Science Fiction and UFOs: Compare and Contrast

Glancing through my copy (above) of The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, edited by Perter Nicholls [Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY 1979]…

…I saw a black and white picture of the cover above, which took me to the internet where I found scads of pulp magazine covers:

And a site about pulp magazines of all kinds:

https://pulpmags.wordpress.com/2015/02/

What’s striking is that, in perusing Sci-Fi covers and stories, one finds (as depicted above) a more bizarre representation of alien (extraterrestrial) contact and other-worldly things than one finds in UFO lore, which is rather bland and mundane by comparison.

The imagination of UFO witnesses and flying saucer observers is boring and prosaic when set alongside the tales created by sci-fi writers and their ilk.

What does this tell us?

That observations and reports of UFOs are either true, because they suck, in a literary sense, or the persons reporting UFOs and flying saucers don’t have the imaginative acumen of sci-fi writers, and thus tell a tale lacking in truly alien configuration; that is, UFO witnesses, Roswell among them, saw something rather ordinary and can’t endow it with anything like that found in the sci-fi genre or alien visitors are from benign worlds (or dimensions) devoid of the exotic wonders that some of mankind conjures up, from its own mind.

I don’t see the pre-1947 stories as predestined to cause UFO sightings by the great unwashed. The sci-fi aliens are creepier that what UFO witnesses say they’ve encountered and UFOs are nowhere near, as reported, as those fabricated by the mind of sci-fi writers.

One would expect actual extraterrestrial visitors to be stranger than strange, which vehicles odder than anything we humans might imagine.

This hasn’t been the case, so one might discard the UFO sightings we keep contending with as a kind of mental fluke or phenomenon that is ordinary in the context of what should be visitations of of alien cultures or examples of the paranormal that come from places that do not exist in our reality.

RR http://ufocon.blogspot.com – The UFO Iconoclast(s)