The History of UFOs — Part 2
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Before Flying Saucers
Strange Things Were in the Sky Long Before We Invented UFOs
In 1947, Kenneth Arnold looked toward Mount Rainier and reported seeing nine unusual objects moving through the sky. What happened next helped create the modern UFO phenomenon. Newspapers picked up the story, the expression “flying saucer” entered popular culture, and reports multiplied.
It is tempting to begin the history there. But people had been seeing strange things in the sky long before 1947 — long before airplanes, radar, rockets, or even the term flying saucer.
Go far enough back and witnesses described fiery shields, celestial armies, burning wheels, strange lights, phantom ships and portents in the heavens. As human knowledge and technology changed, the language used to describe unusual things in the sky changed with it.
By the nineteenth century, people were reporting airships. During World War II, pilots encountered mysterious lights they called foo fighters. Immediately after the war, Scandinavians reported ghost rockets. Then came the flying saucers.
This raises one of the most interesting questions in the entire UFO story:
Did the phenomena change — or did the way we interpreted them change?
Before We Had UFOs
Looking for UFOs in ancient history presents an obvious challenge: people could only interpret strange things in the sky through the ideas available to them at the time.
A Roman witnessing something extraordinary overhead didn’t have our vocabulary. There were no aircraft, satellites, weather balloons or drones. There was no radar or meteorology in the modern sense.
There were gods, spirits, omens and natural wonders.
Ancient chronicles contain descriptions of extraordinary celestial events: strange lights, multiple suns, burning objects and forms sometimes compared with shields moving through the heavens. Many probably had ordinary explanations — comets, meteors, auroras, atmospheric optics or unusual cloud formations — while others may have been exaggerated or transformed as accounts were copied through generations.
We should therefore be careful about retroactively labeling every mysterious historical observation a UFO in the modern sense. A description of a “fiery shield” tells us what someone reported or how an event was remembered. It doesn’t necessarily tell us what was physically present.
But the accounts remain relevant because they reveal something fundamental to the history of unidentified aerial phenomena:
People have always encountered things in the sky they could not immediately explain.
The Wheels of Ezekiel
One of the strangest descriptions of a heavenly phenomenon appears in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Ezekiel.
Ezekiel describes an extraordinary vision involving brilliant fire, four unusual living creatures and enormous wheels. The creatures have multiple faces and wings, while beside them are “wheels within wheels” capable of moving in different directions without turning. Most strikingly, Ezekiel describes the rims of the wheels as being “full of eyes.”
Later Jewish mystical and Christian traditions associated these wheel-like beings with the Ophanim, or “wheels.” Isaiah describes Seraphim with six wings, while Ezekiel’s Cherubim are complex, multi-faced beings rather than the familiar humanlike angels of later European art.
It is tempting for a modern reader to look at Ezekiel’s wheels and try to identify them as some kind of physical object or mechanism. But that would go beyond the evidence. Ezekiel describes a religious vision, not an observational report written for modern investigators.
What matters to our history is something simpler.
Here is an ancient description of something extraordinary appearing in the heavens, recorded using the language and worldview of its time.
We don’t know what physical event, if any, lay behind the account.
And sometimes “we don’t know” is the most accurate answer available.
When the Sky Belonged to the Gods
For most of human history, the heavens were not simply empty space. They carried religious and symbolic meaning. A comet might announce the death of a king. An eclipse could signal catastrophe. A strange light might be interpreted as a warning or message from the divine.
This wasn’t stupidity. It was interpretation within the intellectual framework available at the time.
If you lived in medieval Europe and witnessed an extraordinary luminous object crossing the sky, you couldn’t call it a satellite, aircraft or drone. Those categories didn’t exist. You interpreted the observation using categories that did.
The same human brain that today asks, Was that a drone? might once have asked, Was that a sign?
That difference matters because human beings don’t simply observe. We interpret what we observe.
Nuremberg, 1561
One of the most spectacular examples occurred over Nuremberg, in what is now Germany.
On the morning of April 14, 1561, people were reported to have witnessed an extraordinary display in the sky.
Our principal surviving source is a broadsheet produced by printer and artist Hans Glaser. Its famous woodcut depicts the sky filled with bizarre forms — spheres, crosses, cylinders, crescents and elongated objects — some apparently interacting or colliding. Glaser’s account described what appeared to be a great struggle in the heavens.
To modern eyes, the illustration can look astonishingly like an aerial encounter.
But Glaser wasn’t producing a photograph or scientific report. He was creating a sixteenth-century broadsheet — part news, part illustration and part religious interpretation. Natural optical phenomena, including atmospheric halo effects, have been proposed as explanations.
The important point isn’t that Nuremberg was a UFO event in the modern sense.
We don’t know exactly what happened.
What we have is a historical report of an extraordinary phenomenon in the sky that witnesses and chroniclers attempted to explain using the concepts available to them.
Five years later, another remarkable celestial display was reported over Basel, Switzerland, including numerous dark and reddish objects in the sky.
We look at those illustrations with twenty-first-century eyes.
They looked upward with sixteenth-century eyes.
Same sky. Different vocabulary.
Then Something Changed
For centuries, unusual aerial phenomena were commonly interpreted through religion, folklore and natural portents.
Then came the Industrial Revolution.
Steam engines transformed transportation. Railroads crossed continents. Electricity entered cities. Telegraph wires allowed messages to travel almost instantaneously. Machines were changing what human beings considered possible.
Inventors were also trying to conquer the sky.
By the late nineteenth century, powered flight seemed increasingly plausible. Nobody had yet built a practical airplane, but people understood that eventually someone probably would.
