Report on UFO Wave of 1947 Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Just over twenty years ago, the problem of the Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) burst into public attention. In a single two-week period in the summer of 1947, the UFO problem was laid in confusing disorder before the American public by means of banner headlines and wire-stories in profusion. In retrospect, it seems clear that the visible record of 1947 emergence of the UFO problem is primarily a journalistic record. Although scientists, the military, and a few governmental spokesmen took minor parts in the dramatic entry of UFOs onto the modern scene, newspapermen wrote and delivered the key lines that made the journalists role in the drama preeminent.

Hence, to reconstruct that eventful public emergence of the UFO problem, one must turn to the nation's newspapers and review the day-by-day (sometimes hour-by-hour) unfolding of the evidence -- evidence that something of truly unusual nature was occurring.

A few writers have already nibbled at the edge of a journalistic review of that curtain-raising two-week episode in late June and early July, 1947. In the present book, Bloecher gives us what will probably come to be regarded as the definitive analysis of that important episode in UFO and journalistic history.

His approach was straightforward: Because his professional work takes him to many parts of the country, he began several years ago to devote maximum possible time to digging into local library files of newspapers, in order to extract original 1947 press material reporting the UFO problem in all its dimensions. As his files grew he turned to other sources, including Air Force Project Blue Book files and files of independent investigatory groups. From all this, he has assembled and put into far clearer order than could have been apparent to 1947 readers a systematic recounting of the 1947 birth of the UFO problem. This book is the result of his studies. I commend it to the attention of all serious students of the UFO problem.

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Doubtless, most other readers will be as stunned as I was to realize that already in the first two weeks after Kenneth Arnold's Mt. Rainier report of June 24, 1947, press reports of other American sightings of highly unconventional aerial objects numbered not the dozen or so that most of us might recall, but many hundreds. Since Bloecher is careful to concede that his own searching cannot possibly have gleaned every last report from the 1947 press files, we can safely round upwards his collection of about 800 reports to an estimate that at least some thousand sightings of unidentified objects probably occurred within the United States in midsummer 1947, the bulk of these coming within a rather sharply defined wavecrest centered on about July 7. As Bloecher properly emphasizes, this clearly marks the episode as one of the outstanding sighting-waves on record.

(It would be most unwise to draw the conclusion that a thousand reports in about two weeks earns this episode the distinction of being the outstanding wave on record; unfortunately no other UFO researcher has done for other American waves the same kind of diligent searching that Bloecher has accomplished for the 1947 episode. Thus, the November 1957, episode might well outstrip the 1947 summer episode, if only there were reasonably full documentation at hand. And then, there are foreign waves in the running, too; September-October, 1954, as Michel's work has shown, constituted a most remarkable UFO sighting-wave in France and nearby parts of Europe.)

In the two decades that have passed since 1947, there has been distressingly little progress made towards elucidating the true nature of the unidentified flying objects. But, elucidated or not, they have refused to go away. Press fun-poking and curiously fallacious official "explanations" have most assuredly held up real scientific progress by conveying the distinct impression that the UFO problem has been only a nonsense problem. But ridicule and snide comments notwithstanding, citizens in all walks of life have continued to report, often in the deepest puzzlement and often in a state of suddenly-enhanced concern, that they have witnessed objects fitting no conventional natural or technological categories -- unidentifiable aerial objects of craft-like nature. This being so, it seems long overdue for the scientific community to put aside arrogance and prejudgment, to overlook preconceptions and past glib comments about all the unbalanced persons who just don't know what they are seeing, and to dig into the facts. That those "facts" are, today, not objective instrumental meter-readings but anecdotal accounts of things seen by persons other than Nobelists, is unfortunate. If only science had not been so casual back in 1947, so ready to believe what so many feature-writers and ill-informed official spokesmen had to say about UFOs, we might today have an abundance of meter-readings with which to work. But 1947 began a two-decade period of misinformation, so we are still hardly at the start of an adequate scientific examination of UFOs.

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To understand how that lamentable situation came about, one must begin by reviewing the manner in which various patterns of reaction to the UFO problem became established almost within days of the Arnold report. Bloecher’s work lays before us a fascinating summary of those crucial days of initial journalistic confrontation of the UFO puzzle.

