December 16, 2017 is a date that is probably unmemorable for most–completely unlike 9/11, or Pearl Harbor.

Yet that day saw a historic rebirth in people’s interest in UFOs. On December 16, 2017, certain military radar videos were leaked to the public, which purported to show recent encounters of Navy jets with unusually shaped, unusually fast-moving aircraft. The New York Times picked up the story and put it out there for all the world to see. Including two of the videos. Here’s one of them.

What you’re seeing is a bajillion-dollar weapons-grade infrared radar system at work. In other words, it’s not the sort of system that will confuse a bird for a plane. That’s not a bird. That’s a something. A UFO. You might have heard the pilot say that this something is flying against the wind which is 120 knots. 120 knots is equivalent to 138 miles per hour, which is the wind speed of a Category 4 hurricane. “These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who reported his sightings from 2015 to the Pentagon and Congress. He told them, “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

These are the days, indeed, of a true UFO renaissance. Did you know that? Even the language of UFOs has been recently revised to “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” or UAPs, to signal the start of a completely new chapter. On May 17, 2022, we saw the first public congressional hearing into UFO sightings in over 50 years. Maybe this is because, the year right before that, in 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a much-anticipated report entitled  “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” It presented 144 events involving UFOs, collected from United States government and military sources from 2004 to 2021. The new report concluded that only one of these 144 events and encounters reported in the past 17 years could be explained. Only one. 

Explained, that is, as normal, non-mysterious sorts of things. Not as things which are honest-to-God mysteries from some other world. But if so: what other world are we talking about? 

What might you say about all of this? What are you bringing to today’s topic of UFOs? Are your shields up? Or perhaps there is some curiosity balanced with deep caution? Might there even be some openness to hearing something new? 

I’m very aware that we are not just any kind of community–we are a Unitarian Universalist community–and so to personalize this strange topic even further, I want to highlight the specific experience of two Unitarian Universalists: Betty and Barney Hill. On the night and early morning of September 19-20 in 1961, Betty and Barney reported an otherworldly experience of being abducted by aliens. This incident would become the first story of alien abduction to receive national attention. It’s one of the most thoroughly researched. It is of extraordinary importance and is a first in many ways. 

If it could happen to those Unitarian Universalists, well…. What does that say about the rest of us? 

Part two of this three-part sermon will focus on the details of the Betty and Barney Hill experience. For the rest of this first part, we are going to take a brief tour of the standard cultural conversation about UFOs before 1961, leading right up to Betty and Barney’s time. As for part three–there, I will offer up some conclusions as well as a perspective that’s quite different from the usual. Hang in there with me, and let’s see if you leave church today with some ideas you might not have considered before…..

So: UFO’s before 1961. Let’s go back 400 years, to 1561 (although we could go back much, much further, and to all seven continents of our planet). 400 years ago, in 1561, a woodcut by Hans Glaser portrays mysterious phenomena in the sky over Nuremberg, Germany. 

Fast forward 317 years, and cross the ocean, to North America in 1878. We see an article in the Denison (Texas) Daily News from 1878. It’s entitled “A Strange Phenomenon.” It tells the story of a remarkable thing one Mr. John Martin saw in the sky. I quote: “The peculiar shape, and the seeming velocity with which the object seemed to approach…” 

39 years later, we go back across the ocean and land in Portugal. At Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, something happened that has since been called the Miracle of the Sun. Wikipedia tells a part of this story: “Newspapers published testimony from witnesses who said that they had seen extraordinary solar activity, such as the Sun appearing to ‘dance’ or zig-zag in the sky, careen towards the Earth, or emit multicolored light and radiant colors. According to these reports, the event lasted approximately ten minutes.” 30,000 people experienced this UFO. 

There is, in short, nothing new about strange objects in the sky. And, it’s also important to see that the cultural conversation about UFOs before the time of the Betty and Barney Hill incident wouldn’t stay at the level of the purportedly factual. Fiction has been a hugely important venue for exploring questions about UFOs. Like this question: are they friend or foe? 

