The Cold War UFO Craze: Background information when reading A Girl's Guide to Missiles

The Cold War UFO Craze

This article relates to A Girl's Guide to Missiles

In A Girl's Guide to Missiles, Karen Piper overhears her father talking about a coworker's belief in aliens. It's just one of many moments in which she associates her childhood at the top secret China Lake Naval Station with paranoia, secrecy and fear of the unknown. While Piper knows that the secrecy of her home is due to weapons development, conspiracy theories began to grow across the country about what actually took place in these facilities, and the most prevailing involved extraterrestrial visitors.

One of the most famous UFO sightings occurred in 1947 at the Army Air Field in Roswell, New Mexico, when a flying disc was observed falling from the sky and crashing to the ground. Roswell's official statement was that this object was a waylaid weather balloon. But was it? Many people believed that the government fabricated the weather balloon story to hide a true alien encounter. This skepticism continues to this day; when CNN and Time polled Americans in 1997, two thirds of respondents reported that they believed the Roswell incident was a genuine UFO sighting. The city of Roswell is presently home to the International UFO Museum and Research Center.

After Roswell, sightings become more common. In 1952, in Washington D.C., several people reportedly saw UFOs over a period of multiple days in July. Hollywood began to capitalize on the panic early on, with films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

From the 1940s onward, US citizens reported a continuous stream of UFO sightings to the government. Even President Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen one before a Lion's Club meeting in Georgia in 1969. He registered the event with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in 1973. This committee was just one of several authorities responsible for tracking UFO sightings, the most famous of which was Project Blue Book, conducted by the U.S. Air Force from 1952-1969 with the goal of determining whether UFOs were a national security threat. Project Blue Book was the third Air Force study of its kind, preceded by Projects Sign and Grudge.

In the seventeen years of the project, Blue Book collected 12,618 UFO reports. Most of the objects, upon analysis, were determined to be misidentified phenomena, like swamp gases, large hailstones, meteors, and conventional jets. Notably, the CIA has released statements claiming responsibility for UFO sightings after testing the U-2 spy plane at high altitudes between 1954 and 1974. When Project Blue Book closed, it was with the assertion that UFOs posed no national security risk, represented no advanced technology, and were not evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles of any kind. However, in the years since, many have chosen to believe in elaborate government cover-ups and secret alien-related projects at military installations (including, of course, at the famous Area 51).

Why were there so many reported sightings during this period? The development of rocketry circa World War II resulted in a large uptick that continued as new aeronautic designs were invented and tested. The incident at Roswell coincided with the beginning of the Cold War, and the UFO scare fit hand-in-hand with the Red Scare. Many movies from the era were as much about the threat of communism as they were about aliens. There was also an increase in reported UFO sightings by Soviet citizens at this time. Perhaps it was more comforting for both sides to imagine encounters with aliens, rather than the enemy on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The Cold War and Project Blue Book may be over, but there are still UFO-believers worldwide. Interested in this historical mystery? All Blue Book Reports are available under the Freedom of Information Act, including those related to the 701 true UFOs—the incidents that remain unexplained to this day.

Roswell Daily Record: July 8, 1947

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This "beyond the book article" relates to A Girl's Guide to Missiles. It originally ran in August 2018 and has been updated for the August 2019 paperback edition. Go to magazine.