To keep the record entirely clear, it is necessary that I draw special attention to the adjective "journalistic" in that last sentence. Bloecher does not here purport to present results of his own investigative reporting of UFO sightings in mid-1947. Nor is he able to vouch, on the basis of independent checking, for the reportorial accuracy of the hundreds of press accounts whose rise and fall he explores. Since we all know that standard press reporting falls well short of 100 per cent accuracy, we must not here equate press reports to scientific accounts.

To form my own estimates of the probable order of reliability of these 1947 reports, I undertook a search for witnesses in several dozen of the more intriguing 1947 cases discussed in the text. The results of this sampling were interesting; they were also encouraging in the sense that they pointed to the generally correct impression one draws from reading all these press accounts: Even after reportorial errors and the like are allowed for, the mid-1947 episode seems to constitute a period of remarkable sightings by many level-headed persons.

In the course of my cross-checks, I found that the UFO problem has been with us so long that some key witnesses of the 1947 period are already dead. Others have moved away from the locales of their 1947 sightings and are not any longer to be found by the type of telephone-searching to which my own check had to be limited. A few, but only very few, have forgotten key details of what they saw and reported; but most emphasized the vividness with which they can still recall the unusual objects they saw, or the unprecedented performance characteristics that stunned them, back there twenty years ago.

In my search, I found one outright hoax that was exposed within a day of the initial press report. The victim gave full details to the same reporters that put the hoax on the wires; they weren't interested in clearing up the hoax, and it stood uncorrected in the files for Bloecher to add to his initial collection.

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And in the search I found many cases in which details of the sightings were erroneously reported, both in local and in wire stories. Newspaper reporting, to repeat, leaves a great deal to be desired in the way of accuracy -- whether journalists care to admit it or not. But what I found to be true from the checks I was able to make on about twenty-five more or less randomly selected 1947 cases for which I was able to locate one or more key witnesses was this: Even after one corrected the reporters' errors (wrong times, wrong directions, wrong shapes, wrong names, etc.), one still had left a high percentage of exceedingly interesting and basically unexplainable accounts of unconventional aerial objects. And frequently I found by telephone-interviewing of the witnesses that there was much more significance to the full sighting account than the original reporter had been able to put into his own press story.

Hence, I feel justified in asserting that Bloecher's account is much more than a journalistic review per se; I believe the picture that takes shape as one reads his account is a generally quite correct picture, the random defects of which are admittedly unfortunate but do not spoil the over-all image of an episode of great scientific significance.

I believe that it is important that many more such studies now be undertaken -- with resources that permit a full recheck of the type that I was able to conduct merely on a small-sample basis. Many physical scientists (unlike their confreres in the social sciences) scorn interview methods of acquiring data. I share their strong preference for meter-readings; but I deplore their unwillingness to look at anecdotal data when that's all there is immediately at hand. To escalate concern for the UFO problem to the level where funds and energies will he poured into the design of objective techniques of data-gathering (electromagnetic sensors, improved radar reporting, etc.) will require that science begin by carefully sifting anecdotal data. A first step therein is that of assembling reports; and for the mid-1947 episode Bloecher has done just that for us.

The point I stress is that my own sample-check convinces me that the bulk of these 1947 reports must be viewed as reasonably well reported. This, in itself, carries very important implications. For it implies that within about two weeks hundreds and hundreds of American citizens saw phenomena for which science has no ready explanations. Venus, fireballs, sundogs, and the rest of the "misidentified natural phenomena" of which we have subsequently heard so much in official disclaimers, must be suspected in many more than a few of those reports. But then, as now, one has a large residue of quite inexplicable phenomena reported by persons who appear to be entirely sane, reliable, and often very articulate. And here and there, one finds true gems of the world of reports, cases where highly experienced persons saw objects which they could describe in no other terms than "machines" or "craft" or "vehicles" -- UFOs, briefly.

