Into the 1940s and 50s reports of “flying saucers” became an american phenomena that are cultural. Sightings of strange objects within the sky became the materials that are raw Hollywood to provide visions of potential threats. Posters for films, like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers from 1956 illustrate these fears. Linked to ongoing ideas about life from the Moon, the canals on Mars, and ideas about Martian Civilizations, flying saucers have come to represent the hopes and fears associated with modern world.

Are these alleged visitors from other worlds benevolent and peaceful or would they attack and destroy humanity? The destructive power of this Atomic bomb called into question the progressive potential of technology. Anxiety about the options for destruction into the Cold War-era proved fertile ground for terrestrial anxieties to manifest visions of flying saucers and visitors off their worlds who may be hidden among us in plain sight.

Aliens in our midst and Fears of the Other

If UFOs were visiting our society, where were these extraterrestrials? Could they be hidden in our midst? Comic books and television illustrates how the chance for extraterrestrial visitors reflected anxieties of this era.

The 1962 comic you can find Martians in our midst, from Amazing Fantasy #15, illustrates the way concern about extraterrestrials could reflect Cold War anxieties. Within the comic, a search party gathers around a landed alien craft, however it will find no sign of alien beings. Radio announcers warn those nearby to stay indoors. The action shifts to a husband and wife as he prepares to leave their property despite a television announcer’s warning to remain indoors. He reminds his wife to stay inside as he waves goodbye. The wife however chooses to slip off to the shop and it is dragged and attacked off. The husband returns home and finding it empty runs towards the telephone in a panic. The anxious husband reveals that he and his wife are the Martians in a twist.

The fear that there is alien enemies in fears of soviets to our midst resonates and communists from the McCarthy era. Ultimately, in this story, the humans are the ones who accost and capture the alien woman. The shift in perspective puts the humans into the position of this monsters.

UFOs as Contemporary Folklore

Irrespective of depictions of UFOs in media, UFOs will also be part of American folk culture. Ideas of aliens and flying saucers are a part for the mythology of America. You’ll find documentation of these kinds of experiences in folk life collections. A job interview with Howard Miller about hunting and hound dogs, collected as an element of Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia collection, documents a person’s knowledge about a potential UFO sighting.

In A mysterious light, a segment of an ethnographic interview, Miller describes a strange light he saw once while hunting together with his dogs in 1966 “All at I looked up to see what happened once it was daylight, and. There is a light about that big, going up, drifting within the hill. When I looked and seen it just died out. I’ve been in the Marines, and know what airplane lights seem like, and it was too large for that.” When asked it was he offered, “I don’t know what it absolutely was” but went on to describe, “when there is any such thing as write my essay a UFO that’s what that has been. if he knew what” This light that is unexplained a walk when you look at the woods is typical of many stories among these types of encounters. It is not only the media that tells stories and represents these kinds of ideas, documentation of the experiences and stories Americans tell each other is similarly essential for understanding and interpreting what UFOs designed to 20th century America.

Scientists and astronomers express varying quantities of enthusiasm when it comes to probability of intelligent life into the universe. However, scientists generally dismiss the proven fact that there are aliens visiting Earth. In Pale Blue Dot: A Vision for the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan reviews the options of alien visitors to Earth, and shows that there clearly was reason that is good be skeptical of those. A lot of Sagan’s work centers around debunking folk stories and beliefs and tries to encourage more rigorous and thought that is skeptical. He similarly discussed criticism of beliefs in alien visitors inside the earlier book, Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle at night.

This criticism that is zealous of in UFOs from Sagan, who was well recognized for his speculative ideas concerning the odds of alien civilizations, may appear to be a contradiction. Sagan himself had even speculated from the probabilities of visits by ancient aliens in his essay through the early 60s Direct Contact among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight.

How can we reconcile Sagan the skeptic using the imaginative Sagan? Not even close to a contradiction, these two elements of Sagan’s perspective offer a framework for understanding him additionally the interchange between science and myth about life on other worlds. Skepticism and imagination that is speculative together as two halves of this whole. It really is important to entertain and explore new ideas, however strange, while at the time that is same and evaluating the validity of these ideas.