"The human imagination spirals out in all sorts of directions when something like the space race radically stimulates it. "Interest in flying saucers shot up around the same moment it became plausible that humans would visit space," says Katharine Coldiron, the author of the Midnight Movies Monograph guide to one notoriously terrible saucer movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space. One was that the US and the USSR were competing to be the first superpower to put a satellite into orbit: the USSR won with Sputnik 1 in 1957. The nervousness Menzel mentions had several causes. But one thing was certain: saucer-mania had begun. And, just to be open-minded about it, perhaps some of the sightings were of Martians who were hovering over sparsely populated parts of the Earth for the fun of it. Some sightings, says Shail, were of "weather balloons, Zeppelins, cloud formations and experimental aircraft being developed by the US Air Force as part of the Cold War". Some of these reports were clearly hoaxes: it wasn't hard to fake a saucer photograph if you had a hubcap, frisbee or pizza to hand. Soon there were hundreds of other reported sightings – including one of crashed flying-saucer debris in Roswell, New Mexico. The story spread around the globe considerably faster than 1,200 mph. The editor of the East Oregonian newspaper sent this utterly unverifiable story to the Associated Press news service, and on 26 June, Hearst International put out a press release that contained the fateful term "flying saucers". In June 1947, a commercial pilot, Kenneth Arnold, claimed to have seen nine "flying discs" zipping across Washington state in the US at 1,200 mph. But if you flick through copies of Startling Stories, Super Science Stories and other pulp magazines of the period, you'll see that in the first half of the 20th Century, aliens preferred their transport to resemble submarines and airships. Science-fiction artists had drawn circular spacecraft long before that: an early Flash Gordon strip from 1934 features a spinning "squadron of deadly space-gyros". And yet it didn't take off, so to speak, until the 1950s, when the world went flying-saucer crazy. The flying saucer is a design classic – the archetypal Unidentified Flying Object.
RECENT UFO SIGHTINGS SERIES
"By the end of the 1950s," says Andrew Shail, senior lecturer in film at Newcastle University, "that particular shape had become a shorthand for 'spacecraft piloted by beings from another world', available to everyone working in the visual arts." Sure enough, flying saucers have signified mysterious visitors from Mars and beyond in countless films, TV series, novels, comics, and even hit records, from Mulder's I Want To Believe poster in The X-Files TV series to the popular children's picture book, Aliens Love Underpants. Don't Look Up: The stories that reflect our oldest fear Flash Gordon: An erotic sci-fi extravaganza Maybe, just maybe, Nope will be a proper flying-saucer movie – a celebration of one of the most recognisable and spine-tingling shapes in the history of popular culture. Judging by the twists and turns in Peele's previous films, Get Out and Us, it's impossible to say whether its real or fake, whether it's from the Earth or from outer space, but that glimpse of sparkling silver is tantalising. It's only there for a moment i n the trailer for Jordan Peele's new horror film, Nope, but it's definitely there: a flying saucer.
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