The role of contemporary culture in the changing UFO narrative

[Gary C]

A few posts this summer have gotten me thinking about the role of societal changes in the creation of bunk, specifically UFOlogy.
One member pointed out that disk shaped space craft had appeared in the movies years before the term "flying saucer" was first used in the press.
The more recent NJ and Scandinavian 'Drone Flaps' obviously coincide with public and governmental debate over the use and misuse of drones domestically while a highly publicized drone war rages in the skies over Ukraine.

I'd like to start at the beginning, Roswell.

My parents were born in the 1920's coming of age in the Great Depression and WWII. They witnessed the creation of commercial air travel. They lived through the massed aerial combat of the war. Before WWII and with a few exceptions, only military personnel and a handful of well-heeled private citizens travelled by air. During WII tens of thousands died in airplane crashes both in and out of combat. After WWII, commercial air traffic exploded, sometimes literally. In my parents' lifetimes, the "plane crash" went from something that happened to an air mail pilot or a stunt performer to something that happened to the kid you grew up with. It became both common enough for ordinary citizens to discuss at length and rare enough to be newsworthy. I suspect this is the sweet spot for the birth of a pop culture mythos.

From Statistia - https://www.statista.com/chart/3335/people-killed-in-commercial-plane-crashes-since-1942/
(Note the spike beginning in 1946/47)

[Can we get Statistia approved as a safe source for links to graphics?]

Now what does a layperson know about aviation? Bernoulli's Principle? Unlikely. Meteorology? Not much. Navigation? Very little. Only one or two percent of the population have ever been on an aircraft yet the topic must come up with every morning newspaper featuring a photo of the most recent commercial or military accident.

Now the UFO phenomenon did not "take off" (sorry) until well after the actual Roswell incident, however the WWII generation it blossomed in was already primed with the necessary concepts for UFOlogy to take shape.

• Things in the air must be "flying"
• Things that fly have pilots operating them
• Things that can fly can crash
• Pilots die in crashes
• Government or military authorities engage in censorship regarding their activities [also a byproduct of WWII]

For the Forum

What other social transitions or conditions affected the spread or decline of UFOlogy or another fringe belief?

[Edited for clarity, I'm looking for more specific examples.]

 

[Alytha]

No sources to quote here, please forgive me, but from what I remember reading about this in the last years, the underlying phenomenon seems to be this:
- people experience weird shit. Lights, creatures, feelings,...

And the way we interpret these things depends on our cultural context. It's about something happening around you that's often new, and you don't really understand it.
A couple thousand years ago (and sometimes today), it was gods and angels / monsters and fairies and jinn and what have you.
During the industrial revolution it was airships.
From the mid-20th century, it's been aliens. I've seen that attributed to the rise of science-fiction in culture.
And now it's drones, because drones are a new scary thing that nobody really understands.

I wonder what the next incarnation will be...

ETA: vaguely acceptable as sources: reading the FT for 20 years (yeah I know they're not exactly on the hard science side on some things, but they do go into the anthropological / social history of weird stuff) and listening to pretty much the entire run of the MonsterTalk and Squaring the Strange podcasts)

 

[Gary C]

I agree and I'm hoping to move from simple correlations to more specific social antecedents that make a particular fringe belief more or less likely to spread.

 

[Ann K]

I agree and I'm hoping to move from simple correlations to more specific social antecedents that make a particular fringe belief more or less likely to spread.

The book "Abominable Science" (Prothero and Loxton) examines the origin of various types of belief and the events that led to their becoming prominent in the public consciousness. No quotes, I'm afraid, because one of my kids appears to have walked off with my copy.

 

[Gary C]

The book "Abominable Science" (Prothero and Loxton) examines the origin of various types of belief and the events that led to their becoming prominent in the public consciousness. No quotes, I'm afraid, because one of my kids appears to have walked off with my copy.

