by Charles Lear
In the article, “The UFO Contact Movement From the 1950’s to the Present”, written by Christoper Bader, the author looks at the history of alien and UFO encounters as a social phenomenon. He shows how the focus of researchers changed as they felt increasingly compelled to explain the encounters in physical terms using modern physical science. Particularly interesting is Bader’s summation of the transformations that have occurred in the alien descriptions.
The history of encounters, as Bader presents it, is familiar to most of us. In the mystery airship reports of the late 1800s, the occupants were, almost always, reported to be human and the airships themselves thought to be a human invention. It wasn’t until the 1940’s that the ET hypothesis became widely considered as an explanation for strange aerial phenomena and the aliens themselves weren’t widely reported until the 1950s. After his introduction, Bader focuses on the contactee movement, which is appropriate given the article’s title, devoting several paragraphs to George Adamski. After taking us through the Betty and Barney Hill case, which he uses to represent the 60’s, he describes 70’s encounters with an assortment of strange web-footed, clawed and winged creatures. He argues that these forced the UFO community to try and reach a consensus as to what an alien should look like. This brings us to the 80’s abductee research, from which the “Greys” emerged as the acceptable alien form.