The Famous Flying Saucers

In the summer of 1947 the phrase "flying saucer" entered the vocabulary of popular American culture. Before this period there were some rare and unverifiable stories of disc-shaped aircraft seen around the world, but only a few significant reports of any kind came to light after a series of so-called "phantom" airship" sightings in America around 1886 and l'année suivante. The truly notable incidents, although not really describing saucers, centered around the "foo-fighter" of World War II and mysterious "ghost rockets" over Sweden in 1946. By l'année suivante, the famous saucers had arrived and were here to stay.

An artist's conception of one of the saucer-shaped aircraft that Loedding designed during this period
An artist's conception of one of the saucer-shaped aircraft that Loedding designed during this period

When the sightings hit the headlines, they almost exclusively described flying objects in the shape of discs. Actually, when the primary accounts of many of these reports are studied, the researcher reads stories more descriptive of Alfred Loedding's favorite obsession—flying wings or delta and swept-wing shaped aircraft. Such aerodynamic forms did emerge at the end of World War II and without doubt generated numerous flying saucer reports.

Pictured above are actual blueprints of a saucer-shaped aircraft designed and patented by Alfred Loedding
Pictured above are actual blueprints of a saucer-shaped aircraft designed and patented by Alfred    Loedding

For that reason it is understandable why Alfred Loedding became a chief player in the drama surrounding the early history of UFO sightings. By this period he was often seen running between the buildings at Wright Labs carrying his working models of an all-wing lifting body airfoil. Loedding hoped his design would eventually prove to be the ideal concept for light private aircraft. He envisaged a day when small flying airfoils would even replace the family car s1Trenton (New Jersey) Sunday Times-Advertiser, 10 October 1954. Today we may laugh at his planned application for such a design, but at the time Loedding was justly respected for his interest in the concept of a saucer-shaped airfoil. This became all the more relevant by late June 1947 when "real" flying saucers were being seen in the skies of America. No one knew what they represented, but many were seeking answers from American scientific experts. Alfred Loedding thus entered the flying disc mystery of the great UFO wave of 1947.

Loedding, with his background in radical aeronautics as well as jet propulsion and rocket design was a logical resource to utilize, as little perspective then existed for what was being seen. Jets, of course, were still fairly new and posed a possible solution to the mystery. The German jet and rocket planes that came into service at the tail end of the war startled even experienced pilots not only for their swept-wing design but also for the absence of a propeller. Those German aircraft along with the British Meteor and American P-80 jet fighters had speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour. Such speeds, even two years after the war, still attracted great attention. But jets could account for only a few of the many saucer sightings that summer—which often involved velocities accurately calculated by qualified observers at greater than 1,000 miles per hour.

Loedding with one of his many innovative aircraft test models
Loedding with one of his many innovative aircraft test models

Neither could other new aircraft designs answer all the questions raised by the disc mystery despite the fact that both the Germans and Allies had experimented with the flying wing concept. The Northrop company, for example, tested large flying wing bomber designs in 1947 known as the XB-35 and YB-49 prototypes, but their flights were always documented. Despite many sensational stories on the subject, the well known Horten brothers who designed flying wing aircraft in wartime Germany never saw their machines attain practical use. Nor did the Soviet Union ever utilize the radical Horten airfoil concept.

Balloons, although a much lower level of technology, generated other reports as scientists began using this old invention by the thousands to conduct weather and cosmic ray studies of the stratosphere in the 1940's. The early balloons were made from neoprene which would turn smoky gray or black in the sunlight—just as some witnesses of suspected flying saucer events described seeing. The military and their civilian contractors also used balloons for a whole host of research and intelligence gathering duties. By July of 1947 many of these were no longer small gas bags, but huge silver (and sometimes clear) plastic envelopes made from polyethylene. These f would appear cone-shaped before their helium gas expanded and rounded out their internal volume at high altitude. Many times these and the older, neoprene balloons were tied together in clusters which could resemble formations of discs. Some of these larger polyethylene balloons could be seen by the naked eye at altitudes as high as 60,000 feet. Many saucer sightings, especially after a lot of news play on the subject, were undoubtedly the result of balloon launches. Perhaps as many as seventy percent of all early UFO sightings are attributed to balloons. Yet, balloons cannot explain away, accounts of flying-wings or discs with extraordinary flight characteristics. Loedding soon learned this as he talked to balloon experts who had disc sightings themselves.

