oldrover said:
Analis I can’t agree with you about Arnold. Firstly I never made any mention of mass hysteria. Though it wasn’t meant to be, I can see that it could have seemed like it was implied. I’m not talking about anything so specific. I can’t see that there’s any successful way to argue against the flying saucer era beginning in the late 40’s, I’ve seen and read countless testimonies which do describe exactly that. The sound bite which was carried away from the case was the term ‘flying saucer’, it’s still with us today and probably will be in a thousand years. Problematic because although this is remembered as the key phrase, as you’ll know of course, it only applicable to the flight characteristics of the objects, but saucers become the shape most people are seeing. This to me is highly suggestive. And I believe it refutes your point here;
this phenomenon is well studied and its effects are known. We can observe that with various calls to witnesses on TV, or the kind of scares you mention, red under the bed scares, but also skinhead scares, terrorist scares, the 1938 Orson Welles scare etc... They have produced nothing of the sort. Despite that they were much more pregnant than the impact of a lousy press release, there is simply no comparison between them.
Sorry, as I was absent for a time, I hadn't read all. I will answer here to this point, before it veers off-topic for too long. With much lateness, I answer that what refutates your view in my opinion, is that an explanation has to be confronted to what established scientific studies already teach us (contrarily to what is sometimes believed, sociology and psychology are not so 'soft' sciences, or the realm of pure fantasy ; they've provided us a lot of secure knowledge, notably of how beliefs and sightings spread). If it doesn't fit, even if it seems highly suggestive, it has to be rejected.
I won't come back to the fact that round objects had already been reported before. But there is a point I want to adress, despite that I consider it as unconsequential : what were Arnold's real words, which are usually shrouded in much confusion. I was sometimes the victim of this, and I remember that I have on more than one occasion explained that Arnold refered to movement and not to shape. But a recent discussion reassessed that it was not the case by evidencing what he really told to the press (or at least what the press reported he had told them, which for us is exactely the same thing) :
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2011/sep/m09-005.shtml
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2011/sep/m10-002.shtml
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2011/sep/m10-005.shtml
It emerges from this review that :
1) Arnold did describe the objects as having an undulating motion, but :
2) He never used the saucer metaphor refering to the movement. This comparison emerged only two years later, in a Ray Palmer's book.
3) He didn't use either the comparison with stones bouncing over water in the following days. It seems he resorted to it, but probably, it came again only later (or if he used it just after the 24 June sigthing, it wasn't printed immediately). Although it is more logical. Making flat pebbles bouncing on water is a popular game among children, I practiced it myself. But dish plates... I doubt anybody ever used dishes to this goal...
4) He did describe the objects as disc- or saucer- or even pie-plate-like. He repeated the word saucer (as refering to the shape) in the document he submitted to the Army Air Force Intelligence. They were indeed somewhat discoid. They were round if only on the front part, the back being truncated. The closer comparison I could come with would be of a horseshoe crab without tail.
5) It was only a few weeks later that he mentionned that one of the objects was different from the others, being crescent-shaped, with a pointy tail. Which gave birth to the belief that he had seen a flight of flying wings, but he never said that (from the Martin SHOUGH's
Darklore vol.5 article mentionned there, a confusion may have come from the fact that Arnold had sometimes used a half-moon comparison in the early days :
The Oregon Journal on 27 June had indeed reported a fleet of crescents, but Arnold's quotes cited in the article were similar to the other ones, except for the use of the half-moon - but simultaneously with the disk metaphor).
So, Arnold's saucer and disk metaphors did refer to the shape and not to the flight characteristics. Additionally, the terms flying disc and flying saucer really caught only after another sighting above Idaho on 4 July.
(If you want a more picrocholine discussion about the implications of the use of the terms and their relations to memes, see here (don't forget your aspirin) :
http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/10 ... -gone.html )
Back to the original topic.
oldrover said:
But Similarly, Ray Wallace's hoxes were a minor cultural event. Did they call a mediatic frenzy ? Yes, but quite limited. I don't believe that people believed they saw man-beasts because they had heard of Wallace's scams
Fair point, but I’m not suggesting that it was an overnight sensation, anymore than I’m suggesting the reports instantly reached their current volume. I believe it was still a relatively minor subject and would be second fiddle to the Yeti for at least another decade. In my opinion it’s after the Patterson film that it starts to really take off, and then we have the films from the 70’s and so on.
Patterson and others did have promoted Bigfoot/Sasquatch as a north american yeti, and his movie certainly played a role in the spreading of the belief. But I was re-reading
Strange creatures from time and space, and I have the feeling that between 1958 and 1966, north american BHMs were already described as they would be later. More often as a kind of "super-Paranthopus", and all the variations encountered since.
oldrover said:
Which leads us to the question of how successful Bigfoot is commercially? I doubt anyone has ever made a fortune from it, but a living I don’t know, but possibly
Possibly, but I doubt that it would be through books. More probably through conferences.