Cultural Factors and Flying Saucer Beings

When flying saucers – the hard metal kind (or so they appeared to be) – started landing in the late 1940s, the 1950s, and 1960s, debarking (usually) little beings, the appearances centered in Europe: Italy, France, Belgium, Spain….

The Rosa Lotti encounter [Italy, 1954], pictured above, represents the beings generally reported.

Patrick Huyghe recounts an episode of 1947 [in his Field Guide to Extraterrestrials, Avon, 1996, Page 38] in Villa Santina, Italy where two “little green men” accosted a professor of geology, Rapuzzi Johannis.



In North America, beings emerging from saucers were rather normal looking in the contactee stories, which can be discounted we think.

More reliable accounts described monster-like beings [Flatwoods, West Virginia, 1952] or goblin-like creatures [Kelly Kentucky, 1955].



South America, meanwhile, was reporting creatures with animal features, usually fur and/or fangs [Caracas, Venezuela, 1954], with several animal-like beings showing up in the 1970s.

Russian encounters had descriptions that likened the creatures to robots, usually tall in stature [Voronezh, Russia, 1989] which was antedated by a similar 10 foot tall, one-eyed being encountered in the Minas Gerais State of Brazil (the same area where Villas Boas had his CIA encounter) in 1963.



Nordic encounters [such as that in Imjärvi Mikkeli, Finland, 1970] indicated short beings (3 feet or so) with features that simulated an ice-elf.



The small, gray humanoids appeared after the 1961 Betty/Barney Hill episode, but those seem, to us, to be copy-cat descriptions, whereas the former and later encounters appear to be bona fide, at least in the recounting.



Huyghe reports in his book [above] a 1951 encounter in Salzburg, Austria that resembles the Higdon account (covered here previously) and an interesting report [Page 66, from Jenny Randles’ “Alien Contacts and Abductions,” 1994]] that took place in 1896 in Lodi, California, where three 6 foot-tall, delicate, strangely beautiful beings were encountered by two reputable witnesses.



Huyghe also gives pages to inanimate objects, mechanical in nature, from various sources that appeared emerging from UFOs and flying saucers for the time-frame of 1947-1977 but mostly in the 1950s.

Insect-like creatures have also been reported [Cooksville, Maryland, 1973] along with reptilian beings [Marzano, Genoa, Italy, 1978 and Mount Vernon, Missouri, 1983] plus amphibian creatures [South Ashburnham, Massachusetts, 1967 and Orland Park, Illinois, 1951].



The Pascagoula, Mississippi Hickson/Parker encounter of 1973, with elephant-skinned, robotic-like beings strikes us as bogus or hallucinatory, but that’s only a gut-feeling; Hickson acted as if in a transitional mental state that influenced his buddy, Parker much in the way that Betty Hill influenced Barney Hill in his 1961 account.



British episodes [such as that in Rowley Regis, West Midlands, England, 1979] often mimic fairy stories that are and have been ubiquitous in the British Isles for many years going back to the Middle Ages, and seem to represent, à la Jacques Vallee, something other than alien, extraterrestrial encounters.



We feel that an anthropological-sociological scrutiny of such reports might provide a clue to one aspect of the UFO phenomena – the creature element(s).

That is, do cultures and societies see flying saucers, UFOs, and such creatures as those listed above in ways that are skewed by their environments and societal histories?

This seems to be an area of ufological study that may be fecund with interesting insight(s) and information.