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147 windmill. The object, which emitted heat, plunged toward the Earth before climbing back into the sky and disappearing. (Others saw this as the Sun twirling in the sky, throwing off colors and descending to the Earth)'* If this was a hallucination or a religiously inspired vision, it was a massively shared one. During the first third of the twentieth century, Charles Fort published collected reports of peculiar sightings, some of which now would be catego- rized as UFOs. Referring to conventional scientific wisdom, he wrote in 1919 that “our data have been damned, upon no consideration for individ- ual merits, but in conformity with a general attempt to hold out for isolation of this earth.” Fort argued that the notion of things dropping in on our planet from “externality” was unsettling to science; the scientific attitude toward the unwelcome is that it does not exist. During World War II some military pilots described glowing objects flying beside their aircraft, although these “foo fighters” did not become widely known until later. Scandinavians reported many sightings of “ghost rockets” immediately following the war.'° In the United States, the modern wave of UFO sightings began in 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported that he had spotted disk-shaped objects flying in loose formation, making undulating motions like a saucer skipping over water. Newspaper writers coined the term flying saucer, which allowed people to place inexplicable observations in a new category. The term also implied a tone of ridicule.'® The Arnold story encouraged people all over the United States to come forth with their own tales of strange objects in the sky. Noting the anthro- pological theory that the acceptance of an idea depends as much on the state of society as on the idea itself, planetary scientist William Hartmann argued later that the reaction to Arnold’s report can be explained by the fact that postwar society was primed for the acceptance of alien spaceships.” Others came to different conclusions. Almost everyone then assumed that UFOs were real but easily explained as something other than alien craft. According to a 1947 Gallup Poll, most people thought these objects were illusions, hoaxes, secret weapons, or other explainable phenomena; very few thought they came from outer space." To study the problem further, the U.S. Air Force established Project Sign in December 1947 (Project Sign later became Project Grudge, then Project Blue Book). By the end of that year, Air Force investigators were secretly moving toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis while publicly dismissing saucers as natural phenomena or hoaxes."” Official opinions later shifted away from the visit scenario. The Air Force Investigates The Air Force Investigates