The disc reports came from all over North America and around the world in 1947. Many were seen traveling at tremendous speeds, flying extremely high, sometimes hovering, and on numerous occasions making controlled changes in their flight path. These cases remain a mystery because missiles of the day were only being tested in specific designated areas and had little endurance or range. The next generation of rockets like Sputnik, that were capable of intercontinental flight or earth orbit, were still a decade away. Aircraft, on the other hand, had not yet attained reliable means of reaching supersonic speeds, altitudes above 40,000 feet, or developed methods to hover. Because a large percentage of the first disc sightings occurred during daylight hours, astronomical events are difficult to associate with any but a few of the reports. Thus, 1947 has become a very important period to study. Accounts from reputable witnesses during the time are also significant because they had not yet had the opportunity to have their observations tainted by a vast body of previously published UFO lore.

The military started a formal UFO investigation by the end of 1947, although, as early as July Army Air Force and Naval Intelligence as well as the FBI had studied some of the more well publicized reports. Loedding was associated with investigations out of Wright Field by July 9th, yet few records remain of this work. As in later waves, however, only a small percentage of the total number of sightings were reported to authorities. Less than five percent of the 1947 incidents were even indexed in military files n1Research conducted by Jan Aldrich. (Aldrich is a former United States Army meteorologist and now a noted researcher who has combed the world's archives for early UFO reports.). Many of those can be found in the National Archives' holdings of USAF Project Blue Book files n2Although a later effort, Blue Book included what records survived from the 1947 period in its files. Some paperwork dealing with UFOs are also located at the Air Force Historical Center at Maxwell Air Force Base near Montgomery, Alabama, which primarily deal with records of the Fourth Air Force. Nine hundred and ten pages of lost Air Force documents from the late 1940s have also come to light from the National Records Center in St. Louis Missouri—via Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Microfilms of early intelligence files have surfaced as well but are now held in private hands although are becoming available for sale to researchers. Recently released FBI files provide a very good insight into some of the early investigations too. Despite dedicated efforts to locate Naval records containing UFO cases by historian and researcher Jan Aldrich, these files are in large part still missing.

Another very good source dealing with 1947 comes from a book by Ted Bloecher entitled Report on the UFO Wave of 1947. In his work Bloecher surveyed 853 North American newspaper accounts of flying saucer sightings. Regrettably, many of those stories were not taken seriously by the newspapers themselves and lack details. In fact, after some news play on the subject a great deal of silliness arose in the press. Often it becomes hard to weed out the serious stories from that madness. Because most accounts were not followed up on at the time, the articles remain as the only documentation to many of the early UFO sightings.

The authors are indebted to the help of Jan Aldrich for a number of the news accounts to follow. Mr. Aldrich is engaged in a compilation known as Project 1947 that significantly expands on Bloecher's work. Aldrich has screened over 3,200 North American newspapers and others from all over the world for UFO reports. Aldrich's recent book, Project 1947: A Preliminary Report On The 1947 UFO Sighting Wave, is by far the most extensively researched publication available on the period. Today his work continues, searching out UFO accounts long lost in over 11,000 newspapers that were in print in the United States alone in 1947. When reading those accounts it is important to realize that UFOs were still not yet called unidentified flying objects. As stated, the term UFO simply did not yet exist. The media dubbed the strange objects "flying saucers" and "discs" following the Kenneth Arnold sighting. Those terms would predominate in the popular press until well into the 1950s.

The most important historical hindsight a reader can possess concerns the nature of what flying saucers then represented. Very few made the assumption that these discs represented extraterrestrial intelligence. Belief in so-called "alien visitation" did not mature until 1949 and then mainly in the cinema and tabloid-like magazines printed on pulpwood paper—"the pulp fiction." In 1947 flying saucers were assumed to mean scientific balloons or most likely classified military test craft. What else could a rational individual who had just lived through the wartime environment of secret weapons development think? Most people just hoped they were American and not Soviet—especially the military. Loedding thought likewise. At first he gave great weight to the consideration that the Soviets may have acquired some lost Nazi technology. It is interesting to note, however, that Loedding eventually became one of the first in official circles to conclude that the flying discs could represent controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. His chief, Colonel Howard M. McCoy, even said that November, "The possibility that the reported objects are vehicles from another planet has not been ignored" s2FOIA request I-NAIC-97-053, Project Sign and Grudge documents 1948-1949, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio.. But that was not a topic of discussion in the summer of 1947.