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What I see in all this as primarily important is the abundance of good case-material scattered through a dross of less reliable reports -- an abundance that official agencies should have recognized by late 1947 as constituting a problem of the utmost scientific importance. No such recognition appears to have occurred. The U. S. Army Air Force (which became the U. S. Air Force in January, 1948) quite naturally acquired official responsibility for the UFO problem before 1947 was over; there was understandable concern that these supersonic discs might be weapons of some hostile foreign power. They were maneuvering in our airspace, so our air force received and retained (or, as some subsequent developments suggest, couldn't get rid of) the responsibility for clarifying the mystery of the UFOs. Project Sign was created formally within the new U. S. Air Force on January 22, 1948, seven short days after USAF acquired its separate status within our Department of Defense. Project Sign, followed by Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, became the administrative vehicles in which headway was supposed to be made towards the goal of explaining the UFOs. In fact, those vehicles made almost no net progress; so one now looks back on twenty years of confusion and ineptitude, and one asks how it was ever possible that this bulk of evidence that burst out in mid-1947 became, itself, the greatest body of officially "misinterpreted phenomena" in scientific history. One must, I believe, read Bloecher's work with that question clearly in mind. How could so much evidence be brushed aside, ignored, and made fun of? How was the significance of the UFO reports widely ignored already in 1947? Historians of science are, I believe, doomed to incredulity that so much evidence got lost in an administrative shuffle and became only a first stratum underlying twenty-years-later deposits of more such startling evidence for the existence of a new scientific problem of extraordinary interest.

I write these introductory comments at a moment when I have behind me about eighteen months of intensive examination of the UFO problem. That examination has convinced me that, far from being a nonsense problem, the UFO problem is perhaps the outstanding scientific problem confronting mankind. Those are strong words, and I intend them to be; they are not lightly written. I believe we must radically reorient scientific attitudes towards this steadily-growing body of UFO reports and that we must enlist the aid of really top-notch scientific talent in the difficult task of bringing ultimate order out of the chaos into which twenty years of ridicule have brought the subject.

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Bloecher's study has, for me, brought out at least one very significant insight into the "ridicule-lid" that has so long kept the bulk of the UFO evidence from open scrutiny. The populace itself has well-imprinted patterns of rejection of observations that do not seem to fit within the established world scientific picture.

I shall enlarge a bit on this. I have seen so much press and official ridicule of UFO witnesses in the course of my recent study that I have evidently overlooked somewhat the ingrained tendency for even untrained laymen to be reluctant to report openly something they have seen with their own eyes when it flies in the face of familiar experience. Bloecher's material shows, on close inspection, that even before any Air Force pronouncements, before any press-reported scientific scoffing in early July, 1947, witnesses were exhibiting quite definite reluctance to report the unprecedented aerial phenomena they had seen. This, for social scientists, deserves bold underscoring as an index of the scientific attitudes of our times. I smiled to hear an eminent American physicist deplore, on a recent television program, the public's credulity as evidenced by its willingness to take seriously the "flying saucer" reports. He shook his head in dismay that years of scientific education of the public had produced so little effect. In fact, he need have little worry on that score. Anyone who has done a substantial amount of direct witness-interviewing in UFO cases knows all too well how unwilling most persons (even those with no formal scientific training) have become with respect to open reporting of UFO sightings. But what I see in Bloecher's early press material is surprising evidence that this reluctance predates official and journalistic fun-poking concerning "flying saucers." Science has built into our population a very definite resistance towards acceptance of the odd and unusual, the bewildering and inexplicable. Exceptions there are, needless to say, but the bulk of the populace tends to be quite close-mouthed about observations of unexplainable phenomena. This disposition was quickly and powerfully enhanced by official scoffing, by scientific pronouncements made ex cathedra by the end of the first week of July, 1947, and since repeated over and over. But that disposition, Bloecher's studies reveal, was not created by those pronouncements. This I find exceedingly interesting, exceedingly significant, and rather surprising.

It might be pertinent, if space permitted, for me to give a summary of the roughly two dozen 1947 cases which I succeeded in checking in my sampling. I found it especially interesting to speak with a number of police and sheriff's deputies in the Portland, Oregon, area concerning the unusual July 4, 1947, sightings.

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This episode is officially explained in Air Force files as "radar chaff"(aluminum strips dropped to confuse enemy radar), yet it involved repeated sightings of numerous disc-shaped objects moving rapidly across the daytime sky over Portland. To listen to those officers retell what they saw, how they reacted, and how their colleagues ribbed them was more than amusing. But to try to square all those sightings with "radar chaff" is simply annoying; the evidence bears absolutely no resemblance to observations of falling radar chaff. And so it has gone, over the ensuing years.

