We have constructed everything we think of when we talk about flying saucers from rumor, imagination and a tiny bit of science. Even the term "flying saucer" came from the media and not from an observer. Nevertheless, flying saucers figure in books, stories, movies, television and websites. Who started this cultural phenomenon? Who invented flying saucers?
The First UFO Flap
On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold saw objects in the sky that resembled “a big flat disk.” He reported this sighting and started the media frenzy of the first UFO flap. At first Arnold neither hypothesized the objects had an extraterrestrial origin nor called them flying saucers. The term flying saucer was coined by journalists, and the extraterrestrial hypothesis bubbled up from the imaginations of writers and from the memories of Orson Welles’ broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” The media attention to the sighting was intense. A Gallup poll the following August showed that 90% of Americans had heard of flying saucers.
The Origin of Flying Saucers
Others in history saw mysterious disks in the sky before Kenneth Arnold. Why did his sighting result in so much publicity for so long? How did flying saucers become a modern myth? John A. Keel, author of “The Mothman Prophecies,” attempted to explain in his essay “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers."
According to Keel, Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of the science fiction magazine “Amazing Stories” and co-founder of Fate magazine, prepared the suggestible public for the extraterrestrial hypothesis with lurid magazine covers featuring the flying saucer image. Keel claimed that Palmer encouraged his artists to make illustrations of circular flying machines. As an example, he cited an article “Circle-Winged Plane” in a 1946 issue of Amazing Stories by W.C . Hefferlin. In Keel's belief, once Palmer found that people were seeing the objects he and his writers had made up, he redoubled his publicity for flying saucers, and the media hysteria grew. Keel identified Raymond A. Palmer as the inventor of flying saucers.
According to Keel, Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of the science fiction magazine “Amazing Stories” and co-founder of Fate magazine, prepared the suggestible public for the extraterrestrial hypothesis with lurid magazine covers featuring the flying saucer image. Keel claimed that Palmer encouraged his artists to make illustrations of circular flying machines. As an example, he cited an article “Circle-Winged Plane” in a 1946 issue of Amazing Stories by W.C . Hefferlin. In Keel's belief, once Palmer found that people were seeing the objects he and his writers had made up, he redoubled his publicity for flying saucers, and the media hysteria grew. Keel identified Raymond A. Palmer as the inventor of flying saucers.
Where are the Flying Saucer Magazine Covers?
Palmer was keen to capitalize on the UFO craze. Indeed, Palmer often claimed he’d learned of flying saucers before 1947 from his writer Richard S. Shaver. Nevertheless, Keel may have given too much credence to Palmer’s own claims. Palmer had little influence outside the readership of his magazines. Collectors of issues of Amazing Stories find no covers depicting circular airships or spacecraft in the year before Arnold sighted the saucers. Moreover, the covers of Amazing Stories that illustrate scenes from Shaver’s stories don’t show flying saucers. Before the Arnold sightings, the overwhelming majority of science fiction artists drew cigar- or rocket- shaped spacecraft.
Thus, the image of the flying saucer was not preloaded into the collective imagination by Raymond A. Palmer and his magazine covers. Few Americans saw circular flying saucers on the covers of magazines before the Arnold sightings. In fact, Americans were more likely to have seen a flying saucer in a movie.
Thus, the image of the flying saucer was not preloaded into the collective imagination by Raymond A. Palmer and his magazine covers. Few Americans saw circular flying saucers on the covers of magazines before the Arnold sightings. In fact, Americans were more likely to have seen a flying saucer in a movie.
The Photo
The large still picture at the top of this article is a screenshot from "A Trip to the Planets," a public domain film in the Internet Archive. The title cards of the film describe the vehicle as an airship with powerful electric engines. Despite the description of the vehicle as an airship, the craft leaves the atmosphere and travels to other planets This early spaceship representation resembles the flying saucers in subsequent illustrations, movies and fakery.
The German film industry made a variety of popular science documentaries between 1918 and 1945. These films are known as Kulturfilm. "A Trip to the Planets" was an American re-cutting of the German Kulturfilm "Our Heavenly Bodies." Director Hanns Walter Kornblum made "Our Heavenly Bodies" for Colonna-Film GmbH and UFA, and the film was released in 1925. The German title is "Wunder der Schöpfung." A restored version of the German film is available from the Munich Film Museum. The restored version is a 93-minute film. "A Trip to the Planets” runs slightly longer than 16 minutes because the film was cut to one reel for American audiences.
The Launch Scene
The American distributors retained the vivid launch scene in their cut-down version of the German film. The vehicle appears to be a disc-shaped craft enclosed in a bubble. The vehicle could be a cigar shape viewed sideways, but the "airship" is never shown at any other angle, at least in the American version of the film. The spacecraft of the film certainly looks like it could be a flying saucer.
Was Kornblum the Man Who Invented Flying Saucers?
Could the spacecraft in the 1925 movie "A Trip to the Planets" be the origin of the iconic flying saucer? Could the film have made an impression on viewers that might have later prejudiced their observations or ordinary atmospheric phenomena? Consider the following:
- The first sighting of unidentified flying disks by a pilot (which set off no media frenzy) occurred in 1926, the year after the film's release.
- We don't know if Kenneth Arnold ever saw the film, but in 1925 he was an only 10 and perhaps impressionable. In the same year Richard S. Shaver and Raymond A. Palmer were teenagers of 18 and 15.
- Other Art Deco images from German films of the era have become cultural icons. For example, the robotic Maria from "Metropolis." ("Metropolis" and "Our Heavenly Bodies" were both films from UFA. Theodor Loos appears in both films.)
Although Raymond A. Palmer does deserve credit for his part in publicizing flying saucers, the evidence that Hanns Walter Kornblum created the iconic image of the flying saucer is as strong, if not stronger, than the evidence supporting the contention that Palmer was responsible for the image. Thus, the director of the film "Our Heavenly Bodies," may have originated the image we know as the flying saucer--in 1925.
Sources
More details about the film are available on the Internet Archive page for "A Trip to the Planets," on the page for for "Wunder der Schöpfung" on the Edition Filmmuseum site and on the Internet Movie Database page for "Our Heavenly Bodies." Information on Hanns Walter Kornblum is scarce. According to IMdB.com, he directed no more films after the 1925 “Our Heavenly Bodies.” He died in Berlin in 1970 at age 91.
You can find more on Kulturfilm in the German-language version of Wikipedia:http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulturfilm.
The English-language Wikipedia articles on Flying Saucers, Raymond A. Palmer and Richard S. Shaver give plenty of general information and references:
The English-language Wikipedia articles on Flying Saucers, Raymond A. Palmer and Richard S. Shaver give plenty of general information and references:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_A._Palmer
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_saucer
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sharpe_Shaver
You can read John Keel’s essay “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers” here:
You can watch Raymond A. Palmer claim Richard S. Shaver told him about flying saucers in this video on YouTube:
An earlier version of this article appeared on Triond's Socyberty website:
http://socyberty.com/paranormal/the-invention-of-flying-saucers/
The Invention of Flying Saucers by Mark Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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