Little Green Men from Mars were not initially given any serious thought as being the answer to flying saucers. In 1947, most people thought that if flying saucers were real, they must be a secret military project- ours or by other countries spying on the USA. Space aliens were taken no more seriously than the earlier talk of mischievous gremlins sabotaging airplanes during World War II.
The first report of contact with alien beings from saucers was made in Nashville, Tennessee in early July 1947, and published in the day after the story of the "captured flying disc" story from Roswell, New Mexico:
The Nashville Tennessean, July 9, 1947, page one
All Over the Nation People Talk Saucers
The flying saucer furore has finally hit Nashville... One man, apparently sane and sober, wrote the editor of The Nashville Tennessean, a long interesting letter about his brush with a couple of Men from Mars on a nearby flying field. These strange little men, “all heads and arms and legs, glowing like fireflies,” landed and alighted from a flying saucer as he drove along a highway, the man wrote. The man from Nashville and the Men from Mars exchanged greetings (in sign language) and the saucer finally took off in a cloud of dust, so the letter says.
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| The Nashville Tennessean, July 9, 1947 |
"The newspaper account characterizes the correspondent (whose letter was only paraphrased, not published) as 'apparently perfectly sane and sober,' but the story sounds more like a practical joke than a serious report."
The letter may not have been genuine, but the account is important for being the first published, and closely resembles many other that would eventually surface later, including a number of accounts told or published at the each year on April 1st.
As with so many of the most interesting UFO cases featured here at The Saucers That Time Forgot, Project Blue Book has no file on this incident.
Under the "T-Bone Steak" article Orville Wright shares a conspiracy theory in which the US government is faking saucer sightings as part of a psy-op to get the public worried about a threat from a foreign power -- as he calls it "propaganda for war." My first time hearing that angle.
ReplyDeleteReportedly, Tiffany Thayer made Orville an honorary member of the Fortean Society for this comment. It's interesting, maybe the birth of the "Mirage Men" type paranoia in connection to UFOs.
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