Flying Saucer, Lenticular Cloud. Numbered and signed on reverse of print. High-quality stochastic print on 100 lb, low-acid, uncoated paper with archival ink. Ships rolled. Frame not included. Read about finding a frame before choosing a size.
The Story
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s swamp gas or freakish weather phenomena. An unidentified flying object (UFO) is more likely to be something terrestrial than it is to be an extraterrestrial space ship or flying saucer. But in a very small but significant fraction of sightings, conventional explanations fail all logic. Even in those cases, skeptics cite a number of last-resort solutions including secret military testing, mass hallucination, or even government-perpetrated hoaxes.
In the face of so many skeptic theories, and baffled by the government’s lack of response on the matter, the average person dismisses even the best UFO sightings as simple mysteries, having learned to query no further.
If there is indeed something extraterrestrial to the UFO phenomenon, then the public has been outlasted by a governing body somewhere in the world that has decided to keep it a secret. Since the term “flying saucer” was first coined by an excited press eager to investigate the matter 70 years ago after a months-long spate of sightings in 1947, generations of independent researchers have turned up tomes of documents, reliable eye witness testimonies and video and photo evidence–and yet still the widespread perception of the phenomena is that it lacks credible support.
Somewhere along the way, UFOs became an unworthy subject for civilized discourse. It’s worth tracking this paradigm shift back to the start of the story, to the mid-twentieth century, when the UFO craze reached its height in America.
UFO Fever in the USA
Although unidentified flying objects and the flying saucer have been sighted throughout history, reports started to increase at the end of the Second World War. A generation of young fighter pilots had just returned home with stories of unexplained objects in the sky, and in June of 1947 the Roswell Daily Record published a story about the recovery of a crashed “flying saucer” following a press release by the US Air Force. But whatever the pilots saw during the war was shrugged off by officials and the recovered object in Roswell was later reported to have been a weather balloon. Nevertheless, imaginations began to run wild, and by the early 1950s, people were seeing UFOs everywhere—in the skies and also in movie theatres and on book shelves. They couldn’t get enough.
The start of the Cold War brought a change in attitude. The fear of Russian invasion turned public intrigue in UFOs into public anxiety. Suddenly, the idea of untraceable objects in the skies posed an elevated threat to national security. The 1952 incident known as “The Washington flap” could’ve started World War Three when a series of unidentified flying objects were observed over The White House and the US Capitol Building. With the Air Force scrambling intercept jets, and with both the press and the people frantically demanding answers, it was clear that panic had set in at all levels. Once they had determined that Russia had nothing to do with the embarrassing event, it became incumbent upon the government to downplay the issue, whatever was behind it.
Stephen Basset, Washington’s lobbyist for UFO disclosure, calls the era of the Cold War in the United States the start of the government-imposed “truth embargo” on the subject of UFOs. It became the interest of national security to meet all mention of UFOs with denial and obfuscation. As Basset and many other “disclosure activists” explain it, UFO secrecy in the decades following the Cold War became an addictive habit for the government.
Flying Saucer, Lenticular Cloud: The Artwork
Flying Saucer, Lenticular Cloud reflects the double vision we collectively seem to have on the UFO phenomenon, our inability to decide together what exactly is going on in our skies. It makes for a curious sort of psychological exam: is it a cloud being mistaken for a flying saucer, or a flying saucer being denied as a cloud?
While it might polarize guests to your home, it will play nicely with your decor. The self-contained composition makes it an easy standalone piece that can make a big statement in a minimalist room. Or in a space with a lot already happening, its two graphic circles add a welcome variety of shape. Wherever it hangs, your guests will probably never expect a UFO encounter on your walls in such stylish fashion so it will be sure to leave an impression.