Is this it? https://cup.columbia.edu/book/abominable-science/9780231153218/

 

[Alytha]

Yeah that's the one, been meaning to get it too.

 

[JMartJr]

No quotes, I'm afraid, because one of my kids appears to have walked off with my copy.

I have a copy, if you are looking for a particular quote I can try and find it...

 

[FatPhil]

What other social transitions or conditions affected the spread or decline of UFOlogy or another fringe belief?

Perhaps we're no longer training our brains as much:

In the 1980s, New Zealand intelligence researcher James R. Flynn identified a consistent rise in IQ scores across the world throughout the 20th century. This became known as the Flynn Effect and was initially interpreted as evidence of humanity getting smarter—perhaps thanks to better nutrition, education, and healthcare.

But by the 1990s, the trend reversed.

The first major alarm came from Norway. Because of its compulsory military service, the country had amassed a massive database of cognitive testing—covering more than 730,000 young men from 1962 to today. What researchers found was stunning: IQ scores peaked among those born around 1975 and have been declining since. The average drop is about 7 points per generation.

Flynn himself later confirmed similar trends in the UK, where teenagers in the 2000s tested lower than their 1980s counterparts. And it wasn't just a fluke—researchers across the world observed the same pattern in developed countries.

-- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...-of-homo-idioticus-are-we-getting-more-stupid

 

[Gary C]

Perhaps we're no longer training our brains as much:

In the 1980s, New Zealand intelligence researcher James R. Flynn identified a consistent rise in IQ scores across the world throughout the 20th century. This became known as the Flynn Effect and was initially interpreted as evidence of humanity getting smarter—perhaps thanks to better nutrition, education, and healthcare.

But by the 1990s, the trend reversed.

The first major alarm came from Norway. Because of its compulsory military service, the country had amassed a massive database of cognitive testing—covering more than 730,000 young men from 1962 to today. What researchers found was stunning: IQ scores peaked among those born around 1975 and have been declining since. The average drop is about 7 points per generation.

Flynn himself later confirmed similar trends in the UK, where teenagers in the 2000s tested lower than their 1980s counterparts. And it wasn't just a fluke—researchers across the world observed the same pattern in developed countries.

-- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...-of-homo-idioticus-are-we-getting-more-stupid

It could certainly be a factor although IQ testing has a very mixed track record.
My first question then is, what fringe belief is prevalent in Norway that is comparable to the largely US centric UFO phenomenon which appears deeply tied to American popular culture?

 

[JMartJr]

My first question then is, what fringe belief is prevalent in Norway that is comparable to the largely US centric UFO phenomenon which appears deeply tied to American popular culture?

Do you have data on the assertion that UFO phenomenon is deeply tied to American popular culture? I've seen things like this map:

Which seems to have more to do with searching for "UFO" reports will not find many hits in places where terms like OVNI are used instead... you essentially get lots of hits where English is spoken and there are a lot of people, possibly skewed a bit more by the presence or absence of official or unofficial organizations to which reports can be made!

(This is not intended as a slap at the idea that UFO culture is tied to US popular culture, I would not be surprised if this were the case. I'm just curious if there is evidence for it.)

 

[Gary C]

Exactly the sort of questions and ideas I want to explore.

 

[Ann K]

Perhaps we're no longer training our brains as much:

That roughly coincides with the dates at which a large proportion of children were "raised by TV". The actual content of the programs available is part of it, of course.

 

[jdog]

No sources to quote here, please forgive me, but from what I remember reading about this in the last years, the underlying phenomenon seems to be this:
- people experience weird shit. Lights, creatures, feelings,...

And the way we interpret these things depends on our cultural context. It's about something happening around you that's often new, and you don't really understand it.
A couple thousand years ago (and sometimes today), it was gods and angels / monsters and fairies and jinn and what have you.
During the industrial revolution it was airships.
From the mid-20th century, it's been aliens. I've seen that attributed to the rise of science-fiction in culture.
And now it's drones, because drones are a new scary thing that nobody really understands.

