The Press: The Saucer-Eyed Dragons

Ko-Ko: Well, a nice mess you’ve got us into, with your nodding head . . .

Pooh-Bah: Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

— The Mikado

In June 1947, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold told reporters a wonderful yarn. While flying alone over Washington’s Mount Rainier, he said, he had spotted nine round, shiny, mysterious objects. flipping and flashing along in the sky “like saucers.” Since then U.S. newspapers and magazines have credulously — or jokingly— printed hundreds of other stories about flying saucers, usually based on “reports of eyewitnesses.” The witnesses generally seemed to believe that flying saucers exist, that they were manufactured by the U.S. or Russia, or came from the outer reaches— maybe from Venus or Mars.

Last week, in cocktail bars from Boston to San Bernardino, true believers renewed their faith, for they had a notable recruit: David Lawrence’s U.S. News and World Report (circ. 365,492). A news magazine with a reputation for sobriety and conservatism, U.S. News devoted three pages to a story and pictures headlined FLYING

SAUCERS —THE REAL STORY: U.S. BUILT

FIRST ONE IN 1942. Gist of the account: as part of its guided-missile program, the Navy has developed a revolutionary type aircraft, a combination helicopter and jet plane capable of outflying any other; it is this plane that is the flying saucer.

Later in the week, Editor Lawrence said the same thing in his sober, respected column in the New York Herald Tribune and 200 other newspapers. In a notable omission of a pertinent fact, Lawrence cited U.S. News as an authority, but neglected to mention that he publishes it. As another authority he quoted one Commander Robert Bright McLaughlin, U.S.N., author of an article in the March issue of True, to the solemn effect that flying saucers are real.

The U.S. News story gave the flying-saucers-are-real thesis a big boost. It was put out over the air last week by ABC’s Henry J. Taylor and (“for what it’s worth”) by Mutual’s Fulton Lewis Jr.; it was the subject of a documentary, neither pro nor con, by CBS’s Edward R. Murrow. Columnist Robert Ruark declared that “I believe . . .” Henry Holt announced a “serious” book on flying saucers by Variety’s Columnist Frank Scully. The Herald Trib, pooh-poohing the U.S. News article, concluded: “And yet—And yet there is something puzzling about the business . . .”

“Wild Statements.” What puzzled many Washington newsmen and officials was: How and why did the U.S. News fall for the flying-saucer story? According to Managing Editor L. Noble Robinson, U.S. News “got the idea” for its story from Commander McLaughlin, the same man who wrote the True story. U.S. News did not talk to McLaughlin (“He was out at sea”) and did not quote him by name; but the editors had evidently relied heavily on his reports. In port at Boston last week with his destroyer Bristol, McLaughlin disavowed the U.S. News piece as full of “wild statements.”

Most of the rest of the U.S. News case rested on a “secret” experimental Navy plane, the XF5U or “flying pancake,” which was developed by the Navy and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. But the fact was that only one full-scale plane of the XF5U type was ever manufactured (by Chance Vought), and it never flew. A 3,000-lb. scale model, the V-173, made its last test flight in 1947, is now at Norfolk Navy Depot ticketed for transfer to the Smithsonian Institution. It was pictured in U.S. publications, including TIME, in July 1946.

Space Ships. From September 1946 to February 1948, Commander McLaughlin, the 37-year-old Annapolisman who spun the best of the flying-saucer yarns, was chief of the Navy’s guided-missiles unit at the White Sands Proving Ground, N.Mex. While there, he sent a report to Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, then in charge of the guided-missile program, that he had sighted a flying saucer at White Sands; he calculated its diameter at 105 ft. Recalled Admiral Gallery last week: “I sent back a message, ‘What kind of whisky are you drinking out there?’ The Navy has not had, nor does it have now, anything resembling flying saucers . . .”

Shortly after, McLaughlin was moved to a post where he could get some salt air; he became commander of the Bristol. Still vowing that he had seen a saucer in his telescope, he sold the idea to the Sunday supplement This Week, which prepared a four-page EYEWITNESS REPORT stating that “saucers are space ships from another planet.” At the last minute, This Week got cold feet; it sold the story to True, which ran it. From essentially the same evidence on which McLaughlin (in True) conjectured that the saucers are made-in-Mars, U.S. News concluded that there are made-in-the-U.S. flying saucers.

The Department of Defense backed up Admiral Gallery’s denials of the U.S. News story last week: “None of the three services or any other agency in the Department of Defense is conducting experiments . . . with disc-shaped flying objects which covjld be a basis for the reported phenomena . . . There has been no evidence [to attribute them] to the activity of any foreign nation.”

Venus in Daytime. For two years, the Air Force’s Project Saucer collected and analyzed “eyewitness” reports of saucers. After evaluating more than 200, the Air Force concluded: “Reports of unidentified flying objects are the result of: 1) misinterpretation of various conventional objects [such as weather balloons, meteors, targets and the planet Venus, which can sometimes be seen in daytime]; 2) a mild form of mass hysteria; or 3) hoaxes.” Although Project Saucer has been abandoned, the Air Force continues to study reports, has found nothing to change its conclusions. In his column last week, David Lawrence hinted darkly that there was more to the Project Saucer reports than the Air Force admitted: “Nobody on the outside has been allowed to check up on those reports and analyze them .. .” This was simply not true: since January, the records have been open to the public. A Convivial Round. Others were also guilty of bad reporting. The Taos, N.Mex. Star last week insisted that “3,000 witnesses” had seen a saucer. Fortnight ago the Scripps-Howard Houston Press ran a scarehead on Page One:

WAS IT A FLYING DISC? WEIRD SKY RACER ZOOMS ACROSS

HOUSTON RADAR. The rival Post exploded the story: the Humble Oil Co. had made the radar pickup in 1947, thought it might have been caused by a meteor. Probably the wildest story appeared in

Hearst’s Los Angeles Herald & Express last month. It reported that the wreckage of a saucer had been found on a Mexican mountainside. The finder was a California explosives salesman named Ray Dimmick. The saucer was “powered by two motors,” Dimmick told the Her-Ex. “It was about 46 feet in diameter . . . built of some strange material resembling aluminum.” The pilot, he said, was dead. He was a “midget 23 inches tall with a big head and a small body.” The Her-Ex story had been picked up by an editorial writer over a convivial round with Dimmick. Next day, after thinking it over, Dimmick decided that he had been “misquoted.” He had not seen the wrecked saucer or its pilot himself; it was two other guys in Mexico City. Nevertheless, distributed deadpan by the wire services and printed in many newspapers, the Dimmick “little man” story, and variations of it, are still making the rounds. Why is the press ready to print, and the public to believe, such fantastic tales? Said Admiral Gallery last week: “If you’ll look back about 500 years ago, you’ll find that the people of England had a period of hysteria, when everybody was seeing flying dragons in the sky. We are going through the modern version of flying dragons.”

Pitti-Sing: Corroborative detail indeed! Corroborative fiddlestick.