In one of the scenes I ended up cutting from the final manuscript of Haunted Summer (I had to tighten up the flow.), Todd and Lindsey interview a UFO abductee. The man’s poignant story and disturbing experiences made a strong enough story to keep for a later book, I decided, and couldn’t really be done justice as a minor plot point.
The larger Portland, Oregon, area of the country where my story is set was the location of the first major UFO sighting. This was the incident that put UFOs and flying saucers (They were called flying disks in the early days.) into the American cultural lexicon. Salesman Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier when he saw a cluster of objects flying in formation. Using his own air speed and the positions of objects around them, he calculated that these things were flying at speeds that exceeded 1,200 miles per hour. When he landed, he told people what he had seen and asked around to see if there were any military aircraft being tested in the area. Within a few weeks, other reported sightings of unidentified objects in other parts of the country made UFOs a national phenomenon. This is one of the many links that includes details about Arnold’s experience: http://brumac.mysite.com/KARNOLD/KARNOLD.html. I liked it because it had good illustrations and that raw UFO conspiracy theory look to it. The author seems to have gone into a lot of detail.
Admittedly, I didn’t dig too deeply into the Kenneth Arnold story. For fiction books, tabloid stories make good inspiration. I did wonder, however, when UFOs first became “a thing,” a social phenomenon that inspired movies, cartoons, and jokes as well as serious concerns. Arnold’s experience was in 1947, but he wasn’t the first person to make people think about alien visitors. Orson Welles had terrified the country in October, 1938, with a radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds novel. People who tuned in in the middle mistook it for a real news broadcast. Apparently, the idea of extraterrestrial visitors didn’t start with the Drake sighting–stories of mysterious visitors go back to the dawn of humanity–but it did help give the UFO cultural phenomenon its modern shape.
Some stories cast aliens as saviors of humanity, others think UFO abductees are experiencing something demonic, and some people don’t believe any of it. Maybe I’ll explore some of those ideas in a future novel.