Amazon, 2023; ISBN: 9798862476095
There is a view of religious, spiritual – and, by extension, anomalous – experiencing that has been around for nigh-on fifty years and which goes by various names. Of these names, constructivism is one. In essence, constructivists claim that experiences such as those undergone by mystics are not just shaped by language, culture, and expectation but somehow created – or constructed – by these things. This is a popular view, particularly within academia where it sits comfortably within a prevailing ethos that often champions both diversity and variety of experience (it tends to rule out ‘common core’ theories of various ‘types’ of religious experience, for example) and a reductionistic view of anything ‘supernatural’ or ‘anomalistic.’
I thought of the constructivist attitude to anomalistic phenomena throughout my reading of Chris Aubeck’s Saucers. Specifically: of whether or not his thesis throughout this book lent support to the view or not. And herein hangs a tale…
In fact, there really is no way to review Aubeck’s fascinating study without providing the story with which it begins. Which, in essence, is this: on June 24th 1947, businessman and aviator Kenneth Arnold was flying his CallAir A-2 aeroplane near Mount Rainier, Washington. At approximately 10,000 feet he saw nine shining objects moving erratically between the mountain peaks, estimating their velocity at an incredible 1,700 miles per hour. The objects were nothing he could identify and reading his earliest accounts of his curious aerial ‘encounter’ gives the distinct impression that he was troubled by what he saw: not least because the ‘craft’ had no tails and resembled nothing he’d ever seen. Once landed in Yakima he related what he’d observed to a friend and the story quickly reached the press. Somehow – and in a crucial sense this is the essence of the book – the phrase ‘flying saucer’ found its way into the ensuing press furore and the term itself was born.
Except, as Aubeck shows, the process wasn’t anywhere near as straightforward as this and as he attempts to peel back the layers underlying the origin and rapid spread of ‘flying saucer’ we discover not what Arnold saw – it doesn’t really seem possible to do this – but, rather, where the term was actually ‘birthed’ and why it came to proliferate so quickly and so widely. In fact, towards the middle of the book there’s a real surprise regarding the origin of the term which we’ll come to shortly.
Aubeck leaves the reader in little doubt that Arnold’s sighting, and its immediate aftermath, did much to lead to the ubiquity of the term ‘flying saucer.’ But pre-1947, he asserts, the saucer shape of UFOs was more-or-less non-existent and post-1980 has appeared in only 5.9% of sighting reports to date: a percentage surpassed by lights, circles, triangles, fireballs, ‘unknown’ and ‘other.’ Various databases are presented and analysed to demonstrate this, including one which currently houses no fewer than 146,000 reports. Hence, it seems, ‘flying saucer’ as a descriptor appeared relatively late on the UFO ‘scene’, shone brightly for a few decades, and had pretty much gone by 1980. ‘To put it into perspective,’ writes Aubeck, ‘that’s shorter than the music career of the Rolling Stones to date.’
Conventional UFOlogical wisdom has long had it that ‘flying saucer’ arose because a journalist misheard (or misquoted) Arnold: that Arnold was denoting motion when he used ‘saucer’ – as in a saucer’s motion when it skips, stone-like, across water – but that this became later transmuted into a description of the objects’ shapes. Hence the term’s origin was in a kind of ‘error’ which then dictated the detail – certainly the shape – of subsequently-sighted UFOs. Aubeck’s book shows this to be something of a simplification and herein lies its big surprise. For as the author demonstrates convincingly and at length, ‘flying saucer’, in fact, originated in the 1880s as a term to denote the small circular targets used in trap and clay pigeon shooting. By 1900 the term had spread and it continued to do so right up to the late 1930s and early 40s when shooting sports were suspended. Yet even here the descriptor showed resilience: the term being used to denote the targets used for gunnery practice during the war. Only by the mid-1950s did it stop being used within the shooting context, and this because its meaning had been transferred to the rapidly-proliferating body of UFO reports.
