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Orbs, blobs, and glows: astronauts, UFOs, and photography
Art Journal, Fall, 2003 by Jane D. Marsching
The first UFO photograph was taken on the twelfth of August, 1883, by Mexican astronomer Jose Bonilla at Zacetecas Observatory. Over that day and the next, he took a series of photographs through his telescope showing formations of hundreds of fuzzy round objects crossing the face of the sun. His report describes his reaction: "I had not recovered my surprise when fire same phenomenon was repeated! And that with such frequency that in the space of two hours, I counted up to 283 bodies crossing the solar disc. Little by little, however, clouds hindered the observation. I could not resume the observation until the sun had crossed the meridian, and then only for 40 minutes." (8) With the very long exposure times that photography required, it was difficult to capture a UFO on film, especially since the experience is usually fleeting and UFOs often move fantastically quickly. The resulting images show a huge, blurry, white sun dotted with small, indistinct black discs.
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But it is the 1947 newspaper reports of pilot Kenneth Arnold's sighting of a flying saucer that inaugurated the modern era of UFOs. Arnold saw nine metallic objects flying near Mount Rainier "like saucers skipped over water." The burgeoning growth of the communications industry during the 1940s made images and stories of sightings widely accessible to the public in a way that earlier sightings had not been. It was the press that translated Arnold's description into "saucer-shaped objects," and thus the image of flying saucers was born. (9) Only a few weeks later, the most infamous UFO incident occurred in Roswell, New Mexico, when an Air Force press release claimed to have recovered a crashed flying saucer on a ranch. Images of alien autopsies, scientific analyses of metal fragments, and claims of government cover-ups came to define the aura of earnest scientific investigation and paranoid research that followed. In fact, the modern culture of urology is as much about the government and scientific institutions as it is about the otherworldly: Paranoia, conspiracy theories, unreliable sources, and government cover up have overwhelmed the UFO phenomena so that it is hard to see through the smokescreen to what else is happening. As Charles Fort said, "The history of science is a record of the transformation of contempts and amusements," (10) Astronauts' photographs of UFOs prick the discrete facade of astronautics. They allow us to see what is other, what is outside our rational order, through the lens of authority.
In the late 1960s, the extension of our physical reach and vision through the NASA space program opened up new worlds--literally. Human imagination, already endlessly speculative about all that is just outside our reach, seized upon this assortment of images, sounds, objects, men, and data and ran with it. Throughout the ensuing decades, a surprisingly large segment of the American population saw UFOs in comets, over backyards, in images of the sun's corona, and pretty much everywhere else. A 2002 Roper poll found that 56 percent of the American public thinks that UFOs are real, while 48 percent believes that UFOs have visited Earth in some form. (11) And these percentages are rising. Periodically administered Gallup polls show a significant increase in belief in many forms of the paranormal, with a decline only in belief in demonic possession. (12)
