Jason Colavito has written a fascinating post entitled, “Documents Detail the FBI’s Theory That Science Fiction Editor Ray Palmer Helped Create the Flying Saucer Myth.” It’s well worth your time.

No one would deny that, in the mid-20th century, there were many perplexing sightings of UFOs — unidentified flying objects. But many, including me, would say the jury is still way out there that such things were alien. For starters, you need to know if aliens exist before making them the cause of such things. You can’t use one unknown (“are there aliens?”) as evidence for a second unknown (“what’s that weird thing in the sky?”). But very early on the narrative surrounding UFO sightings became about aliens visiting earth.

Colavito has produced research that ties the ETH (Extraterrestrial Hypothesis) to very terrestrial sources — from the FBI’s declassified UFO documents. After giving us the overview of what he discovered, Colavito ends his post this way:

The long and short of it is that the FBI uncovered the secret origins of the first flying saucer flap and discovered that Ray Palmer was orchestrating the creation of a space invasion, and they did nothing with that information, letting the Air Force twist in the wind and letting the myth of space alien invasion grow mostly out of petty bureaucratic power struggles.