Extraterrestrials, Part I: Before the Flying Saucer — Strange Visitors Before 1950

In March 1639, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop recorded something strange in his journal.

According to Winthrop, a respected man named James Everell and two companions were traveling by boat on the Muddy River near Boston when they saw a bright light in the night sky. At times it appeared stationary. At others it moved rapidly between their position and the nearby village of Charlestown, a distance Winthrop estimated at roughly two miles. The men watched the light for two or three hours.

Then something even stranger happened. When the light finally disappeared, the men discovered that their boat was about a mile from where they thought they had been. Winthrop wrote that the boat had somehow moved against the tide, although the men apparently had no memory of traveling that distance.

Five years later, Winthrop recorded another strange aerial event near Boston. This time witnesses reportedly saw a light resembling the moon rise from the water, join another light and move through the sky before disappearing.

Were colonists in seventeenth-century Massachusetts watching UFOs?

Maybe. But asking the question that way creates a problem because the people watching those lights wouldn't have known what a UFO was. They lived centuries before airplanes, satellites, rockets or science fiction, and nearly three hundred years before anyone used the phrase “flying saucer.” Whatever they saw, they interpreted it through the world they knew.

And that's where our story begins.

Before We Called Them Aliens

Human beings have been reporting strange things in the sky for thousands of years.

Ancient Greek and Roman writers recorded unusual lights, fiery objects, shields and other phenomena overhead. Some accounts sound tantalizingly modern when removed from their historical context, which has encouraged generations of UFO writers to reinterpret them as ancient spacecraft.

We need to be careful with that.

Ancient chroniclers may not have been writing UFO reports. They recorded comets, meteors, atmospheric phenomena and religious omens alongside wars, political events and natural disasters. A Roman writer describing a “fiery shield” in the sky wasn't necessarily describing a metallic disc-shaped spacecraft any more than someone calling a meteor a “falling star” today believes an actual star has fallen from space.

Translations complicate things further. A dramatic modern English phrase may not perfectly capture what an ancient writer meant, and stories copied repeatedly over centuries can accumulate details or lose their original context. Still, there's something worth noticing.

Long before spaceships entered popular culture, people were already looking upward and occasionally seeing things they couldn't explain.

When the Sky Was Trying to Tell Us Something

One of the strangest surviving examples comes from Nuremberg, Germany, in 1561.

On the morning of April 14, residents reportedly observed an extraordinary celestial display involving numerous shapes in the sky. A famous broadsheet created by printer Hans Glaser depicted spheres, crosses, cylinders and other objects appearing around the sun, seemingly moving or interacting with one another before some fell toward the ground.

Modern UFO enthusiasts sometimes describe the event as an aerial battle between extraterrestrial spacecraft.

That's certainly the most exciting interpretation, but we are also looking at the image through a modern lens. (FYI - I still think it was a UFO battle!)

Glaser lived in a society where unusual celestial events could be interpreted as divine warnings. His broadsheet explicitly treated the phenomenon as a sign from God encouraging people to repent, which tells us something important about how witnesses understood what they were seeing.

Atmospheric optics such as sun dogs and ice-crystal halos have been proposed as possible explanations. Historians have also cautioned against treating the artwork as though it were a literal photograph of the event. The illustration represents a sixteenth-century interpretation of something unusual in the sky, not objective instrumentation.

A few years later, in 1566, residents of Basel, Switzerland reportedly observed another series of strange celestial phenomena, including numerous dark spheres moving through the sky. Once again, the event was recorded in a contemporary broadsheet and interpreted largely through the religious worldview of the period.

Were these atmospheric phenomena, astronomical events, exaggerated reports or something genuinely unknown? We can't know with certainty.

Strange Lights in Colonial America

By the time John Winthrop recorded the strange lights near Boston in 1639 and 1644, Europeans had begun settling permanently in North America, but the basic framework for interpreting unusual aerial phenomena remained similar. A mysterious light might be understood as a religious sign, an unusual natural event or simply something beyond explanation. The idea that technologically advanced beings from another planet might be flying machines through Earth's atmosphere wasn't part of the cultural vocabulary.

