probably two to three seconds. She does not recall what happened to the cloud after the ten objects departed.
I have spoken with Mrs. Olavick several additional times, following her first call. Her account was presented in an unembellished manner, and her descriptions were carefully framed, specifying just which parts had become less distinct in her memory. But the basic vividness of her memory of this observation she stressed repeatedly. I had to explain that it was by no means clear that the objects she saw were identical with those reported by Kenneth Arnold two months later. When I queried her as to why she had not reported them, she pointed out that she and Mrs. Down were entirely convinced that they had been fortunate enough to witness some new American military vehicles about which the general public had not yet been informed. Later she heard of the "flying saucers," and she and Mrs. Down, when they rejoined their husbands in mid-summer in Iowa, told them about their own observation. The husbands, she recalled, made such a joke of it that they ceased mentioning it.
Here was a pre-Arnold sighting never reported officially. It was quite clearly not an observation of "new American military vehicles," nor can one readily square this with any phenomenon of atmospheric physics or astronomy. It is a UFO observation, and a rather interesting one. Bloecher's search has led to several other pre-Arnold 1947 sightings. Just a matter of days before this writing, I spoke on the telephone with Walter A. Minczewski, the U. S. Weather Bureau observer whose April, 1947, theodolite-tracking case is cited in the text. Minczewski emphasized that he had never reported it to other than his Weather Bureau superiors and hence was surprised to be called about it twenty years later. Yet his recollection of the details of the whitish disc-like object he had tracked one clear morning in Richmond, Virginia, was still distinct in his mind.
But time is slipping on, and those 1947 witnesses ought to be interviewed in far more depth than anyone has ever done -- lest we lose their reports forever. The same is true of the innumerable observers of subsequent UFO incidents. Detailed case-studies and thorough episode-studies are sorely needed. Bloecher has given here the raw material for an episode-study of the initial 1947 wave of sightings; he has woven it into an orderly account of what was happening when UFOs first became public knowledge. I find this account absorbing reading and regard it as a substantial contribution to the study of the baffling problem of the unidentified flying objects.
Institute of Atmospheric Physics University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
October 23, 1967