History of UFOs Comes to Light at the Warner Library

Yesterday, the Warner Library hosted SUNY Delhi History Professor John Horner and his talk, “The History of UFO sightings in America."

Accompanied with compelling photos, long dormant accounts and government resistance to the facts, Professor Horner’s thesis wasn’t quite in line with those of us who believe, “The truth is out there.”

Some of the Mulder-ing air was sucked from the 30 searchers in attendance as Horner said, “I’m not here to tell you what UFO’s are but how they are seen based on the culture and politics of the time.”

Horner began in 1896 with the first significant “Flap” – a cluster of UFO sightings.

It was a peaceful time in which nothing technological occupied the skies, and trains and ships were the most sophisticated locomotion.

“There wasn’t an air of doom about objects in the sky,” he said.

Reporting on Flap sightings were more comical and entertaining. As for descriptions, rudders, sails, hulls, turbines and air breaking sounds were among the characteristics reported from those who claimed to have seen the objects.

In addition, since this was the time of Edison, witnesses often claimed to see an inventor at the helm of flying machines, but after WWI, scientific advancement took a different perception. Death now came from the sky in inventions like mustard gas and mortars.

Nothing personified this like Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds broadcast.  On the precipice of war, Horner said, “People were ready to believe.”

The next major flap was the Foo Fighter sightings of the mid-1940s. These were balls of light that regularly paced WWII pilots and were definitely taken seriously.

“We assumed the lights were tracking devices being used by the enemy,” Horner said.

In 1947, the perception shifted outward again. Kenneth Arnold was a well-known aviator and the claim that his sighted disc had to be extraterrestrial certainly got its due. 

“It opened up what UFO’s could be because people knew who he was,” said Professor Horner.

However, his ridicule in the press established a pattern that persists today with modern UFO accounts. Either way, two weeks later Roswell occurred but contrary to popular belief, the event mostly died on the spot.

After a military press release announced that a UFO crashed in the desert, another recurring theme occurred –  A “cover story” was accepted by the press and the controversy went away with tales of weather balloons.

Straying from his premise, Professor Horner offered the later account of Colonel Jesse Marcel, who issued the initial statement on Roswell. 

“He was adamant that it wasn’t a weather balloon or anything associated with the Air Force,” he said.

Others at the base felt the same way, but Americans were more inclined to believe their government at this time. However, that would begin to change in the coming years.

In 1952, a flap occurred over D.C. and its perceptions were in line with the history.

“People feared the Russians could use a flap to hide a nuclear attack,” he said.  In the end, the sightings were explained as weather inversions.

Regardless, the first signs of doubting our government emerged as Life Magazine made a case for, “Interplanetary Saucers” after the D.C. sightings.

Project Blue Book, which was the government’s official UFO investigation in the 50s and 60s, kept the lid on things, but Vietnam and Watergate opened the levies on distrusting government, Horner said.

The stage was now set for the reemergence of Roswell and many more outlandish theories. Still, even when thousands of people saw boomerang shaped lights throughout Hudson Valley in 1987, the same pattern emerged to contain curiosity.  People are ridiculed and the explanations for the observance fell short.

Horner admitted that some of the explanations given for UFO activity is a disservice to science, especially when there are so many outspoken UFO believers, such as, now deceased, Apollo Astronaut Gordon Cooper and Project Blue Book advisor, Josef Allen Hynek.

Out of the audience, came at least 10 people who had seen a UFO and one story about Jackie Gleason’s trip to an alien morgue via President Nixon. Otherwise, a more hardcore take came from Paul Greco, who is part of a Yonkers meetup called UFO Roundtable.

“He’s very conservative, not committing himself to a lot of existing evidence,” said Mr. Greco.  Citing numerous scientists and witnesses, he believes the sightings are real and the claims that extraterrestrials are among us.

Professor Horner stops short of that, but he’s had his own close encounter and is open to an answer.

“A big red light and a big white light appeared over my car and just rose out of sight,” he says.  “I'd like to know what that was.”