{"id":255,"date":"2017-06-24T11:03:14","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T12:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/?p=255"},"modified":"2019-12-27T14:00:18","modified_gmt":"2019-12-27T14:00:18","slug":"seventy-years-of-ufos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/seventy-years-of-ufos\/","title":{"rendered":"Seventy years of UFOs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fortean<\/a><\/p>\n

Today marks the 70th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold\u2019s seminal UFO encounter, on 24 June 1947. That was the event that gave rise to the term \u201cflying saucer\u201d, and kicked off a media frenzy that led to copycat sightings around the world … and a whole new subgenre of science fiction. As such I devoted several pages to Arnold\u2019s sighting and its repercussions in my book Pseudoscience and Science Fiction<\/i><\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

The Kenneth Arnold sighting also provides the central theme of the latest issue of Fortean Times<\/em>, pictured above (FT355, July 2017). To my surprise, I received three extra copies of this last week \u2013 something that puzzled me until I looked at the contents and discovered there was a six-page article by myself in it. I actually wrote this (and submitted it to FT) at the beginning of last year, before I\u2019d even had the idea of writing the Pseudoscience and Science Fiction<\/em> book. In fact it was while writing the article \u2013 about the pulp magazine editors Ray Palmer and John W. Campbell, and the way they blurred the boundary between science fiction and fortean-style non-fiction speculation \u2013 that I realized I could write a whole book on that sort of thing. Although the magazine article (called \u201cAstounding Science, Amazing Theories!\u201d) took such a long time to appear, it does fit the theme of this particular issue very neatly \u2013 including a couple of references to the Kenneth Arnold sighting and Ray Palmer\u2019s role in publicising it.<\/p>\n

The main Arnold-related article, however, is not mine but one by Nigel Watson. Called \u201cWas it a bird? Was it a plane?\u201d, this focuses on other potential explanations of the sighting besides the extraterrestrial hypothesis \u2013 in particular the possibility that the objects Arnold saw were saucer-shaped or flying-wing style military aircraft. Arnold was flying a light aircraft himself at the time, and Jenny Randles has a one-page piece in her “UFO Casebook” column about other similar aircraft-based UFO sightings. The Kenneth Arnold links don\u2019t stop there, either. The magazine\u2019s lead feature, by Brian J. Robb, is about the conspiracy theorist Fred Crisman \u2013 who had connections with Kenneth Arnold, Ray Palmer … and the hollow-Earth theorist Richard Shaver, who also features quite prominently in my own article. In passing I also mention L. Ron Hubbard (who started out as a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Palmer\u2019s upmarket rival, John W. Campbell) \u2013 and there\u2019s a link there, too, since the \u201cBuilding a Fortean Library\u201d column in this issue happens to feature a classic biography of Hubbard.<\/p>\n

So there are plenty of reasons to buy this month\u2019s issue of Fortean Times<\/em> \u2013 and my article is just one of them!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today marks the 70th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold\u2019s seminal UFO encounter, on 24 June 1947. That was the event that gave rise to the term \u201cflying saucer\u201d, and kicked off a media frenzy that led to copycat sightings around the world … and a whole new subgenre of science fiction. As such I devoted several … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Seventy years of UFOs”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31,70,21,41],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fortean-times","tag-magazines","tag-my-books","tag-ufos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":654,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}