"We must be cautious of the hubris of the present. When UFOs first appeared in numbers during the great flying saucer wave of 1947, few people made the jump to an extraterrestrial hypothesis.
The subject of this book, Alfred Loedding, is significant because he did eventually lean toward that assumption. Because he played such an instrumental role in the first official Air Force investigation into the phenomena, it is important to analyze the progression of his theories.
For the best part of the summer of 1947 most serious minds studying the flying disc mystery, like Alfred Loedding, considered that a domestic secret project might account for the sightings. After eliminating that possibility, the "foreign origin" option was exhaustively explored. By 1948 foreign origin became a catch word for visitors from outer space, but in 1947 it meant only one thing—Russians. In fact, worries that the Soviet Union may have gleaned a Nazi super weapon at the end of the Second World War remained in the minds of Air Force officials up through 1952.
But by late 1947 some aeronautical engineers, like Alfred Loedding, began to consider that "flying saucers" may represent intelligently controlled machines from another world. Why? What was the mind set in 1947 that could rationalize such a conclusion? What was his perspective? Where was the proof?
It is very difficult with our 1998 view of popular culture to consider a time when there was no extensive set of preconceptions on extraterrestrial life..."
The book is available, free, on the web/internet, and I suggest that some of you newbies (and a few oldies) get your hands on it, to enlighten yourselves about the flying saucer context at the beginning of the modern era of UFOs.
RR
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