1938’s famous War of the Worlds radio play shocked Americans. People thought it was really happening–that aliens from Mars had come to take over the Earth. 

One aspect of the cultural conversation around UFOs, then, has been people trying to communicate what they take to be fact, side-by-side with creative types engaged in fictional explorations of what UFOs might mean. 

Fact: the very common WWII observation of Axis and Allied pilots, of strange lights following their aircraft. These strange lights were eventually named “foo fighters.” 

Fact: on June 24, 1947, came a truly watershed event: 

A civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold described seeing “a group of bat-like aircraft flying in formation at high speeds” near Mount Rainier in Washington state. He said that they were “moving like a saucer would if skipped across water.” One week after this news story went out, a Gallup poll asked Americans if they knew about UFOs. 90% of Americans had already heard the term. The news traveled like wildfire. 

Here is an artist’s rendition of what Arnold saw: 

Note carefully that Arnold described what he saw as “a group of bat-like aircraft flying in formation at high speeds.” He did not see any round, saucer-like objects. But he also said that they were “moving like a saucer would if skipped across water.” If reporters had been more careful, today we might know UFOs as “Unidentified Flying Bats” or “Unidentified Flying Blades.” But a reporter misquoted Arnold and emphasized the round, saucer image and, ever after, we’ve been talking about flying “saucers.” 

Did you know that? How the language of flying saucers is actually a mistake? 

But it caught on. Fact: Less than a month after the Kenneth Arnold sighting, on July 6, 1947, the Roswell incident happened.

The story was that a UFO crashed and UFO hardware, together with dead alien occupants, had been recovered by the military. Three days later, the Army debunked that that had actually happened. 

It was just an air balloon that had crashed. Nothing to see here, folks. Not fact, but fiction….

And, Americans mostly believed the Army. Very reasonably so, when hoaxes at the time were extremely common. Here is a story from just days after the whole Roswell incident: July 12, 1947, at Twin Falls, Idaho

Teenagers had fabricated a UFO from the parts of a juke-box. They got in trouble with no less than the FBI, the Army, and the police. (I’ll bet their parents grounded them for a long, long time, too.)

All this brings up yet another aspect to the UFO cultural conversation: Is the purported UFO story a hoax, or is it about something that really happened? And, if the thing really happened, will the authorities allow the truth to be known, or will it become an “X File”? Will all the aggressive denial and debunking just be a cover for people in power not wanting the world to know? 

Meanwhile, the “is it friend or foe?” theme in fiction continued to play on: 

In 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, an alien lands in Washington, D.C. and tells the people of Earth that they must live peacefully or be destroyed as a danger to other planets. I’d call this tough love. Aliens as friendly, but also as holding earthlings accountable. 

By 1959, fictional takes on UFOs were getting extravagant. Here’s an interesting version of “aliens are our enemies”:

By 1961, the idea of UFOs and aliens had so thoroughly permeated American life that Disneyland, on August 6, 1961, opened up a new ride to the public–a flying saucer ride: 

Only one month later after this, on September 19, 1961, what the world has come to know as the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction happened. Here they are: Betty and Barney Hill.  

An interracial couple, which of course brought them plenty of challenges. Betty and Barney were active members of their Portsmouth, New Hampshire church, as social justice activists and religious educators. I think Barney served as an usher for many years as well. They were also upstanding citizens in their New Hampshire community; they were middle-class; they were well respected. Until the event, they didn’t believe any such nonsense as UFOs. They thought science fiction was foolish and stayed away from the films and didn’t read the books. 

They just weren’t the alien abductee type….

But as the saying goes: “Humans plan and God laughs.” 

Here is something Barney drew after the event–some of what he saw: 

Was the incident real? Was it fictional? 

Aliens as friendly? Aliens as foes? 

Would their story be honored? Or would the authorities try to debunk it no matter how solid the evidence? 

Stay with me for Part 2.