I wonder what the next incarnation will be...

ETA: vaguely acceptable as sources: reading the FT for 20 years (yeah I know they're not exactly on the hard science side on some things, but they do go into the anthropological / social history of weird stuff) and listening to pretty much the entire run of the MonsterTalk and Squaring the Strange podcasts)

I'm always amused when /r/ufos denizens take a look at old movies and conclude that Hollywood has been pushing "soft disclosure" for decades to get people more used to the reality of aliens, when it's really pop culture that's been priming people to believe they're seeing aliens. It was pointed out in this forum recently that most of the incidents portrayed in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) were drawn from the era's UFO lore, which then created a feedback loop of people basing their personal tales of close encounters on what they saw in the movie, which would go on to inspire more books, movies and TV shows, which would go on to influence more reports, ad infinitum. (Whatever happened to alien abductions, anyway?)

TLDR: Unless you've been given a tour of a mothership, it appears the main reason to assume a distant light in the sky is of alien origin is from pop culture and lifetimes of media exposure.

 

[FatPhil]

That roughly coincides with the dates at which a large proportion of children were "raised by TV". The actual content of the programs available is part of it, of course.

Coincidences are wonderful things.

I've just been watching a BBC documentary (2022, overlapping greatly with one made previously, but containing a fair amount of additional new material) about Mary Whitehouse (a grotesquely censorious and homophobic bible-basher from the 60s onwards), and the concept of 80s "video nasties" was raised in this second part. I paused it at that point, and said to my g/f that I'd read something today which implied that these youngsters who were first exposed /en masse/ to the such harmful material seem to be the smartest generation Britain's had. (Though the real data showed that there was no mass exposure, so the whole original scare was bunk: one of her favourite tools.)

 

[John J.]

What other social transitions or conditions affected the spread or decline of UFOlogy or another fringe belief?

Thank you for raising such an interesting topic.
There's a thread "How have descriptions of UAPs changed over the years?" which has some related discussion.

As well as the influence of technological development and socio-political events, I think fictional representations of aliens and their spacecraft in popular culture have played a significant role in some aspects of the UFO narrative (not least the axiom that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth).

What we call popular culture arguably has its roots in the later half of the 19th century. In a few countries- e.g. in Western Europe, North America- a sizeable literate middle class emerges, with some money to spare on entertainment. Magazines and mass-market books become popular. A large percentage of children from poorer backgrounds receive at least some formal education (and learn to read), public libraries proliferate. Many workers have at least some guaranteed days off in which they can pursue hobbies.

Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel Around the Moon (1869) might have been among the first works which made at least a minority of the reading public aware of the possibility of "scientific" spaceflight, i.e. spaceflight by mechanical means that (at that time) might have seemed at least halfway credible (Verne's spacecraft is, effectively, a giant shell fired from a huge gun; I'd guess even at the time learned people would have been aware that the acceleration wouldn't be good for the occupants).

(L), the spacecraft in an 1872 illustration (Wikipedia), (R) an 1875 German translation's front cover depicting the launch (Science Photo Library).

A few years later, the idea of life on other planets got a boost from the observations of Mars by Giovanni Schiaparelli (Wikipedia), who believed he saw water courses on the surface:

During the planet's "great opposition" of 1877, he observed a dense network of linear structures on the surface of Mars, which he called canali in Italian, meaning "channels", but the term was mistranslated into English as "canals".

(Wikipedia as above); while Schiaparelli didn't state the canali were necessarily artificial, some people (notably US astronomer Percival Lowell) wondered if they were. Some astronomers reported- and mapped- elaborate networks of straight lines.

H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, 1898 (serialised in the USA by Cosmopolitan (!) in 1897) combined these ideas: There were Martians... and they had the spacecraft-launching cannon. War of the Worlds was well-received, and has never been out of print since.
Cylinders land in England; metallic tripedal "fighting machines" emerge, 100 feet/ 30 m tall.
They carry a "heat-ray", an instrument resembling a bulky Victorian camera. I'd guess the first use of a ray gun/ beam weapon in fiction:

This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a light-house projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved these details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter.

