The phrase "flying saucer" was coined in June 1947, with sightings in Washington State of "saucer-shaped objects" over Mount Rainier. The catchphrase entered the national lexicon two weeks later with reports from Roswell, New Mexico, of the "capture" of a flying saucer near the Roswell Army Air Field. Conspiracy theories about government suppression of the existence of UFOs began to percolate as Hollywood's imagination ran wild. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950) was a surprisingly adult treatment of the notion of extraterrestrial visitors, while other films -The Flying Saucer (1950), Man from Planet X (1951), The Thing from Another World (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), Invaders from Mars (1953) - upped the exploitation ante to excite prospective ticket-buyers. Something was in the air in 1956, with the release of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (with special effects by Ray Harryhausen) and Winston Jones' documentary Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers. (Completed that year but unreleased for another three was Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space.) The film chronicles the investigations of Albert Chop, chief of the Pentagon's press section, into UFO sightings and his eventual conversion from skeptical inquirer to true believer. Producer Ivan Tors later created the TV series Flipper -- an otherworldly helper to humanity whose physical appearance is not so dissimilar from the tradition depiction of intergalactic "greys."

By Richard Harland Smith