A transatlantic buzz: flying saucers, extraterrestrials and America in postwar Germany
Greg Eghigian
Journal of Transatlantic Studies · 2014
West and East German press both instrumentalized flying saucer reports as Cold War political commentary, treating the phenomenon as a lens for anti-American critique rather than a factual question about aerial objects.
Brief
Historian Greg Eghigian analyzes German-language press coverage of flying saucer reports from 1947 through the 1970s, drawing on publications from both the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. The paper argues that neither German public sphere engaged UAP reports on their empirical merits; instead, each mapped the phenomenon onto pre-existing ideological frameworks. West German skepticism about American cultural influence, and East German propaganda framing U.S. military secrecy as the obvious explanation. Eghigian's central claim is that the UAP phenomenon was politically constituted from its earliest emergence, with transnational information flows shaping local meaning-making before any scientific framework could take hold. The article runs pp. 282–303 in JTS 12(3) and contributes to the historiography of Cold War knowledge production and stigma.
Metadata
- Category
- Stigma
- Venue
- Journal of Transatlantic Studies
- Type
- Peer-reviewed
- Year
- 2014
- Authors
- Greg Eghigian
- Access
- Paywalled
- Data sources
- West German press archives, East German state media archives
- Tags
- UAP-history, stigma, Cold War, media studies, sociology-of-knowledge, transatlantic-relations
Key points
- The 1947 emergence of the flying saucer narrative in Germany was inseparable from the geopolitical context of the nascent Cold War, making politically inflected interpretation structurally inevitable from the outset.
- West German press coverage reflected ambivalence toward American cultural exports, treating flying saucer reports as potential evidence of U.S. military secrecy, mass hysteria, or media manipulation rather than genuine anomalous phenomena.
- East German state media used the flying saucer phenomenon as a propaganda resource, attributing sightings to American military experimentation and framing the public fascination as evidence of capitalist irrationalism.
- Despite occupying opposite ideological poles, both German press environments converged on a dismissive stance toward extraterrestrial interpretations, preferring explanations that served their respective anti-American or materialist narratives.
- Eghigian frames the transatlantic transmission of UAP reports as a case study in how American popular culture and Cold War anxiety were simultaneously exported and transformed by receiving audiences.
- The paper contributes to the stigma literature by showing that delegitimization of UAP inquiry in Germany preceded any scientific consensus, it was a political reflex, not an evidence-based conclusion.
Most interesting
- Both West and East Germany independently arrived at anti-American interpretations of the same phenomenon, ideological enemies reading identical saucer reports as proof of U.S. duplicity, each for opposite reasons.
- The flying saucer became a Rorschach for Cold War political identity in Germany: the same report could simultaneously be read as evidence of U.S. military secrecy by a West German liberal and of capitalist propaganda by an East German apparatchik.
- Eghigian's framing challenges the assumption that UAP stigma originated from scientific skepticism, in Germany at least, political stigma preceded and arguably foreclosed scientific engagement.
- The JTS venue (Journal of Transatlantic Studies) situates UAP history within mainstream international relations historiography, unusually treating the phenomenon as a legitimate object of diplomatic and cultural study.
- The coverage period (1947–1970s) spans the full arc from the Kenneth Arnold sighting through the height of détente, suggesting German press framing shifted alongside, not independently of, broader U.S.–European political relations.