On the evening of 30 October 1938.....came on the air via radio around 8 PM, War of the Worlds. Most folks started from minute 1....knowing it was a fictional story. Some folks got to the storyline around 5 to 8 minutes late.
Over the next hour....tens of thousands of Americans truly believed that the US had been invaded by aliens. It was an odd phenonium.
For weeks after this....people talked about the experience. Limited to just the US? No....in Europe and the USSR....folks talked about the naïve nature of Americans and how it really didn't take much to get people into a frightened frenzy.
Stalin, of the USSR, fascinated by this? Yes.
In the summer of 1947....a UFO incident unfolded in Roswell, NM. The US Air Force recovered 'something'....there's not much to argue.
There are bits and pieces to suggest that the Soviets had decided by the end of WW II to create a 'War of the Worlds' event in the US, and that two faked-up UFOs were to be designed, built and smuggled somehow into NM. Aliens themselves? The same story suggests that the Soviets had found a number of short people....performed surgery to alter them, and the bulk of them would be found dead (1 live one would be part of the unfolding event).
The US reaction? Retrieval of ship #1, and months later....they would be called to site two (Aztec area).
For a fairly long period (weeks and months)....as this was unfolding....they would eventually figure out that the whole thing was bogus, and the alien they held....seemed to be a normal 'human'.
Would you want to admit how stupid you were to fall for the Soviet act? No.
But as you come upon the early 1950s....three additional avenues open up.
First, there was the developmental range north of Vegas....Area 51, which had to be established and cover stories established. So misinformation was created in various layers....to suggest that alien technology or ships were being kept there.
Since there was the already the belief of Roswell and Aztec....this wasn't a wild idea to convey.
Second, out of the Nazi era.....there was a lot of development into mind control and hypnosis. The Air Force had this guy develop a new medical technology......Jolly West....where you could get people to believe something with a fake layer of facts inserted into the mind.
This 'science' began to be used in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. You could actually take a guy and convince him of an alien abduction or visitation.....when nothing happened.
Third, throughout the 1950s and 1960s....a heck of a lot occurred in the physics area of science....where developers were taking military-related projects to extreme levels of reality.
So the idea that aliens and UFOs might exist....being totally faked up with thousands of acts? Well....ask yourself this....if you were 10,000 years more advanced and had traveled to Earth....crashing somewhere...dozens of times....wouldn't your highly developed travel business be suspect?
I'm not saying the alien/UFO business is 100-percent faked-up. I'm just saying that after the War of the Worlds episode in 1938....we seem to be on a treadmill, and believing things, without much proof.
