Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

There’s so much amazing about this “Miss Flying Saucer” artwork by Bill Randall, but let’s stick with what makes us psychosocial pelicanists cheer. You see, the sexy space cadet is on top of an actual saucer. Not an alien spaceship, but a plain simple, pink saucer dinnerware. It’s either a giant saucer, or Miss Flying Saucer is a tiny fairy-like being. Either way, that makes psychosocial pelicanists happy.

Why, would one ask. Is it a fetish of sorts? Not exactly. This has in fact a lot to say about the origin of ufology and in particular, the term “flying saucer”.

In “Saucer Expansion” Martin Kottmeyer remarks how, surprisingly, most reports from the 1947 wave of flying saucers in Canada and the USA had them of a very small size, of 3 feet or less. In the graphic above, Kottmeyer illustrates how the reported size for flying saucers, which would soon be called UFOs, increased gradually, and nowadays it’s actually rare to read description of very tiny objects.

Why, would one ask. Is it an alien fashion of sorts? Probably not. Kottmeyer quotes Ed Stewart suggestion that “Saucer descriptions in the news stories made reference to table top cups and saucers which could have implanted a small size in the readers mind when they read the initial stories.”

That is, people were seeing actual flying dinnerware in the sky. Only with later sci-fi movies which depicted large (Day Earth Stood Still) and then gigantic (Close Encounters) alien spaceships would people come to report larger UFOs.

There’s corroborating evidence for this psychosocial pelicanist interpretation. In Brazil, the term “flying saucer” was translated as “disco voador”, or “flying disk”, no one here speaks in terms of dinnerware when referring to aliens. On the other hand, “flying disk” would immediately remind people of the late 1940s and early 1950s of vinyl records.

And that’s exactly what they reported. Historian Rodolpho Gauthier also collected some news clippings of the first UFO waves in Brazil, and though no detailed statistical analysis was conducted, from Gauthier’s work one can find several references to small flying disks and even funny cartoons comparing flying disks with small vinyl records thrown in the air.

Well, back to Miss Flying Saucer. Unfortunately I couldn’t find when exactly did Bill Randall created that amazing illustration, the closest was this commentary from The Pinup Blog (NSFW) that “I could only guess that these pinups were painted between 1946 and the 1960’s”.

Here’s one prediction from the Psychosocial Hypothesis: given that Randall referenced an actual saucer, I would guess it was made shortly after Arnold’s sighting in 1947 and before 1952, when the term UFO would enter the mainstream.

Whatever flies in the sky, whether there are aliens visiting us or not, everything that we see, we see through our cultural lenses. Those can be quite funny just a few decades later. A few decades from now, people may laugh about our reports of giant spaceships.

Do not miss: “Saucer Expansion” by Martin Kottmeyer. [via x-ray delta one on flickr]

From Ufocasebook:

“Unknown Flying Object Captured in Hawthorne, Florida, Photograph

Hawthorne, Florida – 04-25-10 – Sunday morning we awoke at 8 AM, and made ourselves some coffee and walked down to the creek, which was only a few yards away from our cabin, the witness stated. I started taking pictures of our surroundings and some mirrored reflections of some cypress trees in the water. After we arrived back home in Jacksonville, we were anxious to view the over 400 photos we took during our vacation. When I took this photo I was drawn to the reflection in the water and did not notice anything unusual until I uploaded it to my computer.

This photograph is the only one that shows something abnormal.”

Check the link for the full image. Now, you will notice that it’s not only the UFO that looks strange. Then you may realize the report mentions that the photo in fact depicts mirrored reflections in the water.

Then you may want to flip the image. Then you may immediately recognize what this UFO is.

The answer, after the jump.

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They are being promoted as “the most significant UFO videos of all time”, including “two extraterrestrials [that] were caught on tape in Istanbul”. And perhaps the most amazing thing, or the dead giveaway, is that those videos have been captured not once, but several times since 2007.

Summer and springtime in Turkey, 2007, 2008 and 2009, and there comes a man named Yalcin Yalman with more of these “most significant UFO videos of all time”.

Now, Chilean researcher Andrés Duarte publishes an excellent analysis of the Kumburgaz videos and comes to the conclusion that they must be mainly of yacht side windows reflecting light at night: Los ovnis de Kumburgaz son ventanas de lanchas.

Stay with us for a summary in English of Duarte’s analysis.

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A rare record of an unidentified object hovering over a town in Belgium in 1954 was recently released in compliance with the disclosure legislation.

The video was uploaded by “barzolff814”, who must be better known as David Nicolas, or perhaps best known as the French CGI wizard who in 2007 created the infamous “Caribbean UFOs”.

That is, this Belgium footage is obviously another of his impressive digital creations. Coming soon to another Youtube account near you, without attribution to the source, promoted as the real thing. [via Scepticisme Scientifique]

Just look at the image above: from a strictly fictional point of view, could there be something cooler than Nazi flying saucers fighting at the Second World War? Nazis, they are evil, and now they have flying saucers!

Besides a nice upcoming CGI comedy movie, this is something that could be seen as a background story for a (good) Indiana Jones movie, and in fact, LucasFilm Games sold “Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe” at the beginning of the 1990s – it didn’t include Nazi flying saucers, but it had a Horten flying wing (which was recently recreated, by the way).

My own interest for ufology started when I was young(er) and first read these wild tales of incredible Nazi flying disks. There are even scale models for sale. I actually believed the stories.

Because, you see, stories and rumours about flying saucers from the evil Nazis are promoted as real fact by not so few. You can read all about how Hitler ran away to the South Pole and the Nazis visited Mars on Kevin McClure’s comprehensive research on the subject published on Magonia, or his short summary and update published on 2003 at ForteanTimes.

Now fellow Maurizio Verga has published an amazing article which adds a lot of information to the subject, especially at its origins. The article is in Italian – here’s an automated English translation – but it’s well worth the effort to understand it even if you don’t quite get the language (like me).

One of the most interesting finds by Verga in my opinion is the image at the top of this post. The comment that it would be something very cool from a fictional point of view had a reason: pay attention to the signature.

The illustration comes from Amazing Stories, published in July 1943. That’s four years before the start of the modern obsession with flying saucers, and therefore way before anyone associated them with Nazis, much less Aliens.

As Verga remarks, in the 1950s that exact scene – a flying saucer fighting a squadron of Superfortress Flying Fortresses (thanks Craig!)– would be depicted as a supposedly real event over Schweinfurt in 1944.

[Above, art by Daniele Sabatini, 1998. Compare it with the 1943 Amazing Stories illustration]

It’s not news to the psychosocial theorist that all and every allegedly real element from ufology can be found years before in science fiction. Some examples, however, can be quite impressive, and the Amazing Stories illustration foretelling later Nazi UFOs tales is clearly one of them.

Nazi UFOs are not just a curious sub-area of ufology. At the early years of the field, the idea that flying saucers were very terrestrial secret weapons was one of the most popular explanation for them. Before they were Alien, they were Nazi.

Aliens didn’t even made it to the opinion poll, as the extraterrestrial hypothesis would only be widely popularized in 1950 by Donald Keyhoe.

Now, another interesting bit, Verga also remarks how even Keyhoe mentioned the story he heard that flying saucers were real… British aircraft, captured from the Nazis after the war. They were later transferred to Australia and also Canada, the story went.

Nazi UFOs: an idea so cool that it quickly jumped from Amazing Stories to… amazing stories as told by not quite amazing, and not at all original, mystery sellers.

Be sure to check Verga’s work: WikiUFO, UFO nazisti: leggende dischi volanti tedeschi Nazi UFOs saucers.