Wells' Martians are maybe the first fictional aliens whose appearance has a (sort of, for that time) scientific rationale: An older species than us, they have evolved to become pretty much all cranium and hand (well, dexterous tentacles). Wells was a science teacher; one of his tutors was Thomas Huxley, famously a contemporary supporter of Charles Darwin ("Darwin's Bulldog").

1906 illustrations by Henrique Alvim Corrêa.

So, by the first years of the 20th century a significant number of people would have been familiar with the idea of spaceflight, aliens, and aliens with more advanced technology than us- as fictional concepts, anyway.

In the first decade of the 20th century Konstantin Tsiolkovsky reasoned that rockets, fuelled with hydrogen and oxygen, would work in space.
He realised the need to reach escape velocity, and later theorised that multi-stage rockets might achieve this. Hermann Oberth and Robert Goddard reached similar conclusions in the 1920s. While not always taken seriously, there was a growing understanding amongst some scientists and engineers that spaceflight was physically possible.

Reprints of Verne's and Wells' proto-SF stories and later science fiction tales sometimes featured in story papers and pulp magazines of the 1910s and 1920s. In 1926, American Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, a science fiction magazine with stories featuring many of the tropes of contemporary science fiction: Spaceflight, aliens, robots, rogue scientists etc. etc.
Amazing was (relatively) influential, and a number of similar SF magazines followed. With colourful covers, on newsstands and newsagent shelves they might have made more of an impression on the wider public than their modest circulations might suggest.

From the thread "What evidence of aliens would convince skeptics?", magazine covers from 1929, the 1930s and 1940-
-between 17 and 27 years before Kenneth Arnold's sighting was (erroneously) described as a flying saucer and a USAAF public relations man described balloon debris as a flying disc.

...long before the idea that UFOs were "a thing" and that they might be alien craft became widespread, the American public were familiar with space-faring flying discs. They had been visible on magazine stands across the nation for years.

Magazines (L-R) from November 1929; winter 1930; pre-1931 (Science Wonder Stories merged with Air Wonder Stories to produce Wonder Stories in 1930); pre-1937 (not clearly visible here but cover states editor is Hugo Gernsback who ceased being editor in Feb 1936); May 1940.
So Americans knew about flying saucers for at least 17 years before anyone suggested they were real.

 

[Gary C]

I didn't realize Amazing Stories was that old.
Your mention of H.G. Wells reminded me of Orson Wells infamous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. On the eve of WWII it fits well with my concept of the changing social conditions the WWII generation lived through and the role of technology in that change.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

A few posts this summer have gotten me thinking about the role of societal changes in the creation of bunk, specifically UFOlogy.
One member pointed out that disk shaped space craft had appeared in the movies years before the term "flying saucer" was first used in the press.
The more recent NJ and Scandinavian 'Drone Flaps' obviously coincide with public and governmental debate over the use and misuse of drones domestically while a highly publicized drone war rages in the skies over Ukraine.

I'd like to start at the beginning, Roswell.

My parents were born in the 1920's coming of age in the Great Depression and WWII. They witnessed the creation of commercial air travel. They lived through the massed aerial combat of the war. Before WWII and with a few exceptions, only military personnel and a handful of well-heeled private citizens travelled by air. During WII tens of thousands died in airplane crashes both in and out of combat. After WWII, commercial air traffic exploded, sometimes literally. In my parents' lifetimes, the "plane crash" went from something that happened to an air mail pilot or a stunt performer to something that happened to the kid you grew up with. It became both common enough for ordinary citizens to discuss at length and rare enough to be newsworthy. I suspect this is the sweet spot for the birth of a pop culture mythos.

