The following is an article from the May '92 (Vol. 1, #4) issue of The
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                         The Saucer Error
                        By Martin Kottmeyer
     Ufologists from time to time express the sentiment that
UFOs just can't be a myth.  Look at them.  That shape.  How
do you explain where it came from.  Space travel was
supposed to involve rockets, not these disc-shaped marvels.
The whole phenomenon is just so, well, alien from what you'd
expect.
     J. Allen Hynek, one of the leading ufologists of his
time, put it this way:
       "Why flying saucers?  Why not flying cubes or flying
       pyramids, or for that matter, why not flying pink
       elephants or even flying buildings, reported from a
       hundred different countries?  Indeed if UFO reports
       were entirely the result of excited imaginations,
       why not hundreds, possibly thousands, of totally and
       radically different types of reports as people of
       different cultures let their locally conditioned
       imaginations loose?"
                 (Hynek UFO Report, Dell, 1977, p. 28)
     John Prytz, who has defended the extraterrestrial
hypothesis against psychosocial interpretations of the UFO
phenomenon in a fascinating series of articles, devoted a
whole article ("UFO Genesis" MUFON UFO Journal, September
1982, pp. 10-14) to exploring this conundrum.  There weren't
any "sci-fi films" playing in 1947 and the serials before
that date, The Purple Monster Strikes and Flash Gordon, only
involved rockets.  He checked the newspapers of the period
and couldn't find anything in the cultural environment which
could have stimulated the saucer phenomenon.  The period was
boring.  He concluded, "The timing of the genesis of the
modern UFO phenomenon, which cannot be logically accounted
for, is yet another forceful argument for the external
nature of, and external intelligence behind, the UFO, and
yet another nail in the coffin of the pro-internal-
intelligence advocates."
     UFO historian David Jacobs has echoed Prytz in his
paper, "The New Era of UFO Research" (Pursuit, #78, 1987)
and more recently in Secret Life and asserted there was no
precedent for the saucer configuration in popular science
fiction films, popular science fiction, or popular culture
in general.  The objects seemed "well beyond that produced
by the technology of 1947 and it became immediately apparent
that the witnesses were seeing something that could be
entirely unique."
     There is a trivial sense in which Prytz and Jacobs are
simply wrong.  Disc-shaped spacecraft have a number of
precedents in popular culture.  They appear in the well-
known and widely distributed Buck Rogers comic strip as
early as 1930.  Flash Gordon was battling a squadron of
deadly "space-gyros" in 1934 in his strip.  Even better,
they can be seen dangling around, thanks to the gloriously
crude special effects of 1938 Hollywood, in the Flash Gordon
movie serial, "Rocketship" based on that strip.  Science
fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul repeatedly used disc-
shaped space vehicles in his art for the early pulps.
Others followed his example.  I regard these as trivial
however because I accept them as coincidences inevitable in
a large body of artistic creativity.  Artists utilized every
geometric form they could think of and when imagination
failed them they preferred to fall back on the convention of
the rocket.  If the images of science fiction were the
determinant of what people should have been imagining in
1947 we should have had a wave of ghost rockets, not flying
saucers.  So what was the determinant?
     Oddly enough, we got flying saucers because of a
journalist's error.  1947 was an exciting time in aviation
history.  New advances and innovations were turning up
regularly and speed records were being broken as pilots
aimed to break the sound barrier.  Chuck Yeager would win
that prize on October 14, 1947.  Four months earlier, on
June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold surprised the world by
reporting nine objects flying by Mount Ranier at the
incredible speed of 1,200 miles per hour.  It was an
incredible mystery and was such a sensation that it made
front page news across the nation.  Soon everyone was
looking for these new aircraft which according to the papers
were saucer-like in shape.  Within weeks hundreds of reports
of these flying saucers were made across the nation.  While
people presumably thought they were seeing the same things
that Kenneth Arnold saw, there was a major irony that nobody
at the time realized.
     Kenneth Arnold hadn't reported seeing flying saucers.
     In a memoir of the incident for the First International
UFO Congress in 1977 Arnold revealed the flying saucer label
arose because of a "great deal of misunderstanding" on the
part of the reporter who wrote the story up for the United
Press.  Bill Bequette asked him how the objects flew and
Arnold answered that, "Well, they flew erratic, like a
saucer if you skip it across the water."  The intent of the
metaphor was to describe the motion of the objects not their
shape.  Arnold stated the objects "were not circular."  A
look at the drawing he did for his report to the Air Force
shortly after the incident confirms the truth of that
statement.  It is hard to describe in a word or two; beetle-
shaped is the best I can come up with.  However you describe
it, one thing is clear.  It is not the elegant alien
geometric perfection we have come to know and mystify
ourselves over.
     We can from these facts derive the answers to Hynek's
questions.  The reason excited imaginations didn't come up
with hundreds of radically different variations is that they
were constrained by Bequette's description of the objects.
The phrase "flying saucers" provided the mold which shaped
the UFO myth at its beginning.  As time progressed people
would draw them, looking as they sound like they look.  They
in turn shaped hoax photos and the imagery of films like The
Flying Saucer and The Day the Earth Stood Still and dozens
of alien invasion films and TV shows in the decades that
followed.  It remains the stereotype to the present day.  By
one tally 82% of the craft descriptions in alien abduction
reports fall into the flying saucer category.  It can be
found in nearly all the well-known cases:  Betty & Barney
Hill's interrupted journey, Herb Schirmer, Travis Walton,
the Andreasson affair, Whitley Strieber.
     Prytz's and Jacobs' arguments miss the mark because one
doesn't need to look beyond Bequette's error to understand
the unambiguously cultural genesis of the saucer mystery.
Arnold's report was itself the source of excitement in the
otherwise almost boring period of 1947.  The speed of the
objects caught everyone's attention and guaranteed that the
whole world would add the phrase "flying saucers" to their
vocabulary within a matter of days.  Science fiction had
nothing to do with this; the interest in fast planes was the
determinant.
     Bequette's error may not prove to be the ultimate
refutation of the extraterrestrial theory for everyone.  But
it does leave their advocates in one helluva paradox:  Why
would extraterrestrials redesign their craft to conform to
Bequette's mistake?
--- msgedsq 2.0.5
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