Henry J. Taylor secret-weapon broadcast (1950)
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 11
| Date | Late March 1950, probably 27 March (the night after a 26 March broadcast blaming Russia) |
|---|---|
| Speaker | Henry J. Taylor, host of the General Motors-sponsored radio programme Your Land and Mine |
| From | Dallas, Texas |
| Claim | The flying saucers were real, and secret U.S. military projects |
| Reprinted | Reader's Digest, June 1950: "The 'Flying Saucer' Is Good News" |
| Denials | White House spokesman Charles Ross; partial denials by the Navy |
| Topics | Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic), Congress & law (topic) |
| People | Henry J. Taylor, Joseph Bryan III |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 41 |
| Year | 1950 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1950 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 6 |
In late March 1950, during a new wave of saucer sightings, the radio commentator Henry J. Taylor told his national audience that the flying saucers were real and were secret U.S. military projects.[1][2] He said a saucer bearing Air Force markings had been found near Galveston, Texas, but offered little evidence.[1] Within days a magazine claimed the Navy was building saucers, and a television station showed "the first photos" of one, which turned out to be a 1940s Navy experimental aircraft.[1][4] The White House denied any knowledge of a secret saucer, and the story faded within weeks.[4]
Taylor
Henry Junior Taylor (1902–1984) was a Chicago-born economist, author and broadcaster.[2] His career in outline:[2]
- Journalism. He was a Scripps-Howard foreign correspondent early in the Second World War. After the war he hosted Your Land and Mine, a General Motors-sponsored radio programme known for its conservative commentary.
- Diplomacy. He served as U.S. ambassador to Switzerland from 1957 to 1961. While there he received the "Sniper" letters from the Polish intelligence officer Michał Goleniewski, which led to the arrest of the Soviet spy Stig Wennerström.
- Writing. He later wrote a syndicated column and several books.
The broadcast
Edward Ruppelt, the former head of Project Blue Book, described the episode in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects:[1]
- 26 March. "A famous news commentator said the UFO's were from Russia."
- The next night. Taylor, broadcasting from Dallas, said "the UFO's were Uncle Sam's own". He said he "couldn't tell all he knew", but that a flying saucer "had been found on the beach near Galveston, Texas. It had USAF markings."
- Two nights later. A Los Angeles television station broke into a programme with a news flash and promised "the first photos of the real thing, our military's flying saucer". The photos showed the Navy's XF5U, which Ruppelt called "a World War II experimental aircraft that never flew".
"The public was now thoroughly confused," Ruppelt wrote.[1] Taylor's argument was reprinted in the June 1950 Reader's Digest as "The 'Flying Saucer' Is Good News".[1]
The Navy saucer story
Taylor's claim came alongside a U.S. News & World Report "scoop" of 7 April 1950. Headlined "Flying Saucers – The Real Story: U.S. Built First One in 1942", it said jet-propelled discs could hover and outfly other aircraft, and that "evidence points to Navy experiments".[1] The French newspaper Le Provençal reported the two stories on 5 April 1950:[4]
- The magazine. It said the first saucer had been built in 1942 by Chance Vought. Later models were supposedly made of three stacked metal discs 30 metres across and could exceed the speed of sound.
- Taylor. He was reported as saying the saucers bore a registration like "XF5J". He said Navy models ranged from 60 centimetres to nearly 100 metres across, and that two saucers found in Texas carried notices telling finders to keep the secret and phone an air base.
- The Navy. It acknowledged an interest in saucer-shaped aircraft but said it had abandoned the tests, denials the paper called "nuanced".
- The White House. Press spokesman Charles Ross said President Truman was not aware of flying saucers being a secret of the United States or any other country.
The aircraft behind the stories were Vought's real "Flying Flapjack" designs: the V-173 test aircraft, which flew in 1942, and the XF5U fighter prototype.[1][4]
Reaction
The story was widely heard and read. In Ruppelt's account, the confident and contradictory explanations of that spring, Russian, American and otherwise, left the public "thoroughly confused".[1] The 1950 chronology published by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) sets the episode against the Air Force's position at the time. The Air Force had publicly closed its UFO project, Grudge, in December 1949, and quietly cancelled its special reporting directives in early 1950.[3] With the government saying little, a confident-sounding explanation could spread quickly.[1][3] A newspaper clipping of Taylor's claim, linked as an image, could not be retrieved.[5]
Aftermath
In 1957 Taylor's UFO beliefs prompted questions about whether he was fit to be ambassador to Switzerland. President Eisenhower appointed him anyway, and he served until 1961.[1][2] According to a 1957 report in the APRO Bulletin, he still believed UFOs were real but had dropped the claim that they were American-made.[1] He died in Manhattan in 1984.[2]
The disinformation theory
The suggestion that Taylor's broadcast was part of a deliberate disinformation effort is a later theory.[6] The researcher Jack Brewer has examined the intelligence connections of Joseph Bryan III, who is reported to have run the CIA's psychological warfare staff in this period and later sat on NICAP's board.[6] Brewer's own FOIA requests to the National Archives about Bryan produced two pages: a 1953 FBI memo, out of an 8,500-page file mainly about bacteriological warfare.[6] No document has been found showing that the CIA or any agency planted Taylor's story.[1][6]
Assessment
Taylor offered no more evidence for American saucers than others did for Russian or extraterrestrial ones.[1] The aircraft cited as proof was an unflown experimental fighter, and the White House denied the story.[1][4] The episode shows how quickly competing "explanations" spread in 1950, at a time when the Air Force had stepped back from public UFO investigation.[1][3]
People and topics
- Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
- Disinformation — False information spread deliberately to mislead.
- Henry J. Taylor — Radio commentator who announced in 1950 that flying saucers were secret U.S. weapons.
- Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
- U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
- U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
- Joseph Bryan III — Reported head of CIA psychological warfare in the early 1950s who later sat on NICAP's board.
- NICAP — The leading U.S. civilian UFO group of the 1950s and 1960s.
On the Timeline
- Bell Labs source on 1950 crash files (1950) — A Bell Labs source says a former NASA employee had technical files on a 1950 crash retrieval.
- RAND memorandum RM-365 (14 April 1950) — An Air Force-funded RAND paper studies using superstition and the paranormal for psychological warfare.
See every 1950 event on the UAP Timeline →
Further reading
- UFO documents — CIA Reading Room · cia.gov · archived copy
- U.S. congressional hearings on UFOs — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
References
- "1950 disclosure: UFOs are made in USA", The Saucers That Time Forgot (Nov 2018) · thesaucersthattimeforgot.blogspot.com · archived copy
- Henry J. Taylor — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- NICAP 1950 chronology · nicap.org · archived copy
- Patrick Gross, French press on Taylor's claim (Apr 1950), UFOs at close sight · ufology.patrickgross.org · archived copy
- 3.bp.blogspot.com · 3.bp.blogspot.com · archived copy
- ufotrail.blogspot.com · ufotrail.blogspot.com · archived copy
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Henry J. Taylor”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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