From Statistia - https://www.statista.com/chart/3335/people-killed-in-commercial-plane-crashes-since-1942/
(Note the spike beginning in 1946/47)

View attachment 85210

[Can we get Statistia approved as a safe source for links to graphics?]

Now what does a layperson know about aviation? Bernoulli's Principle? Unlikely. Meteorology? Not much. Navigation? Very little. Only one or two percent of the population have ever been on an aircraft yet the topic must come up with every morning newspaper featuring a photo of the most recent commercial or military accident.

Now the UFO phenomenon did not "take off" (sorry) until well after the actual Roswell incident, however the WWII generation it blossomed in was already primed with the necessary concepts for UFOlogy to take shape.

• Things in the air must be "flying"
• Things that fly have pilots operating them
• Things that can fly can crash
• Pilots die in crashes
• Government or military authorities engage in censorship regarding their activities [also a byproduct of WWII]

For the Forum

What other social transitions or conditions affected the spread or decline of UFOlogy or another fringe belief?

[Edited for clarity, I'm looking for more specific examples.]

Re: The UFO flap of ~1946 to 1950

Very often UFOs were described as small... as small as a baseball. Often too small to have a human pilot.

The secrecy/government denial aspect was primarily about the development of new weapons, not wartime censorship of ordinary military stuff, including ordinary air crashes/shoot downs.

UFOs were often suspected to be "wonder weapons" developed by the US or the Soviet Union, with rogue Nazi mad scientists in the mix.

The "wonder weapon" was a common cultural narrative at the time. "Push button war" was conceived to be the coming thing.

The "wonder weapon" (Wunderwaffe) narrative originated during World War II, primarily from Nazi Germany's self-soothing late-war propaganda. The real-life V1 and V2 were things to consider, but there was also much speculation about more fanciful "secret weapons."

This kind of thing was much talked about at the end of the war. There's a brief scene in the movie Patton about that. It became a big part of the public imagination during the early Cold War.

The surprise appearance of the A-bomb reinforced the suspicion that there were other secret weapons in development.

The sudden development of jet aircraft and rockets also fired the imagination. Fanciful concepts of another sudden major leap forward in propulsive technology leading to fantastic speeds became a part of the cultural narrative.

It's likely that the wonder weapon/secret weapon/push button war cultural narrative was the major influence on the flying disc/flying saucer mass delusion of the late 40's. Including the "ghost rocket" (spökraketer) flap in Sweden, Finland, and to a lesser extent Norway, which started in May of '46... a year before Arnold's flying saucer sighting.

Flying discs/flying saucers were often suspected to be experimental unmanned wonder weapons, guided by an "electronic brain" and propelled by some new fantastic breakthrough technology.

The deliciously spooky question was... "Is it one of ours or one of theirs?" Or in the case of neutral countries, wondering how things would shake out.

My best info is that Donald Keyhoe and his book The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950), first really popularized the idea of alien visitors.

 

[Smythe Bacchus]

Cattle mutilations grew in the public consciousness with mass media coverage in the 1970s which resulted in more ranchers reporting cattle deaths with prosaic post-mortem predation.

Suspicions were aimed at shadowy government and military experimentation (a legitimate example is referenced below), before shifting more towards UFOs and aliens in the 1980s.

These stories still pop up from time to time.

Article:

The Enduring Panic About Cow Mutilations

The New Yorker, May 8, 2023 by Rachel Monroe

On April 19th, the Madison County Sheriff's Office published a Facebook post about "the death and mutilation" of six cows. It was an unusual story for the farming community, a hundred miles north of Houston, where police reports tend more toward traffic violations and stray livestock. The news travelled quickly, racking up seventeen thousand shares on Facebook; within a week it had gone international.
...
In the seventies, mutilated cows began to be reported across the country—a couple of dozen in Minnesota, more than a hundred in Colorado, and others in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and elsewhere. Midway through the decade, newspapers began to repeat the questionably sourced statistic of ten thousand total mutilations. By 1975, the Colorado Associated Press reportedly voted the mutilations the No. 1 story in the state.
...
In March, 1968, thousands of sheep convulsed and collapsed near Utah's Dugway Proving Ground, a U.S. Army facility established to test chemical and biological weapons. Ultimately, six thousand animals died. The Army never fully acknowledged its responsibility for the incident until, decades later, a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune uncovered a declassified internal report admitting that there was "incontrovertible" evidence that a nerve agent had caused the deaths.)

