by Charles Lear
Hoaxes have been a part of the flying saucer/UFO mystery from its very beginning. Shortly after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting report on June 24, 1947, people started coming forward with physical disks they claimed to have found in their yards, in fields, or to have actually seen flying through the air in flames and then crash. Claimants ranged from school children to professional adults, and there is even a report from a Catholic priest that received a good deal of press. The priest’s case, as well as others of this sort ended up in FBI files. The disks that were displayed were obviously home made, sometimes quite crudely, but there was the possibility that these could be responsible for valid sightings reports by people who were truly mystified.
Besides the attraction of getting one’s name and picture in the newspapers, various organizations began offering rewards to anyone who could bring in a disk that would prove flying saucers were real. According to the article “Here they are! Early crashes of flying saucers: a short visual history.” in the Italian magazine Cielo Insolito #6 March 2018, from which much of this blog is sourced, the rewards were as high as $8000.
In late 1947, a flying object of any shape still qualified as a flying disk. People came forward with pieces of weather balloons and their radar targets, and the newspapers reported on them as disks.
The majority of the reports showed up in the papers during the first three weeks in July. One case from Circleville, Ohio, hit the newswires and went national. On July 5, 1947, Sherman Campbell found a foil covered radar target shaped like a six-pointed star on his farm. A blog from The Saucers That Time Forgot on saucer pin-up girls, has a picture of Campbell’s daughter, Jane, holding the target. The picture was published in papers all over the country, and the writer points out that many papers on that same day and in the days that followed, had pictures of “pretty young women allegedly searching for saucers, or posing with bogus UFOs, or sometimes no saucer at all, just mentioned in the caption.”
Father Joseph Brasky, a Catholic priest in Grafton, Wisconsin, reported that on July 6, he heard a “whizzing” sound followed by what sounded like a firecracker going off. He said he went outside and saw a one-eighth inch thick, eighteen-inch diameter metal disk with a hole in the middle and jagged edges. He said it was warm when he picked it up and weighed about 4 or 5 pounds. In the hole was a cluster of wires with something that looked like a condenser that was about three inches long and wrapped in black tape.
There is an FBI file (starting on page 12) on this case due to the fact that Brasky told reporters that he was going to call the FBI about his find. A memo dated July 8, 1947, to the Director from SAC, Milwaukee informs the Director that the Agent had been called at his home by representatives from the Associated Press and the United Press who asked him for a comment. The Agent wrote that he responded with “no comment.” He says that he asked the Associated press representative what the facts were and that he responded with the information that “a circular saw had been found and a story had been obtained from a priest who had been drinking quite heavily.”
The July 8, 1947 Shreveport Times has a story of a local man, F. G. “Happy” Harston, who said he saw a flaming disk fly over a billboard and land in the street on July 7. When he picked it up it was cold. It was a 16-inch diameter aluminum disk with some copper wire, radio tubes and a ”fluorescent light starter” mounted on it. According to the Cielo Insolito article, it was examined by an FBI agent, the local police, and then turned over to a military base.
On July 9, a case from North Hollywood, California, was covered in hundreds of newspapers, often on the front page, and it also generated an FBI file (page 60). According to an FBI memo dated August 27, 1947, the Agent was told by the Valley Fire Department (Van Nuys, California) fire chief that a woman (most of the papers reported that it was a man) called and told them that a disk had fallen in her garden and burst into flames. A truck was sent out and the fire was extinguished with a hose. The disk was taken back to the station and a picture of it sitting on the fire chief’s desk was used in many papers and magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post.
4Disk on Fire Chief’s DeskThe disk is described in the FBI memo as being made of two convex disks made of steel fused at the outer edge and held together at the center by “a hollow c5Boys From Children’s Homeylindrical connection.” A galvanized steel fin was screwed to the top and a radio tube was mounted on the top as well. The memo concludes with the information that the “flying disk” was turned over to a Major at Fort MacArthur, San Pedro, California. The Major informed the Agent that “the object was definitely a hoax and under no circumstances could have flown under its own power.”
There is a case where a reward was actually paid out. On July 13, 1947, the Spokane Athletic Roundtable paid out $1000 to four young boys from a children’s home in Spokane, Washington. They reported hearing an explosion and then finding a crashed disk among some nearby trees. The July 14, 1947 Spokane Chronicle ran the story with a picture. It was later announced that the money was to go towards the construction of a new gym at the children’s home. It is speculated in the Cielo Insolito article that the payout was actually a pre-arranged donation and that the saucer story was cooked up as a publicity angle. Hopefully, the DoD and the FBI weren’t compelled to spend any time at the expense of the American tax payers on this particular case.