The Summer of Flying Whatsists

On July 17, 2025July 12, 2025 By Sarah AngletonIn Astronomy, Journalism6 Comments

We are approaching the anniversary of a very big week for the United States and for the world because between July 19th and July 27th of 1952 was the peak of intense UFO sightings in a year that had been filled with them. Over the course of the previous four years the US Air Force had recorded observations of 615 UFOs. In 1952 alone, that number jumped to 717.

USA National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, via Wimikedia Commons.

The media noticed, particularly in that one week in July when many of the reported UFOs were spotted in the air over Washington DC. Headlines across the nation proclaimed the news. The Cedar Rapids Gazette announced: “SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL.” The front page of the Standard-Sentinal out of Hazelton, Pennsylvania declared: “RADAR SPOTS MORE ‘FLYING WHATSITS’ OVER WASHINGTON, and in Monroe, Louisiana, the front page of the Monroe News-Star featured the headline: “RADAR SPOTS ‘FLYING SAUCERS’ IN BACKYARD OF NATIONAL CAPITAL.”

Of course most of the articles do acknowledge various versions of the official government response, provided in the largest Pentagon press conference since World War II, that there was no national security concern at all, and that the sightings could be attributed to natural phenomenon like air temperature inversions and meteorite activity.

The UFO media frenzy seems to have been touched off by an April article in Look magazine that asked the question, “HAVE WE VISITORS FROM SPACE?” Then it steadily built because the eyewitnesses to UFOs weren’t just the usual crazies, but also included more credible people like both military and civilian pilots as well as air traffic controllers, some of whom were insistent that their observations didn’t perfectly fit the explanations.

I did see a series of UFOs earlier this spring over my house. That is until my husband identified them as a Space X satellite launch. Still a pretty cool thing to get to see.

Of course the most likely truth rarely gets in the way of a good sensational headline, or even a slanted story, of the variety that will sell a lot of news to the hysterical people who most want to consume it. That was certainly true in 1952, just as it was during the Summer of the Shark in 2001, when everyone became so afraid to go into the water that the number of shark attacks was down a little bit, and just as it has been every single year, before or since, that there has been nationwide media coverage.

Yes, that includes now. But before you get mad at me, it also includes every year the other political flavor held more power, too. Because media is a business designed, like all businesses, to make a grab for our attention and resources. It’s most successful when we’re scared and angry and maybe a little irrational, which is why it works very hard to keep us that way.

Am I suggesting that there isn’t any truth to the sensational, terrible, nation-ending, world altering stories we are consuming in the media every day? Well, not exactly, but often with a little distance and the slight change in perspective it might offer, we can start to see things a bit more clearly.

I suppose I can’t really say for certain that DC wasn’t visited by flying saucers in July of 1952, but I have read that when digital filters were added to radar equipment in the 1970s, there was a sharp reduction in reported UFO sightings. And that really can only mean one thing. Clearly, flying saucer cloaking technology also saw vast improvement at that time.

Looking to the Skies

On May 27, 2021 By Sarah AngletonIn Astronomy, Conspiracy Theories, Current Events12 Comments

On the night of February 20, 1954, while he was vacationing in Palm Springs, California, then US President Dwight Eisenhower disappeared. Fortunately, he reappeared the next morning and attended a church service in Los Angeles as scheduled, but there were several hours during which the president’s whereabouts couldn’t be accounted for.

Does this look like a man with a toothache? Dwight D. Eisenhower, official photo portrait, May 29, 1959.jpg, White House. Public Domain.

According to the president, his staff, his wife Mamie, and one bleary-eyed dentist, Eisenhower’s absence could be explained by the need for an emergency dental procedure following a tooth cap mishap at dinner. I think, however, it might be worth considering another possibility.

According to conspiracy theorists, a bunch of people who refer to themselves as UFOlogists, and the son of a US Navy Commander witness, what actually happened that night was that the president traveled to nearby Edwards Air Force base for a clandestine meeting with some blue-eyed aliens.

To be clear, I am not suggesting this other possibility has a great deal of merit or anything. I count myself pretty firmly in the camp that assumes if there is life on other planets, its only use for us is as the villainous visitors in stories about midnight abductions and anal probes. That’s assuming that said aliens possess anuses, which I certainly wouldn’t swear to.