One 1947 case that does warrant more than passing mention here is a report that is not in Bloecher's material because it was never reported to press or official agencies. (One comes to realize that there must be a very large volume of other such reports that still lie fully covered by the ridicule lid.) The report came directly to me from a Tucson woman who happened to read a Time article on UFOs (Aug. 4, 1967) that made passing mention of Arnold’s report of "seeing nine disc-like objects erratically moving through the air near Mount Rainier in 1947." Thinking that here, at last, must be a confirmatory report of what she and a friend had seen in early 1947 in Tucson, and noting my name in the same article, she telephoned me, thinking that I might be interested to know that she had seen "the same nine objects." But by the time we had gone over details, it was not obvious that she had seen the same objects as Arnold; but it was clear that her report must be entered into the UFO record.

Here is a brief summary: Mrs. H. G. Olavick and Mrs. William Down were the witnesses, and the date was Tuesday, April 29, 1947, according to Mrs. Olavick's reconstruction of related events and dates. (there is a possibility that this date is one week off, she pointed out; but that it was a Tuesday in late April or early May she regards as quite definite.) Mrs. Olavick was in her kitchen at 2101 East Hawthorne Street, Tucson, while Mrs. Down was out in the backyard patio. Suddenly Mrs. Down called her out excitedly, and both proceeded to observe what had caught Mrs. Down's eye. The time was just after the noon hour; Tucson's skies were completely cloudless. Somewhat north of their zenith lay an unusual, isolated, "steamy-fleecy" cloud at an altitude which Mrs. Olavick found difficult to estimate, though she recalled that it seemed lower than average for that time of year (thus, perhaps at or below 10,000 feet, say). No other cloud was to be seen in the sky. In and out of the cloud moved a number of dull-white disc-like objects that rose and fell in an erratic manner, occasionally disappearing into or above the unnatural cloud. She said that these objects were round in planform but were not spherical, for they frequently tipped a bit, exposing a flattened-sphere form. She estimates that they watched these objects cavorting near the cloud for perhaps five or six minutes before the entire group suddenly disappeared within the cloud or perhaps above it.

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After a minute or so, as she now recalls it, a new object, perhaps three or four times as large as the little objects, came out of the cloud on its east side. After it emerged, the small objects began to emerge also, taking up a V-formation pattern behind it. The V comprised a line of four-abreast just to the rear of the large object, then a line of three-abreast behind that, and finally two-abreast in the rear. Thus, the point of the V was to the rear (in the sense of the emergent and subsequent motion). This formation permitted the first accurate count of the small objects, nine in all. No sooner had the last pair emerged than all ten objects shot off to the northeast, climbing out of sight in a time that she thought was probably two to three seconds. She does not recall what happened to the cloud after the ten objects departed.

I have spoken with Mrs. Olavick several additional times, following her first call. Her account was presented in an unembellished manner, and her descriptions were carefully framed, specifying just which parts had become less distinct in her memory. But the basic vividness of her memory of this observation she stressed repeatedly. I had to explain that it was by no means clear that the objects she saw were identical with those reported by Kenneth Arnold two months later. When I queried her as to why she had not reported them, she pointed out that she and Mrs. Down were entirely convinced that they had been fortunate enough to witness some new American military vehicles about which the general public had not yet been informed. Later she heard of the "flying saucers," and she and Mrs. Down, when they rejoined their husbands in mid-summer in Iowa, told them about their own observation. The husbands, she recalled, made such a joke of it that they ceased mentioning it.

Here was a pre-Arnold sighting never reported officially. It was quite clearly not an observation of "new American military vehicles," nor can one readily square this with any phenomenon of atmospheric physics or astronomy. It is a UFO observation, and a rather interesting one. Bloecher's search has led to several other pre-Arnold 1947 sightings. Just a matter of days before this writing, I spoke on the telephone with Walter A. Minczewski, the U. S. Weather Bureau observer whose April, 1947, theodolite-tracking case is cited in the text. Minczewski emphasized that he had never reported it to other than his Weather Bureau superiors and hence was surprised to be called about it twenty years later. Yet his recollection of the details of the whitish disc-like object he had tracked one clear morning in Richmond, Virginia, was still distinct in his mind.

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But time is slipping on, and those 1947 witnesses ought to be interviewed in far more depth than anyone has ever done -- lest we lose their reports forever. The same is true of the innumerable observers of subsequent UFO incidents. Detailed case-studies and thorough episode-studies are sorely needed. Bloecher has given here the raw material for an episode-study of the initial 1947 wave of sightings; he has woven it into an orderly account of what was happening when UFOs first became public knowledge. I find this account absorbing reading and regard it as a substantial contribution to the study of the baffling problem of the unidentified flying objects.