Every Day Is Special: flying saucers

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June 24 - First “Flying Saucer” Reports

Posted on June 24, 2021

This is an update of my post published on June 24, 2010:

On this day in 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine lights that seemed to pace his airplane and then zoom past Mount Rainier in Washington. He described the moving lights as boomerang shaped but also said that they moved like saucers skipping over water.

Somehow Arnold was misunderstood and misquoted, and many people thought he said that the strange objects he saw looked like saucers flying through the sky. Soon reporters dubbed the sighting as “flying saucers.” Suddenly many people, worried or thrilled, started studying the night sky and seeing saucer-shaped unidentified flying objects.

And so began the modern UFO craze. Since people expected to see saucer-shaped items, they did see saucer-shaped items. This was very frustrating for Arnold, who has been photographed with a picture of what he did see (remember, he said shaped like a boomerang - see the photo at the top of the article).

These clouds are called "UFO clouds" - but their proper name
is "lenticular clouds." They sometimes look really solid.

Of course, many people over the years have assumed that "flying saucers" - aka UFOs - are and were extra-terrestrials (aliens) in spaceships.

All of these four pictures (above) are things that humans have drawn
or painted - NOT things that anyone has actually seen!

However, most reliable accounts and photos of unidentified flying objects can be explained in ordinary, non-E.T. ways: birds, the planet Venus, fireballs, meteors, human-built aircraft, mirages, hoaxes, clouds - the list goes on and on.

What is the explanation for Arnold's sighting? Given the shapes and motions he saw, some likely explanations are pelicans, mirages of mountain peaks, or meteors. We will never know for sure, but those explanations are far more likely than aliens.

Also on this date:

Jāņi in Latvia

Celebration of the Senses Day

Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in Quebec

International Fairy Day

Inti Raymi (Sun Festival) in Peru

Midsummer in Sweden

Big Numbers Day

Joninės in Lithuania

Festa Junina in Brazil

Battle of Caraboba Day in Venezuela

National Bomb Pop Day

(Last Thursday of June)

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

June holidays

June birthdays

Historical anniversaries in June

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

December 17 - UFO Project Canceled

Posted on December 17, 2017

Ball lightning

There are loads of things to see in the sky. The moon and sun, airplanes and helicopters, birds and insects, stars and planets, clouds and lightning are all pretty normal...But there are many more unusual things, at times, such as meteorites or "falling stars", weather balloons and drones, noctilucent and mammatus clouds, St. Elmo's Fire and ball lightning, green flash and sun dogs, mirages and other optical illusions.

Noctilucent clouds

Mammatus clouds

St. Elmos' Fire

Green flash

Both normal sky stuff and unusual phenomena can be confusing to viewers. We can become confused with how far away something really is, and therefore how big it is. We can misunderstand lights jiggling from moving air currents, thinking that they are actually lights on moving vehicles. We can mistake a swarm of creatures for a single large object, and we can assume that a bunch of water droplets or reflecting and refracting lights are actually solid objects.

So - the upshot of all this confusion is, some people are sure - maybe even definitely-for-sure - that they've seen a flying saucer, or a UFO (unidentified flying object), or whatever you want to call a spaceship from another planet...when they've really seen something else altogether.

UFO folks ask, what else could these things possibly be?

Check out the answers below.

Starting in the 1940s, people began to report flying saucers. And in 1952, the United States military took notice and opened a study called Project Blue Book to figure out if the UFOs were a threat, and to analyze the data about UFOs in a scientific way. The Air Force was in charge of the project, and they studied thousands of reports.

By this date in 1969, the Air Force declared the project closed, with the final report saying that:

* No UFO has ever been reported that indicates a threat to national security.

* No UFO has ever been reported that represents some sort of technology more advanced than our own.

* No UFO has ever been reported that could be categorized as an extraterrestrial vehicle.

Answers to "What else could these things possibly be?"

1. a lenticular cloud

2. a helium-filled inflatable purchased from eBay

3. an enormous flock of birds

4. a moon of Saturn

Also on this date:

Anniversary of the first Saturnalia Festival

Bhutan's National Day

Anniversary of the publishing of A Christmas Carol

Anniversary of the discovery of an Aztec calendar stone

Second night of Las Posadas

Anniversary of first successful airplane flight

Mathematician and physicist Emilie du Chatelet's birthday

Anniversary of NYC's First One-Way Street

Night 6 of Hanukkah

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest pages on:

December holidays
December birthdays
Historical anniversaries in December

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

March 20 – Alien Abduction Day

Posted on March 20, 2015

Alien Abduction Day has arrived!!!

But have any UFOs arrived? Any little green men?

Anyone?

Apparently inspired by the Alien Abduction Festival held in Toronto, Canada, in 2008, Alien Abduction Day can be celebrated by watching movies or reading fiction. So far, nobody has celebrated by actually taking a ride on a flying saucer!

(Darn!)

A fun festival!

I gather that the festival goers did a whole lot of crafting. There was an “Alien Birthing Room,” a “Spacecraft Crafting” workshop, a “Tin Foil Hat Tailoring” station and fashion show, and of course some “Extraterrestrial Eats and Grooves.”

The serious side of alien abduction...

Hundreds of people believe that they have been abducted by aliens, and they report memory gaps that shouldn't exist, in some cases, and memories of being paralyzed and surrounded by creatures and bright lights, in other cases.

However, not one of these “experiencers” has even a shred of physical evidence to back their claims, and in most cases their stories actually contradict the evidence available.

So what is going on? Are all these people nuts? Liars? Fame-mongers?

Apparently, the few scientists who have studied cases have found that most people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are not mentally ill, and they are not lying in order to cash in on their claim. Instead, the experiencers (people who claim to have been abducted by aliens) seem to experience sleep paralysis, a particular sort of hallucinations, and/or false memory syndrome.

The long and the short of it is that most people who make these claims genuinely believe that they really experienced what they are claiming—but that doesn't mean that they actually did!

Let's get back to the fun again!

Watch a movie or read a story about aliens. For movies, you might try old classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Cocoon, or you might watch something newer like Guardians of the Galaxy or Galaxy Quest.

For books, the Tripod series by John Christopher (starting with The White Mountains) is pretty intense, Even Aliens Need Snacks by Matthew McElligott is silly, and my own book The Survivor has an interesting alien connection.

For more alien/UFO fun, check out World UFO Day, Extraterrestrial Culture Day, and the anniversary of the first “Flying Saucer.”

By the way, if you haven't yet figured it out,
you definitely CANNOT trust all programs just
because they are on TV - not even if they are
on something like "the History Channel" - to be
accurate about interesting topics like aliens.

If you hear extraordinary claims on a TV show,
check it out further. Be skeptical until you have
looked at more than one GOOD source.

Also on this date: