Description

1947 was a long time ago, and memories fade with the generations. Particularly, memories of *pop culture ephemera* fade very fast. But pop culture is the context and background against which historical events were understood.

It's easy for modern viewers to imagine that the classic "flying saucer" shape - so distinctively different from actual aeroplanes of the era - only appeared *in response to* UFO sightings, and was *only inspired by them*.

This is not the case. Fiction, and filmmaking, had already got there first.

Alex Raymond's beautifully detailed "Flash Gordon" science-fantasy comic strip appeared in 1934 and was such a pop culture sensation that it was rushed into a movie serial by 1936. The whole serial is well worth watching in its own right, but for UFO fans it has a special resonance. At around 30 minutes into the 4 hour serial, we see a confrontation between rocket ships and "gyroships of the Lion Men".

Gyroships are essentially the classic Flying Saucer: round and rotating. (The idea of a round flying vehicle probably was inspired by helicopters.) They're a *little* different from, say, the George Adamski Venusian Scout Ship (they have an axle pointing down rather than up) but not so different as to be unrecognisable.

Like the comic, the Flash Gordon serial was a huge success and burned its way into the 1930s-1940s pop culture imagination. It was the Star Wars of its era: or rather more literally, Star Wars in 1977 was an attempt to recapture the magic that was Flash Gordon.

We need to take this widely known background into account when we think about 1940s and 1950s sightings of the classic "flying saucer" shape. *Spinning saucers had already been coded in fiction as "alien advanced technology" for a decade before reports of them being seen "for real" began to hit the news.*

While the pre-existence of the round, spinning, saucer/top shape in widely viewed pop culture doesn't necessarily imply that all "saucer" sightings after 1936 are merely fiction, it does suggest that maybe something more than just "nuts and bolts craft" is going on. If there is (as Vallee and Keel thought) a nonphysical, illusion-generating phenomenon at work, perhaps broadcasting images telepathically or creating/projecting them temporarily in space via some process akin to holography (not *actual* holography, you understand, but something *like our fictional idea of holography*).... then the phenomenon might be deliberately presenting itself in images chosen *from* science fiction, to portray the idea of "something just a little foreign, yet not entirely beyond our understanding".

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Gordon

Also read Mark Pilkington's 1996 essay "Screen Memories" for a similar take on the uncomfortably close - and confusing - two-way relationship between UFO sightings and film images of "aliens". https://www.hedweb.com/markp/ufofilm.htm