Winthrop's 1639 account is especially intriguing because of the reported movement of the boat. Modern readers familiar with UFO literature may immediately notice similarities to later stories involving “missing time” or unexplained displacement.

That's interesting, but we shouldn't retrofit a twentieth-century alien-abduction narrative onto a seventeenth-century journal entry. There are plenty of ordinary possibilities. The men were traveling at night, apparently focused on an unusual light for hours, and may simply have misjudged their location or the movement of their boat. Winthrop himself didn't suggest extraterrestrials, time distortion or anything resembling modern abduction mythology.

What his journal does give us is something much more useful: evidence that people were recording genuinely puzzling aerial experiences centuries before flying saucers became part of popular culture. And countless experiences probably never made it onto paper.

The Historical Blind Spot

For most of human history, information traveled slowly and record keeping was inconsistent.

A farmer in 1700 could see something bizarre over his field, tell his family and neighbors about it, and leave absolutely no historical trace. Even if someone wrote the story down, the document could easily disappear through fire, war, weather, neglect or simple decay. And... literacy itself limited what survived.

That creates a major problem whenever someone tries to construct a neat timeline of unexplained aerial phenomena. The surviving reports aren't necessarily representative of how often people saw strange things. They're simply the tiny fraction that happened to be recorded and preserved.

There's another problem: vocabulary.

Today, if a silent triangular object crossed the night sky, a witness could immediately reach for terms like UFO, UAP, spacecraft, drone, stealth aircraft or alien. Someone seeing the same inexplicable phenomenon three hundred years ago would have described it using completely different concepts and may have shrugged it off to weird natural events. People understood that there was a lot that we did not know about a lot of things.

But it does mean that if something unusual really has been visiting our skies for centuries, we shouldn't necessarily expect old reports to sound like modern UFO reports. They would sound like the people who wrote them.

Science Gives the Visitors Somewhere to Live

For most of history, the idea of intelligent beings living on other worlds belonged primarily to philosophy, theology and speculation. During the nineteenth century, that began to change. Astronomy was improving rapidly. Telescopes became more powerful, planets were mapped in greater detail, and scientists increasingly treated other worlds as physical places rather than mysterious lights moving through the heavens.

Mars became particularly important.

In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped linear features on the Martian surface that he called canali, meaning channels. English translations frequently rendered the word as “canals,” which carried a much stronger implication of artificial construction.

American astronomer Percival Lowell took the idea much further. Beginning in the 1890s, Lowell observed Mars from his observatory in Arizona and became convinced that the planet contained an enormous network of canals. He theorized that an intelligent Martian civilization might have constructed them to transport water from the planet's polar regions across an increasingly dry world.

The canals weren't real. Improvements in astronomical observation eventually demonstrated that the apparent lines were largely optical and observational artifacts. But culturally, the damage—or perhaps the fun—had already been done.

Mars now had engineers.

When the Martians Moved In

Lowell wasn't alone in wondering whether Mars might harbor intelligent life.

By the late nineteenth century, serious scientists openly discussed the possibility of inhabited worlds. Newspapers reported astronomical discoveries to an increasingly literate public, while fiction writers began imagining what extraterrestrial civilizations might look like.

Then H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898. Wells didn't invent the idea of extraterrestrial life, but his Martian invasion helped establish something enormously important in popular culture: beings from another planet could possess advanced technology, travel to Earth and interact with humanity.

The heavens were changing. For ancient people, strange things in the sky might have represented gods or omens. For medieval Europeans, they could be divine signs. By the end of the nineteenth century, another possibility had entered the conversation.

Maybe somebody lived up there... And if somebody lived up there, perhaps they could come down here.

The Great Mystery Airship Wave

Just as the idea of technologically advanced civilizations elsewhere was becoming plausible to the public, Americans began reporting mysterious machines flying overhead.