Then something remarkable happened.
People started reporting flying machines.
The Mystery Airships
Beginning in late 1896, reports of mysterious flying machines spread across the United States, appearing prominently in California before proliferating elsewhere.
Witnesses described brilliant lights traveling through the night. Some reported elongated bodies, wings, propellers, cabins or other mechanical structures.
The stories sound almost comical today, except for one extraordinary fact:
The practical airplane hadn’t been invented yet.
The Wright brothers’ famous powered flight would not occur until 1903.
Real aeronautical experimentation was underway, however. Samuel Langley’s unmanned Aerodrome successfully flew in 1896. Newspapers were reporting experiments with flying machines. The conquest of powered flight seemed close.
The cultural context had changed.
People no longer necessarily interpreted mysterious things in the sky as portents.
They could now be machines.
Were the Airships Real?
Probably not in many of the elaborate forms described by contemporary newspapers.
Some reports may have involved astronomical objects or balloons. Some were undoubtedly hoaxes or newspaper inventions. Journalism of the period was fiercely competitive, and sensational stories sold copies.
Once airship reports became popular, more appeared. People began looking upward. Ambiguous lights sometimes acquired mechanical details.
But dismissing the entire episode misses the more interesting point.
The mystery-airship wave demonstrates something fundamental about unidentified observations:
Expectation can influence interpretation.
A mysterious light in 1596 and a mysterious light in 1896 might produce completely different descriptions — not necessarily because the light itself changed, but because the observers lived in completely different technological worlds.
The Sky Becomes Technological
By the twentieth century, people could really fly.
Aircraft crossed oceans. Military aviation developed rapidly. Radio appeared. Radar followed. Rockets moved from speculation toward engineering.
The sky was no longer beyond human reach.
It had become technological territory.
That changed the question people asked when something unusual appeared overhead.
Instead of What sign is this?, the question increasingly became:
Whose machine is that?
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Then came World War II.
The Foo Fighters
During the Second World War, Allied aircrews reported strange luminous objects accompanying their aircraft.
They were often described as glowing balls of red, orange or white light. Sometimes they appeared to follow aircraft or maneuver nearby, although they generally did not attack.
Pilots called them foo fighters.
At the time, the obvious suspicion was enemy technology. Allied pilots wondered whether Germany had developed some secret weapon.
That response is revealing.
A medieval observer might have interpreted an unexplained light religiously.
A World War II pilot suspected enemy technology.
Proposed explanations for foo-fighter reports have included atmospheric electrical effects, astronomical objects, visual phenomena and unusual conditions encountered during combat flying.
But whatever the explanations for individual cases, military aviators sometimes reported things they could not identify.
And that gives us the definition that should remain at the center of this entire series:
Unidentified means unidentified.
It doesn’t tell us what the object was.
It tells us that, at the time of the observation, the observer couldn’t determine what it was.
Then Came the Ghost Rockets
World War II ended in 1945, but reports of unusual aerial objects continued.
In 1946, a major wave emerged from Scandinavia, particularly Sweden. This time witnesses frequently described objects resembling missiles or rockets.
They became known as ghost rockets.
Again, the historical context matters.
Germany’s V-1 and V-2 weapons had just demonstrated dramatically that advanced rockets were real. After Germany collapsed, the United States and Soviet Union competed for German rocket technology and expertise.
So when mysterious rocket-like objects appeared over Scandinavia, suspicion naturally turned toward experimental military technology.
Swedish authorities investigated the reports. Many probably involved meteors and other conventional phenomena. Some could not be confidently resolved.
But look at the progression.
Ancient observers described celestial signs.
Early-modern observers described strange forms and portents.
Industrial-age observers reported airships.
World War II pilots suspected secret aircraft or weapons.
Postwar Scandinavians reported rockets.
The terminology kept moving alongside human technology.
Then came 1947.
1947
On June 24, 1947, businessman and private pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State when he reported seeing nine unusual objects moving at apparently extraordinary speed.
His description of their movement was transformed by newspapers into a phrase that would change popular culture:
Flying saucers.
Reports exploded across the United States.
Suddenly the unidentified object had a recognizable shape, a memorable name and an enormous audience.
The modern UFO era had begun.
But after everything that came before it, perhaps 1947 wasn’t really the beginning of unidentified aerial phenomena.
It was the beginning of something else:
the modern way we talked about them.
The Most Interesting Pattern
Look at the history as a timeline and a pattern emerges.
Ancient people described signs and wonders. Later generations reported airships, mysterious lights, secret weapons, ghost rockets and flying saucers.
The important point is not that all of these reports had the same cause. They almost certainly did not.
The point is that people describe the unknown using the ideas available to them at the time.
Today we use another term:
UAP — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
But the basic meaning remains the same:
Someone observed something they could not identify.
What Remains
A UFO does not tell us what something is.
It tells us that we don’t know what it is.
Some sightings were natural phenomena. Some were mistakes or hoaxes. Some may have involved unfamiliar technology. Others remain unresolved because there simply isn’t enough evidence.
Unexplained does not mean inexplicable.
Sometimes it simply means we don’t know.
1947 Changed the Story
Kenneth Arnold’s sighting helped give the modern mystery a name:
Flying saucer.
That phrase eventually gave way to UFO, and increasingly to UAP today.
But 1947 did more than change the vocabulary.
It changed the mystery's direction.
For centuries, people had looked up and asked:
What is that?
After 1947, another question began to take hold:
What if there is someone inside it?
That question would change everything.
Next: Part Three — Aliens
The objects came first.
Then came the occupants.
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