Why saucers?

[BK613]

Why 1947? Sorry if I missed it if it was explained earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting

 

[Christopher]

Why 1947? Sorry if I missed it if it was explained earlier.

1947 was when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a group of mysterious "flying discs" behind his plane. This was just two years after WWII, and Americans had been conditioned for years during the war to watch the skies for enemy aircraft. So that ingrained habit was still there but lacking any actual enemy to focus on, and I figure the "flying disc" report gave it something to latch onto and triggered a nationwide mania of sightings of what the press called flying discs or flying saucers, including the Roswell weather-balloon foofaraw a couple of weeks later. Before long, the notion that flying saucers might be alien spacecraft took hold, and thus we started to get flying-saucer spaceships in film from 1950 onward.

(Edit: Well, the saucer mania is a fact, but the connection to WWII air-raid readiness is my own conjecture, given the timing.)

 

[XCV330]

With all the attention that Area 51's been getting recently, flying saucers are coming to the forefront of meme activity around the nation. With that in-mind, I thought I'd pose the question: why did Trek designers make so many ships to have a saucer section in Starfleet?

Did show/model designers believe that flying saucers were built by the Air Force and would evolve into a Space Force? Now we take the design for granted, but any number of other designs would have sufficed. If any flying saucers are uncovered at Area 51, one of the first things any of us will look for is whether they have warp nacelles attached (and whether they glow with our color-of-choice).

Cause trek was, in some ways, a 25% different copy of Forbidden Planet

 

[Henoch]

Cause trek was, in some ways, a 25% different copy of Forbidden Planet

Best true flying saucer, ever.

 

[The Old Mixer]

foofaraw

Well that sent me a-Googling.

 

[Kor]

Of course, in-universe in 1947, there was an emergency crash-landing on Earth by an alien shuttle that looked nothing like a flying saucer.

Kor

 

[Timo]

...Which no doubt is why USAF sent up all those saucer-shaped weather balloons when Venus was high in the sky, to misdirect the public attention from the real deal.

What is curious is the general absence of flying saucers from Star Trek. The show has had its share of Grey jokes and abduction stories, but not even the Benny Russell storyline featured classic saucers. I can see why TOS would have avoided those, but what's the excuse of the later shows? General Sternbach aesthetics? Still thinking saucers are silly (even when B5 and the like got mileage out of those)? Other? Simple geometric shapes certainly aren't banned in the Trek school of starship design...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Probably because flying saucers had the reputation of being representative of cheesy or cliched science fiction, and the very self-conscious Berman era of Trek wished to avoid that at all costs.

 

[NewHeavensNewEarth]

Cause trek was, in some ways, a 25% different copy of Forbidden Planet

Mic drop.

 

[publiusr]

1947 was when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a group of mysterious "flying discs" behind his plane. This was just two years after WWII, and Americans had been conditioned for years during the war to watch the skies for enemy aircraft.

From the wiki

Arnold described them as a series of objects with convex shapes, though he later revealed that one object differed by being crescent-shaped. Several years later, Arnold would state he likened their movement to saucers skipping on water, without comparing their actual shapes to saucers, but initial quotes from him do indeed have him comparing the shape to like a "saucer", "disc", "pie pan", or "half moon", or generally convex and thin.

They're called "pelicans"
https://badufos.blogspot.com/2016/08/kenneth-arnold-and-pelicans.html

Then too...
http://greyfalcon.us/The Horten Ho 229.htm

Live-in saucers
https://theoutline.com/post/8005/futuro-house-the-home-of-the-future-that-never-was?zd=3&zi=s4kne7hs

Now if you want a real saucer--and I'm not talking Avrocar...
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/watch-romanian-engineers-build-working-flying-saucer/
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/ekip-flying-saucer.952/#post-264015
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/421860690068861953
http://airshipworld.blogspot.com/2007/07/kothmann-flying-saucer-airship.html
http://www.bldgblog.com/2006/08/quick-list-2/
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...nas-ufo-not-unidentified-it-probably-wont-fly

...Which no doubt is why USAF sent up all those saucer-shaped weather balloons
Timo Saloniemi

Now they did lie about it being a weather balloon. It was a chain of balloons called Mogul
https://www.pigeonroost.net/sunspots-roswell-wright-field/

I think it carried something like an infrasound array to detect Soviet atomic tests.

What is curious is the general absence of flying saucers from Star Trek.
Timo Saloniemi

I don't know quite where to put flying saucers in modern sci-fi.
Would Klaatu's craft be more or less sophisticated than Enterprise.

The Ent' looks more souped up--but maybe Klaatu doesn't need ugly nacelles any more.

My fav book on saucers:
http://www.cgpublishing.com/Books/SaucerFleet.html

A nice UFO recognition manual would sell well.

I'm not a big believer in saucers--but found this chart a hoot'
https://external-preview.redd.it/4f...bp&s=3f874c4d67da9092860d891316bc1a7e2c9bf105

And last but not least--what I think people are seeing
https://theposterdepot.com/products/xl23dronesptr03111401