Source: https://archive.is/k1NkD

It only takes one person to mutilate an animal with intent to spread public panic. Not sure if anyone has ever been caught.

Article:

Who is behind a string of grisly cow deaths in Texas?

The Guardian, May 8, 2023 by Erum Salam

The cow-killing spree happened (in) Madison, Brazos and Robertson counties – all located in east-central Texas. Each cow was from a different pasture and herd.

"A straight, clean cut, with apparent precision, had been made to remove the hide around the cow's mouth on one side, leaving the meat under the removed hide untouched," the Madison county sheriff's office said.

Source: https://archive.is/UOjGG

The Snippy Case of 1967 is cited to be the modern origin of conspiracies around animal mutilation.

Article:

After 50 years, Snippy still a mystery

Valley Courier, Sep 29, 2017 by Sylvia Lobato

A columnist for the Rocky Mountain News observed that Lady/Snippy had become more famous in death than Man O' War was in his prime. He also suggested the horse had tripped and fallen with its head in a band of cannibal ants.
...
Several days after the horse was found, police at the nearby Great Sand Dunes found Dr. John Altshuler, an award-winning pathologist, trespassing on the monument after dark. When police lectured him about breaking the law, he begged to keep his name a secret, afraid his reason for being in the park would ruin his career if it came out. He was watching for UFOs.
...
He found the animal's lungs, heart and thyroid were completely missing, removed with some of the cleanest cuts he had ever seen. The brain and abdominal organs were gone, he said, and there was no material in the spinal column.

At the edges, the sliced skin was a deep black in color. Even stranger to him was the lack of blood.
...
Reporters from Associated Press, United Press International, The London Times, Parish Match, periodical magazines and publications devoted to strange things arrived to cover the story.

A guard was placed at the gate, pending investigation by the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO). News of possible UFO involvement eventually reached the Condon Committee, a group funded by the U.S. Air Force from 1966 to 1968 at the University of Colorado.
...
Snippy's legacy still hangs over the San Luis Valley in places like the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve and the nearby UFO Watchtower, where sky watchers continue their hopes of glimpsing a visitor from outer space.

Source: https://archive.is/PkOn5

The popularity of the paranormal in concert with the macabre will always be there.

 

[Todd Feinman]

I agree and I'm hoping to move from simple correlations to more specific social antecedents that make a particular fringe belief more or less likely to spread.

A number of papers have been written about it. A sample:

"Social factors and UFO reports: was the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic associated with an increase in UFO reporting?[/H3]
Chase Cockrell, Linda Murphy, Mark Rodeghier
Journal of Scientific Exploration 36 (4), 2022
The ongoing SARS-Cov-2 pandemic had many drastic effects upon society beyond the illness and death it caused. Pandemic mitigation measures disrupted and altered behaviors related to social mobility, significantly increasing the time spent at home compared to the pre-pandemic per…"

Many more can be found with Google Scholar:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,38&q=Social+Factors+and+UFO+Reports&btnG=

 

[Gary C]

Z.W. Wolf

I was only peripherally aware of the role the Second Red Scare played in the UFO phenomenon. Thanks for brining that up. IIRC it was also a factor in anti-fluoridation campaigns of the period.

The public experience of the introduction of jet and rocket technology also goes to my question of changing social circumstances.
In 1940 my parents would have seen this at the theater (make sure the sound is on):


Source: https://youtu.be/nbgItX63rdc?si=W5VKnWrnvIHAWbzg&t=289


The first time I saw that I found it hilarious! For comparison watch any clip from a space opera like Star Wars and you will notice that the default Hollywood selection for space craft sound effects is the turbine whine we associate with jet engines.