In parallel with this process of descriptor ‘evolution’, the early decades of the twentieth century saw a rapid permeation of popular culture by disc-shaped, unusual, craft: most markedly in novels, short stories, ‘pulp’ magazines and other sources of speculative fiction. Further, and as part of this, crucial additional UFO motifs from within later flying saucer lore such as trips through space and encounters with aliens featured prominently.
In sum: fiction preceded fact. As Aubeck asserts: ‘For those interested in the history of UFOs, this continuity between speculative fiction and later eyewitness testimony should prove thought-provoking. It’s like a chicken and egg situation, except in this case we know which came first.’
There’s more to Aubeck’s book even than this but you get the gist. It’s not about whether or not these craft actually exist, or even about what Arnold saw. Instead, it’s all about…well, the taking shape of a shape. And herein lies the constructivist rub. Because, in ways analogous to those of the constructivists before him, Aubeck too seems to be arguing strongly that cultural-linguistic expectation did more than simply shape a pre-existing, pre-linguistic phenomenon. Instead it went further than this. So, as regards the preponderance of disc-shaped craft in the various forms of popular Western speculative fiction of the early twentieth-century, he writes: ‘There was no precedent for the phenomena they portrayed.’ In other words: popular culture created the flying saucer. Or constructed it, if you prefer. Ex nihilo.
Aubeck provides copious illustrations throughout this extremely well-produced book as he sets about proving his points. This is necessary because flying saucers were quintessentially visual phenomena but it also serves to reinforce those self-same points. It’s one thing to be told that ‘flying saucers’ as a term existed before late-June 1947, quite another to be shown page after page of actual headlines spanning several decades prior to this which absolutely prove it.
Succour for constructivists, then? Support from a most unlikely quarter? Well, not quite. Taken on its own merits, Saucers makes a compelling case: at least in places. But it raises crucial questions whilst begging a fair few also. On the one hand, it appears that in the case of flying saucers expectation created at least one crucial detail of experience: shape. Not in Arnold’s own case, however. He drew something akin to a bat or boomerang shape and steadfastly denied that he’d seen saucer shapes thereafter. Ufological history also shows that by the 1990s flying triangles were being sighted in considerable numbers: particularly in Europe. Might this morph from saucer shape to triangle shape provide a good way of testing Aubeck’s contentions in Saucers? On the surface at least, it is not clear that triangles had assumed anything like the potency or ubiquity as a pre-internet ‘meme’ by the 1990s comparable to that of saucers by the late-1940s. There is at the very least the opportunity for a ‘test’ study here.
I was also struck throughout my reading of Saucers by the overall complexity of Aubeck’s analysis. It might be argued that this was necessitated because societal and cultural processes are themselves complex. However, those committed to the use of Occam’s Razor for the understanding of anomalous phenomena might want to point to something simpler: that the objects themselves, perhaps, might have undergone a process of willed and deliberate shapeshifting. Much is made in some quarters of the tricksterish nature of many Fortean phenomena and, as is commonly acknowledged, tricksters are shapeshifters par excellence. Might we be being presented with another example of their wily ways here?
Finally, and regardless of how Aubeck’s conclusions might be viewed, even the briefest examination of the Ufological literature as it has unfolded over many decades reveals the inescapable fact that something has been repeatedly seen by witnesses: in many cases something with no discernible conventional explanation. Cultural-linguistic expectation might indeed ‘clothe’ this. But it surely doesn’t entirely create it. Particularly in that significant number of high strangeness cases where, having no concepts whatsoever on which to ‘hang’ their experiences, subjects actually do not know what it is that they have encountered – often experiencing extreme anxiety as a result. The October 1973 Pascagoula ‘abduction’ is a case in point but examples are legion.
The constructivist hypothesis with regard to religious and spiritual experiencing might well go further than Aubeck goes in the case of UFOs in Saucers. But the potential for the application of his analysis to the very different realm of religious and spiritual experience is at least theoretically there. As above, so within, perhaps. Regardless: those seeking to build bridges between the wide variety of phenomena within the equally wide field of anomalistics might well find much to ponder in Aubeck’s excellent work.
This review first appeared in De Numine, Issue 77, Autumn 2024, pp. 33-5