blog.area51.org

It was 60 years ago, June 24, 1947, that pilot Kenneth Arnold described the UFOs he was tracking as “a saucer if you skip it across water”, and a new buzzword was born. (Interestingly, the Roswell Incident happened just days later.)

There’s a nice article in Wired Magazine celebrating the anniversary of the term “flying saucer”, but, having read it, I wonder if they can’t tell the difference between the term and the reality.

UFO sightings predate 1947 by, oh, at least a few thousand years.

This is just one example, a fresco called The Crucifixion done in the year 1350. If you haven’t seen it before, take a good look at the upper right-hand and left-hand corners.

Here, I’ll help:

What other explanation could there be — angels? Don’t angels generally have wings in renaissance art, rather than … er … vehicles?

You can see other mysterious paintings at this site, UFOArtwork.com. Check out the BC section for evidence of really ancient UFO sightings.

Back to the Wired article — to be fair, it’s not all bad. Stanton Friedman gets a lot of air time, they mention Project Bluebook, Erich von Daniken (without mentioning his book/film Chariots of the Gods? by name), and give a nod to Roswell, although with a bias toward the government’s coverup stories. By the end, it will irritate you. Quotes like “I have found almost no sustainable evidence that any UFO encounter is caused by alien visitors or spacecraft” are misleading and skewed to the skeptic; you’d expect the people at Wired to keep their minds more open.

The real point is that UFO sightings are not new, and they certainly did not begin in 1947. If they were all just sightings of objects in the sky, you might be able to write them off as hallucination (sometimes mass hallucination, though), lies, or mistaken identity. But consider that reports from the middle ages show ships that we can easily recognize as mechanical, and you might want to take a second look.