Flying Saucers and UFOs in US Advertising During the Cold War, 1947-1989
Matthew P. McAllister · Greg Eghigian
Advertising and Society Quarterly · 2022
A content analysis of 150+ US print and television ads from 1947–1989 argues that flying-saucer imagery functioned as a semiotic 'floating signifier,' cycling through six commercial modes that simultaneously popularized and trivialized the UFO phenomenon.
Brief
McAllister and Eghigian analyzed a corpus of more than 150 American advertisements spanning the full Cold War period, from the 1947 Kenneth Arnold sighting that coined 'flying saucer' through 1989, to trace how commercial culture absorbed and redeployed UFO iconography. Using a floating-signifier framework drawn from semiotics, they identify six thematic modes through which advertisers attached saucer imagery to unrelated products and services. The central argument is that this commercial co-optation produced an ambivalent cultural status for the phenomenon: widespread recognition paired with reflexive mockery, making it structurally difficult for serious scientific or governmental inquiry to gain traction. The paper situates advertising as an underexamined mechanism in the social construction of UAP stigma.
Metadata
- Category
- Stigma
- Venue
- Advertising and Society Quarterly
- Type
- Peer-reviewed
- Year
- 2022
- Authors
- Matthew P. McAllister, Greg Eghigian
- Access
- Paywalled
- Data sources
- US print advertisements 1947–1989, US television advertisements 1947–1989
- Tags
- stigma, cultural-history, media-studies, UAP-public-perception, semiotics, Cold-War
Key points
- The study corpus exceeds 150 print and television advertisements, covering 42 years of American commercial culture from the first 'flying saucer' reports (1947) through the end of the Cold War (1989).
- UFO/saucer imagery is theorized as a 'floating signifier', a term from semiotics denoting an image with excess, unanchored meaning that can be attached to radically different signifieds depending on context.
- The authors identify six thematic modes through which advertisers deployed saucer imagery, spanning registers that include futurism, threat, humor, and novelty, demonstrating the image's commercial polysemy.
- Commercial trivialization is presented as a causal mechanism in UAP stigma formation: repeated humorous or absurdist use of saucer imagery in consumer contexts primed audiences to treat the topic as inherently ridiculous.
- The 1947–1989 window is analytically significant because it brackets the period during which the U.S. government ran formal UFO investigation programs (Sign, Grudge, Blue Book), allowing the authors to juxtapose official and commercial framings.
- The paper contributes to a stigma-studies literature arguing that popular-culture representations, not only media news framing, structured the conditions under which UAP witnesses and researchers were socially discredited.
Most interesting
- The 'floating signifier' concept, originally from Lévi-Strauss and later developed by Laclau and Mouffe, is rarely applied to UFO studies; its use here reframes saucer iconography as a structurally empty vessel that advertising filled with whatever cultural anxiety or aspiration was commercially useful at a given moment.
- Eghigian is also the author of substantial historical scholarship on the UFO phenomenon including work on psychiatric and governmental responses; pairing him with a media-studies co-author (McAllister) makes this an unusual cross-disciplinary collaboration within the stigma literature.
- The 1947 start date is not arbitrary: the Arnold sighting and subsequent press coinage of 'flying saucer' created the visual template, a disc, that advertisers began exploiting almost immediately, meaning commercial trivialization began concurrently with the phenomenon's public emergence.
- By focusing on advertising rather than news or entertainment media, the paper implicates the profit motive directly in stigma production: companies chose saucer imagery because audiences found it funny or futuristic, economically rewarding the trivializing frame.
- The study's endpoint (1989) predates the 1990s abduction-narrative revival and the post-2017 AATIP disclosures, leaving open the question of whether post-Cold War advertising continued, accelerated, or shifted the six thematic modes.
- Advertising and Society Quarterly, the venue, sits at the intersection of consumer culture and communication studies, publishing this paper there rather than in a science studies or history journal signals the authors' intent to reach audiences who study commercial persuasion, not just UFO history.