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The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age

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Dr. Donald Menzel (1901-1976) was an influential and politically well-connected astronomer at Harvard University. However, he also has the distinction of being the first famous UFO "debunker", and he used his contacts within the US government and scientific community to discourage any attempt to treat the UFO phenomenon seriously. In Menzel's view, UFOs were "pseudoscientific nonsense" and a "space-age myth". In 1953 he wrote the first-ever UFO "debunking" book, "Flying Saucers", in which he attempted to provide prosaic explanations for every major UFO sighting since 1947.

In his second UFO Book, "The World of Flying Saucers", Menzel offers new explanations for UFO sightings covered in his 1953 book, and he also covers most of the UFO incidents of the fifties and early sixties. Recent research by UFO historians has revealed that Menzel was actually strangely obsessed with "flying saucers", and also obsessed with humiliating or even threatening anyone who held a different view of UFOs from his own. James Moseley, who has skeptically covered the UFO phenomenon since the fifties, writes in his memoirs that he received playful, detailed drawings from Menzel of "Martians" and UFO "crewmen" cavorting with naked alien girls! Edward Ruppelt, a USAF Captain who supervised the Air Force's famed "Project Blue Book" investigation into the UFO mystery in the early fifties, wrote that in a 1952 meeting Menzel claimed to have "all the answers" regarding the UFO mystery, but when several scientists openly challenged Menzel's conclusions that all UFOs were hoaxes, mirages, or temperature inversions, Menzel at first "hedged his answers" and finally "blew his stack" and stormed out of the room. In 1949 Menzel had his own UFO sighting, which he reported to the Air Force. In his three UFO books, however, Menzel claimed to have "solved" the sighting as a "reflection of the Moon off of haze". However, UFO historian Jerome Clark has argued that Menzel actually changed the facts of his own sighting in order to "explain" it, and that the details of the sighting he gave in his original AF report don't match his descriptions of the incident listed in his books years later.

In "The World Of Flying Saucers" Menzel does create the "blueprint" which would be followed by nearly all UFO debunkers, from the 1960's to the present day. Menzel describes the UFO phenomenon as a "myth of the space age" - much as witches and fairies were the "myths" of earlier historical eras. According to Menzel, all UFO reports are explainable as hoaxes, mirages, weather balloons, or some other "conventional" phenomena. What is particularly striking about this book is that Menzel approaches every UFO case not with the objective eye and open mind of a true scientist, but with the utterly close-minded assumption that, since UFOs can't possibly exist, any prosaic explanation, no matter how far-fetched, is better than admitting that a case is "unsolved" or "unexplained". A few examples will illustrate the main thrust of Menzel's debunking approach: in his examination of the Nash-Fortenberry case of 1952, in which two Pan American Airline pilots spotted six strange objects flying in formation over Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, Menzel at first claimed the pilots had seen "city lights reflecting off haze, clouds, or humidity". When weather records clearly showed that there was no haze, clouds, or other inversion-causing weather, an undaunted Menzel claimed that the two pilots had actually been fooled by fireflies trapped between the panes of glass in their cockpit! When Dr. James McDonald, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Arizona and a prominent Menzel critic, pointed out the absurdity of such a claim, Menzel responded by calling McDonald a "pseudoscientist" and a "crank" - without ever specifically responding to McDonald's criticisms of his explanation.

In "The World of Flying Saucers", Menzel offers several completely different explanations for the Kenneth Arnold UFO case. Arnold, a successful businessman and private pilot, spotted nine "flying disks" in Washington State in 1947, and the headlines resulting from his story led to the first great wave of UFO sightings in America. Menzel claims that Arnold either saw a "mirage" or an unusual cloud formation - yet both of these explanations fly in the face of Arnold's testimony. (In his other two books Menzel offers three additional explanations for Arnold's sighting). Menzel refused to do any field research when investigating UFO cases, and he also refused to personally interview the UFO eyewitnesses. Instead, his solutions came almost entirely from sitting in his home or office and examining the testimony and transcripts of UFO sightings, which possibly accounts for the fact that his "explanations" for UFO cases often run contrary to the testimony of the witnesses and other researchers. Bottom line: Menzel's "The World Of Flying Saucers" is worth reading for the simple fact that Menzel is still regarded as the "godfather" of all UFO debunkers. If you read this book you will find that virtually all other UFO debunking books, such as those of Philip Klass, Robert Sheaffer, and Curtis Peebles, have simply copied Menzel's debunking approach. However, if you wish to read a truly scientific and objective approach to the UFO phenomenon, then you'd be well-advised to look elsewhere.