Although saucers were indeed very hot news by early July, they were not the only focus of the nation by any means. The Cold War had begun to heat up in late 1946 as tensions grew tighter each day. In that year, while responding to an invitation from President Truman to speak in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill brought the phrase Iron Curtain into general use. Although voted out of office by that point, his beloved Britain then had to institute bread rationing in order to export enough grain to keep food riots from erupting in Allied occupied Germany. That was a hardship English citizens had not even had to endure during the darkest days of the war. Subsequent pressure on Parliament led Britain to abandon efforts to check Communist expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. President Truman felt America had to fill that vacuum. To drum up Congressional support for aid to Greece and Turkey as well as aid to Europe, the Truman administration intentionally exploited public anxiety. The battleship Missouri sailed to the Mediterranean s3David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 540-550, 562-565. But as the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan took shape in 1947, real fears over a blockade of Berlin were already in the news.

The Berlin Crisis would only be a year off. President Truman would send a flight of B-29 bombers to England the next summer to dissuade ongoing Soviet threats to close the divided city from the West. The B-29s had no nuclear weapons, but the administration made every effort to suggest that they did. In fact, when the (Army) Air Force and thus Alfred Loedding officially became involved with UFOs, they did so largely out of fear of foreign, but earthly, intrusions into American air space.

The American military, after all, had already started mapping Soviet defenses on the Siberian frontier via the North Pole in converted B-29s. Recently declassified Air Force files even document US efforts to locate land masses in the Polar region that could be used for bomber bases. When the British later flew nighttime radar mapping reconnaissance missions over major Russian cities with American RB-45C jets out of England, it only stood to reason that the Soviets would try to do the same s4Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun, The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 326; and Paul Lashmar, Spy Flights of the Cold War (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1996), pp. 66-71.

The crucial point so often missed, concerns the significance of the 1947 sightings. If the nation believed they were seeing experimental aircraft or spy planes, then they were in fact seeing something. Today we know they were not Soviet—the USSR made no early incursions into continental US air space. But what were they? Undoubtedly many were misidentifications of domestic aircraft, balloons, and astronomical events—probably as many as eighty percent. But even the military came to the conclusion that there was a disturbing number of unexplainable events. By September 1947 Air Materiel Command, Wright Field, commander, Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining, produced a memo based on research which Loedding assisted with. It characterized the discs as "real and not visionary." Future Air Force Intelligence Chief Major General Charles P. Cabell even stated in regard to the discs, "The conclusion appears inescapable that some type of flying object has been observed." Wright Field Intelligence Chief Colonel McCoy then concurred, "it is obvious that some types of flying objects have been sighted" s5FOIA request I-NAIC-97-053.

From July 4-11, 1947 UFO reports dominated the newspapers, often featuring flying saucer sightings on their front pages. The stately New York Times ran four continuous days of page-one features starting on July 6th, this at a time when editors jealously coveted space for stories dealing with Berlin, the Marshall Plan, and serious flooding in the Midwest—which was a significant domestic news story. National Guard air units, the Army Air Force, and Navy were sufficiently concerned to send up "saucer patrols" along the Pacific Coast. That's significant alone because the regular military then had what they perceived to be a need to conserve fuel for upcoming Air Force Day celebrations. The sightings attracted such attention because most of them took place in broad daylight. This stood in great contrast to earlier and later UFO cases, many of which occurred at night or generated vague descriptions of objects that appeared so luminous or distant that they did not seem to be of substance. During this period many accounts describe very solid-looking objects maneuvering with the performance that some aircraft lack today. The reports do not all involve flying wing and saucer-shaped craft. The 1947 wave encompassed a great variety of observed phenomena including cigar-shaped rocket-like objects. Other forms include luminous balls, fan blades, boomerangs, triangles, diamonds, and light phenomena.

Sightings suddenly slowed in frequency after July 11th. Several dozen notable sightings would follow to end out the year, but whatever happened took place primarily between June 24th (and in force from July 4th) to July 11th. Granted, after the 11th, the news media did seem to lose interest in the story, but this alone cannot account for the marked decrease in reported activity after that initial onslaught of sightings. Some sort of phenomenon predominated in those very critical days of late June to early July.

Many claim it to be a form of mass hysteria generated by the widely publicized Kenneth Arnold sighting. If so, why did the sightings encompass the entire globe in a matter of only days with too little time for most people in foreign countries to read news accounts of the first American saucers? Why were there sightings before Arnold's? Would Arnold's story have become so publicized if not for actual incidents immediately following his event? Why did the intensity of the phenomenon end so suddenly after the 11th? If people were indeed caught up in a worldwide craze generated by media coverage, would not large numbers of reports still come in on the 12th instead of dozens the day before and only a handful until l'année suivante? These same questions were asked by Alfred Loedding. The facts that follow are those that became available to Loedding during the course of 1947. Many of the UFO incidents of that year will be shown to result in specific actions taken by the military to formulate an investigation. That investigation, in large part, became the brain child of Alfred Loedding.