But I do think it’s fun to talk about the possibility of aliens, because there’s an awful lot of scary stuff happening on this planet—stuff that divides all of us humans with our widely varied cultural outlooks, political ideologies, and beliefs about the universe and our place within it. In light of all that, alien life still seems like a relatively safe, apolitical, uniting topic.

Actually, I bet aliens don’t have anuses. That’s probably why they spend so much time probing ours. Image by Daniela Realpe from Pixabay

And maybe that’s the reason that all of the mainstream media outlets in the US suddenly decided last week to spend their time talking about UFOs and alien visitations. UFOs, known to people in the know who do not refer to themselves as UFOlogists as UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena), have evidently been appearing to military pilots. Frequently. For years.

So says Luis Elizondo, alleged former member of a super-secret government Pentagon project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and former president and armchair UFOlogist Barack Obama. At least one of those sources seems credible. And actually, both kind of do, because neither has said that we have definite proof of extra-Earth astronauts (which those of us schlubs outside the UFOlogist and secret government communities simply refer to as aliens).

What they’ve said is that sometimes we see stuff and upon further inspection, we’re still left scratching our heads. Personally, I am in favor of a Pentagon project to figure out what all these pilots are looking at and if Congress wants a little more information coming up next month, I’m okay with that, too.

I’m not sure why it all had to be super-secret, or why it suddenly has to claim top billing in the news cycle, but I don’t mind amid all the chaos down here on Earth, taking a little time to look at the skies. It’s significantly less worrisome up there. Because if we can believe the UFOlogists (and why wouldn’t we?), Eisenhower worked out a treaty with our alien visitors back in 1954.

Puritans Inhaling Swamp Gas

On March 15, 2018March 16, 2018 By Sarah AngletonIn Astronomy, Conspiracy Theories, Holidays6 Comments

Sometime in late February of 1639, a man by the name of James Everell, along with two of his Puritan buddies, rowed his boat up the Muddy River of Massachusetts and spotted a weird light in the sky. The light appeared as a large flame, about three yards square, and then began to dart around the sky, taking on a different shape, like that of a swine, presumably still on fire.

Maybe that fancy, dancy light was just the aliens’ way of inviting the men to a pig roast. photo credit: eric dickman Pig Roast ’05 via photopin (license)

After a few mesmerizing hours of watching the flaming pig streak back and forth across the sky, the three men realized that during that time, they had somehow ended up a mile upstream from where they’d been with no recollection of how they’d gotten there.

But here’s the really strange part. These three pals actually told people they’d watched a flaming pig fly through the night sky. By people, I mean they told John Winthrop, then governor of the Massachusetts Colony and among the puritanest of Puritans. On March 1, 1639 he wrote down the account in his now well-studied diary. It’s clear he found the tale a little odd, but also that he believed the tale-tellers to be credible men who generally made pretty bang-up witnesses.

JohnWinthrop — John Winthrop. If this man told me he’d been abducted by aliens, I’d probably believe him. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

There are a few possible explanations, then, for what these reliable men saw. First, and obviously most likely, this could be the earliest written account of a North American UFO sighting and alien abduction. Alternatively, these gentlemen could have been boating to a safe distance away from the stocks before overindulging in their puritanical beer. Or of course the whole thing could just be an example of spontaneously igniting swamp gas reflecting off Venus.

Governor Winthrop proposed another explanation nearly five years later when two similar events occurred. During the second of these later events, a voice accompanied the mysterious lights. Winthrop’s most reliable witnesses said they heard the words, “Boy! Boy! Come away! Come away!”

The governor notes fourteen days later, the same voice could be heard again. The reason, he suggests, is that the colony had recently experienced a nearby shipwreck resulting in an explosion. All the victims’ bodies were accounted for except one. Logically, Winthrop theorized the Devil had possessed the body and was now using it, along with a freaky light show, to terrorize the colonists. Hmm. Maybe.

foil hat — This guy knows what I’m talking about. photo credit: c r i s They’re Coming To Take Me Away / 135.365 via photopin (license)

Then again, perhaps a bunch of enthusiastic otherworldly visitors were calling to their human would-be abductees as they have so many times in generations since. Personally, I’m a little skeptical, but perhaps you’re not. Perhaps you, or someone whose story you find credible, have experienced something that to the rest of us might seem a little far out there.

If so, then National Alien Abduction Day, observed in the US on March 20 every year for at least the last decade, may be just the day for you. As for me, I think I’ll avoid the swamp gas and the puritanical beer that day. Perhaps I’ll fashion a nice aluminum foil hat, too, just in case.