The Great Airship Wave of 1896–1897 began prominently in California before reports spread across much of the United States. Witnesses described lights and strange craft traveling through the night sky, sometimes with wings, propellers, searchlights or cigar-shaped bodies. The timing was remarkable. The Wright Brothers wouldn't achieve their famous powered flight until 1903.

Yet witnesses several years earlier were already describing mysterious aircraft capable of traveling significant distances and remaining aloft for extended periods. Newspapers eagerly reported the sightings, and speculation centered largely on the possibility that an unknown inventor had secretly developed a revolutionary flying machine.

Some stories went considerably further. Witnesses occasionally claimed to have encountered the airship's occupants, who were usually described as surprisingly human. In many accounts, the mysterious aviators explained that they were inventors testing secret technology and would reveal themselves to the world when the time was right.

Americans were seeing mysterious flying machines before airplanes existed, but the dominant explanation wasn't extraterrestrial visitation. The witnesses interpreted the mystery using technology that seemed just barely beyond the horizon.

The unknown had changed costumes again.

The Aurora Crash

Then came one of the strangest stories of the entire airship era.

On April 19, 1897, the Dallas Morning News published a report from the small town of Aurora, Texas claiming that one of the mysterious airships had crashed into a windmill on the property of Judge J.S. Proctor. According to the newspaper account, the craft exploded and scattered debris across the property. The pilot was killed, and although the body was badly damaged, a local man reportedly concluded that the unfortunate aviator was “not an inhabitant of this world.” The remains were supposedly buried in the Aurora cemetery.

Read through modern eyes, and this sounds astonishingly similar to a twentieth-century UFO crash story: strange aircraft, nonhuman pilot, wreckage and mysterious burial. But... The Aurora story has almost every hallmark of a nineteenth-century newspaper hoax. No verified wreckage survives, no alien body has been produced, and the original story was written with the sort of tongue-in-cheek sensationalism common to newspapers of the period. Later investigations have failed to produce convincing physical evidence that anything unusual crashed there. Hmm, sounds a little Roswellian to me. 🤔

Still, Aurora is fascinating because of its timing. This was 1897, fifty years before Roswell, and an American newspaper was already telling readers about a mysterious flying machine that crashed in the Southwest and left behind the body of a pilot who wasn't from Earth.

The story was probably fiction. Or a cover up. (Oops, did I say that?)

Technology Keeps Catching Up

Within a few years, human technology began overtaking the mystery airships.

The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Aviation developed rapidly afterward, and World War I transformed airplanes from fragile experimental machines into military weapons capable of reconnaissance, bombing and aerial combat. Isn't it great that we can take something from a wonderful concept like mankind FLYING to an instrument of war in just 20 years or so? But I digress.

Something interesting happened to reports of strange objects in the sky as our own aircraft became more sophisticated. The mysteries became more sophisticated too. People no longer needed to imagine unknown inventors piloting secret airships because real airplanes now filled the skies. As aviation advanced, unusual aerial reports increasingly involved objects that appeared faster, more maneuverable or simply stranger than conventional aircraft.

It is true that one of the recurring puzzles surrounding the UFO phenomenon is our descriptions of the unknown often seem to resemble technology just beyond whatever humanity currently understands. Perhaps that's because witnesses interpret ambiguous phenomena using familiar ideas. Or perhaps something else has been adapting alongside us.

Foo Fighters

By World War II, pilots were encountering strange things in the sky under circumstances where identifying another aircraft could be a matter of life and death. Beginning particularly in 1944, Allied aircrews operating over Europe reported mysterious lights accompanying their aircraft. The objects were often described as glowing balls—red, orange, white or other colors—that followed planes, maneuvered nearby and sometimes appeared to react to the aircraft's movements.

The pilots called them “foo fighters.” BTW, the image below is BAD-ASS!

Initially, there was an obvious suspect: the Germans. Allied crews understandably worried that they were encountering some new enemy weapon or surveillance technology. German pilots reportedly had their own unexplained aerial encounters, however, and after the war no secret Nazi weapons program emerged that adequately accounted for the phenomenon.