Smythe Bacchus

I vaguely recall the cattle mutilations chatter being associated with both aliens/ufos and alternatively with the Satanic Panic of the early `80s. Thank you.

 

[Ann K]

Your mention of H.G. Wells reminded me of Orson Wells infamous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.

I heard the original broadcast when it was replayed (circa 1970). Knowing the story behind the panic, it sounded over-dramatized, but I can well imagine the original listeners being frightened.

 

[John J.]

our mention of H.G. Wells reminded me of Orson Wells infamous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds

I heard the original broadcast when it was replayed (circa 1970). Knowing the story behind the panic, it sounded over-dramatized, but I can well imagine the original listeners being frightened.

The amount of real panic that Orson Welles' radio play caused is now widely questioned.
It was one hour long, with fairly clear disclaimers at both the start and end, and with an intermission in which it was stated that the listeners were listening to a radio play (or something along those lines).
It's clear that many 'phone calls were received by the CBS studio, and the faux-reportage format- with American soldiers under onslaught, a character apparently choking to death "live" on air- might have unsettled many, but we don't know (except from anecdotes from those handling the calls) how many callers disliked the content as opposed to believed it.

As with later radio and TV programs/ films, those who feel motivated to contact the broadcaster or other authorities might not be representative of the audience. There were people who (claimed to have) believed that The Blair Witch Project was "real". In a sufficiently large audience there might be a small number of people who seem to have difficulty distinguishing dramatic fiction from reality; actors playing soap opera villains sometimes face hostility in real life (see e.g. Digital Spy, 9 April 2019, 7 soap villains who received real-life abuse over their roles).

It is unlikely that a significant proportion of the War of the Worlds audience was fooled;

The night the program aired, the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. "To what program are you listening?" the service asked respondents. Only 2 percent answered a radio "play" or "the Orson Welles program," or something similar indicating CBS. None said a "news broadcast," according to a summary published in Broadcasting.

Slate, "The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic", J. Pooley, M.J. Socolow, 28 October 2013.
That is, of the approx. 100 survey respondents who had heard the Welles broadcast, none had mistaken it as real.

Newspapers at the time perceived the new technology of radio as a threat to their business. Newspapers exaggerated the rare cases of actual fear and confusion to play up the idea of a nationwide panic as a means of discrediting radio.

Wikipedia, The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama).

One of the broadcast's critics was newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Perhaps ironically, Hearst had been a key figure in promoting the "Yellow Journalism" (Wikipedia) starting in the1890s:

This type of reporting was characterized by exaggerated headlines, unverified claims, partisan agendas, and a focus on topics like crime, scandal, sports, and violence.

The type of journalism pushed by Hearst may have had a role in the US "mystery airship" flap of the late 1890s ,

...Jacobs believes that many airship tales originated with "enterprising reporters perpetrating journalistic hoaxes." So-called yellow journalism was at its peak during the 1890s and many of these accounts "are easy to identify because of their tongue-in-cheek tone, and accent on the sensational."

Wikipedia, Mystery airship

The Slade article (Pooley, Socolow, link above) gives examples of newspapers using War of the Worlds to attack radio news coverage,

In an editorial titled "Terror by Radio," the New York Times reproached "radio officials" for approving the interweaving of "blood-curdling fiction" with news flashes "offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given." Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry's trade journal, "The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove … that it is competent to perform the news job."

-Which might be taken as more of an attempt to start a moral panic (about the risks of radio compared to newspapers) than coverage of actual panic.

Few contemporary accounts exist outside newspaper coverage of the mass panic and hysteria supposedly induced by the broadcast. Justin Levine, a producer at KFI in Los Angeles, wrote that "the anecdotal nature of such reporting makes it difficult to objectively assess the true extent and intensity of the panic". Bartholomew saw it as more evidence that the panic was predominantly a creation of the newspaper industry.

