Yes! Precisely! Somehow people started associating UFOs with flying saucers and aliens. How would they know it's aliens if the U stands for unidentified?
> Somehow people started associating UFOs with flying saucers and aliens.
I saw a video (that I can't currently find) of Feynman explaining this once.
The US government had a classified program that suspended 1940s saucer microphones from a balloon at a height in the atmosphere that would allow them to listen for Soviet atomic tests.
The balloon crashes and some reporters are out sniffing around. Someone with loose lips lets slip that it was a flying saucer. You can imagine what the artist's rendition based on that description looked like.
Then, since the program was classified, the official explanation becomes that it was a weather balloon or something, and a conspiracy theory is born.
Not sure where your source comes from, but the term came into popular use in the year 1947.
It was most likely first used after Kenneth Arnold's famous report where he described a "saucer-like" shape. That story blew up, and people started reporting "flying saucers" everywhere.
It even got into the heads of some government officials. For example, the initial press release given by the airforce for the Roswell incident was that they had captured a "flying disc". They later made a correction that it was a weather balloon, but you can see how the government making such statements would cause confusion and add to the mania.
Arnold has suggested his original remarks to the press referred to the motion of a saucer skipping across water rather than the shape too; his original report showed a semicircular front and triangular tail
His measurements could’ve been wrong, it’s nearly impossible to accurately measure distance and size in the air, using a tachometer to estimate speed is rather inaccurate under best conditions.
In 1947 your cockpit would likely not even have a true airspeed indicator, there would be no ground speed indicators, no radar nor any other electro optical ranging devices.
Whilst not supersonic it’s quite possible that he could’ve encountered one of these too or another flying wing variant.
This quite frankly more plausible than aliens as an explanation, the time frame of the sighting matches the period
during which the USAF was exploring a lot of flying wing designs and that it was also the first time that jet powered aircraft began to appear and when turboprops were reaching nearly transonic speeded.
So overall it’s very likely that what he saw was an experimental aircraft that was much faster than any aircraft that he encountered in the past and the slightest of errors in the estimation of size and range would have pushed any airspeed calculation into the supersonic range.
I dunno, the flying saucer / alien stuff is kind of fun to watch people go nuts over and pretty harmless. I think a Goodyear blimp was mistaken recently for aliens too:
I take the meaning to be "unidentified to the general public, perhaps identified or speculated about in classified reports that have not yet been shared with Congress".
I saw a video (that I can't currently find) of Feynman explaining this once.
The US government had a classified program that suspended 1940s saucer microphones from a balloon at a height in the atmosphere that would allow them to listen for Soviet atomic tests.
The balloon crashes and some reporters are out sniffing around. Someone with loose lips lets slip that it was a flying saucer. You can imagine what the artist's rendition based on that description looked like.
Then, since the program was classified, the official explanation becomes that it was a weather balloon or something, and a conspiracy theory is born.