Possible explanations include electrical phenomena such as St. Elmo's fire, ball lightning, astronomical objects, misidentified aircraft and the considerable perceptual challenges of flying combat missions at night.

What makes the foo fighters important is that highly trained military aviators were reporting unusual aerial phenomena before the modern flying-saucer era began. The war ended in 1945.

The strange objects didn't.

The Ghost Rockets

In 1946, another wave of unexplained aerial reports appeared, this time primarily over Scandinavia.

Witnesses described hundreds of mysterious objects crossing the skies over Sweden and neighboring countries. Many appeared elongated or missile-like, leading newspapers to call them “ghost rockets.” The sightings immediately attracted military attention. World War II had ended only a year earlier, and the Soviet Union had captured German scientists and advanced missile technology. Swedish authorities reasonably suspected that the objects might represent Soviet tests of captured V-2 rockets or some new weapon.

Investigations failed to produce a simple answer.

Some sightings were undoubtedly meteors, aircraft and other conventional phenomena. A few reports described objects apparently descending into lakes, prompting searches that failed to recover convincing wreckage. The extraterrestrial explanation existed, but it still wasn't dominant. The world had just entered the missile age, so mysterious objects in the sky were interpreted as mysterious missiles.

Oh boy, THAT was about to change.

June 24, 1947

Businessman and experienced pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State when a bright flash caught his attention. Arnold was helping search for a missing military transport aircraft and initially thought the flash might have come from another airplane. Instead, he reported seeing nine bright objects moving rapidly near the mountains. He tried to estimate their speed by timing their movement between landmarks and concluded that they were traveling far faster than conventional aircraft of the period.

Arnold later described the objects themselves as relatively thin and somewhat crescent or disc-like. More importantly, he described their movement as resembling a saucer skipping across water. Newspapers seized on the description.

The phrase “flying saucer” was born.

Within days, reports of similar objects began pouring in from across the United States. Americans who had previously seen mysterious airships, ghost rockets, strange lights and wartime foo fighters suddenly had a new name for the unknown. They also had a new shape.

The modern UFO era had begun.

And less than two weeks later, something would fall onto a ranch outside a small town in New Mexico. The town was called Roswell.

CONTINUED IN PART II

Interested in other UFO and Extraterrestrial stories? Check out this posts: The Flatwoods Monster

Field Notes: Extraterrestrials — Before the Flying Saucer

📍 LOCATION: Worldwide

👀 EARLIEST REPORTS: Unexplained celestial phenomena have been recorded since antiquity; interpreting them as extraterrestrial encounters is a much more modern development.

🛸 CLASSIFICATION: UAP / Historical Aerial Phenomena / Possible Extraterrestrial Encounters

📜 NOTABLE CASES: Nuremberg (1561), Winthrop's Massachusetts lights (1639 & 1644), Great Mystery Airship Wave (1896–97), Aurora (1897), Foo Fighters (1944–45), Scandinavian Ghost Rockets (1946), Kenneth Arnold (1947)

👽 REPORTED OCCUPANTS: Rare before the twentieth century; 1890s airship occupants were often described as human inventors rather than extraterrestrials.

🔬 EVIDENCE: Historical documents, newspaper reports, military investigations and eyewitness testimony; no verified extraterrestrial artifact or biological evidence.

💀 THREAT LEVEL (1–10): ? — It depend on the witness.

📖 STATUS: Unexplained reports are historically documented. Extraterrestrial origin remains unproven.

🔎 ODDAGEDDON VERDICT: Human beings were reporting strange things in the sky long before flying saucers, but what they believed those things were changed dramatically with culture, science and technology. That leaves us with a fascinating question going into Part II: Did the phenomenon change—or did we?

Hans Glaser's Battle Over Nuremburg, 1561

Mystery airship, newspaper illustration using the McCanns Rogers Park photo 1987

64th Fighter Wing's 415th Night Fighter squadron spot a Foo Fighter.

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