Wikipedia, The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama).

Neither Welles or CBS were sanctioned in any way. War of the Worlds has been rebroadcast many times; surely not all newer listeners were aware of the mass panic backstory, and some must have started listening part-way through (and thus missed the initial introduction/disclaimer- a supposed reason for some of the original listeners panicking).

Can't cite examples, but I think I recall Welles' War of the Worlds being used by UFO enthusiasts as an example of the type of reaction that The Authorities want to avoid, a reason for their reluctance to "disclose".
This skates over the fact that WotW portrayed an alien invasion of the USA, not a peaceful "first contact" or finding an inert crashed saucer.
It also ignores the Cold War reality of many millions of people living with the knowledge that they were under the threat of nuclear attack- a demonstrably real threat, deliverable by technologies and systems which few would have fully understood- and carrying on with their lives as per usual. Many would have had times of sombre reflection or perhaps occasional anxiety, but there was no mass panic, no flight from the cities.

 

[Feltmouse]

I always thought it's quite funny how reports of Alien, UFOs or Abductions mirror the (pop) scientific understanding and cultural sentiment of that time:

In the 50s for example, a lot of the encounters and abduction reports place the Aliens on Venus or Mars (see George Adamski, Buck Nelson, Howard Menger), claims that seemed to stop very abruptly once the Mariner and Mars programs showed there is obviously no advanced alien civilization living there. The narrative quickly switched to extrasolar destinations (with an honorable mention to "behind Jupiter" in the 70s).

Of course it could just be the case that modern claims about aliens from Venus are just more easily dismissed within the community and therefore don't get popularized, but I don't think I can find any serious reports mentioning Mars or Venus originating later than the 60s.

The funny thing is, while I would get ridiculed claiming to have been abducted to Venus nowadays, these old reports are still brought up as serious cases by the UFO community.

 

[jdog]

I always thought it's quite funny how reports of Alien, UFOs or Abductions mirror the (pop) scientific understanding and cultural sentiment of that time:

In the 50s for example, a lot of the encounters and abduction reports place the Aliens on Venus or Mars (see George Adamski, Buck Nelson, Howard Menger), claims that seemed to stop very abruptly once the Mariner and Mars programs showed there is obviously no advanced alien civilization living there. The narrative quickly switched to extrasolar destinations (with an honorable mention to "behind Jupiter" in the 70s).

Of course it could just be the case that modern claims about aliens from Venus are just more easily dismissed within the community and therefore don't get popularized, but I don't think I can find any serious reports mentioning Mars or Venus originating later than the 60s.

The funny thing is, while I would get ridiculed claiming to have been abducted to Venus nowadays, these old reports are still brought up as serious cases by the UFO community.

I believe those are covered by the Special Pleides exception.

 

[Gary C]

I don't recall the Martian or Venusian UFO connections but I vaguely recall the "behind Jupiter" references and the Counter Earth that was popular for a short while. Both of the later depend on the misunderstanding that all planetary orbits are not perfectly aligned to the Sun's equatorial plane so we can in fact see what is on the "other side" of most bodies on a predictable basis. Counter Earth would also create observable gravitational effects on other bodies.

 

[Ann K]

As a teenager I read Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" but they weren't coming here; we were going there.

 

[Eburacum]

Counter Earth would also create observable gravitational effects on other bodies.

And it would be unstable. The location behind the Sun, the Lagrange 3 point (L3) is only temporarily stable, and a planet located there would eventually wander out and probably end up hitting Earth.

 

[John J.]

In the thread The Ariel School, Zimbabwe UFO sighting...., Giddierone has mentioned a film that predates the Ariel School sightings but which might have some parallels (post #195)

Because there's always an interesting correspondence between UFO reports and science fiction this example intrigues me.

The film Nukie (1987) is about a small telepathic alien that crash lands in rural africa