Psychology and Saucers

History

Psychology and Saucers is held in the archive as a single article by Dr Kenneth J. Gentilli, published in the Western Mail of Perth, Western Australia, on 19 April 1951. The Western Mail was Perth's weekly companion paper to the West Australian, running country and feature material that the daily did not have room for, and the Saturday-feature placement of a 4,000-word medical-press analysis of the flying-saucer phenomenon is itself documentary evidence of how the topic was being treated in the Australian mainstream press in the early postwar period. The article was published less than four years after the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 24 June 1947 that conventionally starts the modern UFO era.

Gentilli's framework is explicitly psychological and physiological. He works through the canonical American sightings of the late 1940s and applies the contemporary medical literature on visual perception, oxygen depletion at altitude, glare and eye fatigue, red blood corpuscle artefacts, and meteorological optical phenomena. The cases he treats include the Kenneth Arnold June 1947 Cascade Mountains sighting, the Tacoma weather-balloon explanations, the Cascade Mountains telescope observation, the Fort Knox sighting in which Captain Thomas Mantell was killed pursuing what he reported as a metallic object, the Farmington, New Mexico, mass-formation sighting of March 1950, Captain Adams's observation of blue light and "port windows" on a reported craft, the December 1948 Washington DC halo display, and a Chilean Antarctic base report. The piece's working conclusion attributes most of the sightings to weather balloons, meteorites, and optical phenomena.