Comments on: Guy Hottel Document – UFO Proof?

By: davidsmith

davidsmith — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:30:59 +0000

Can someone point me to a reliable study that compares the content of UFO reports to images from popular culture through the ages?

By: banyan

banyan — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:34:20 +0000

I realize I’m dumb in retrospect, but when I first read “UFO Proof” in the title, I read it to mean that this Hottel document was impervious to UFO’s.

By: BillyJoe7

BillyJoe7 — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:48:31 +0000

eean,

The eyewitness in my post was in fact Kenneth Arnold.
I checked out Steven’s version and it seems correct.

By: HHC

HHC — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:48:18 +0000

Where are the 3 bodies stored if they exist? May I suggest the 3 bodies be produced as evidence for such a claim? If these are not alien bodies, then this is a hoax which the Air Force has in its UFO files.

By: sonic

sonic — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:27:52 +0000

Another explanation as to why the aliens haven’t shown up (this one evolutionary).
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1104.0624v1

By: Tim Farley

Tim Farley — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:44:56 +0000

A better link for that Aztec UFO hoax story is this page over on The Skeptic’s Dictionary:

http://www.skepdic.com/aztec.html

It does mention the Hottel memo.

By: Steven Novella

Steven Novella — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:55:58 +0000

The term “flying saucer” was coined by a journalist reporting on the Kenneth Arnold sighting, who characterized the boomerang-shaped objects as skipping like a saucer.

But the iconic flying saucer shape predates that in science fiction. The image and the term were then merged following the Arnold incident.

By: eean

eean — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:36:44 +0000

@BillyJoe7 are you sure scifi descriptions of flying saucers don’t predate the ‘eyewitnesses’, misquoted or otherwise?

By: taustin

taustin — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 14:49:35 +0000

This isn’t exactly new, either. My understanding is that this memo was declassified in the 70s, and has been fodder for UFO cult books ever since. The only thing new is its addition to the online FBI archive.

Certainly, the memo has been discussed online since the earliest days of the internet, as far back as 1995:

http://cnvi.com/dreamland.htm

http://www.ignaciodarnaude.com/avistamientos_ovnis/UFO%20Crash%20at%20Aztec,a%20Hoax.htm

has an (alleged) account of how the memo came to be:

“What she had was a rumor eight times removed from the source, Silas Newton, that eventually ended up in a memo written to J. Edgar Hoover. Newton told George Koehler about 3-foot tall aliens and their saucer; Koehler told Morley Davies who told Jack Murphy and I. J. van Horn who told Rudy Fick who told the editor of the Wyandotte Echo in Kansas City where it was read by an Air Force agent in the Office of Special Investigations who passed on the story to Guy Hottel of the FBI who sent a memo to his boss (Thomas).”

(Note that, according to this account, the entire thing was an investment fraud that resulted in criminal convictions.)

By: BillyJoe7

BillyJoe7 — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:55:25 +0000

An interesting fact about flying saucers is how this description of the shape of UFOs arose from a misunderstanding about what was reported by an eye witness.

The eye witness used the word “saucer” not to describe the shape of the UFO but the way these UFOs moved – “like saucers skipping across the water”. This mistake by readers of the newspaper reports was the genesis of the archetypical alien craft which persists even to this day.