UFOs vs The Flying Saucers

I haven't been blogging much lately for a very good reason. Over the past few weeks I've had some fantastic opportunities arise, and they have necessitated a great deal of writing work, leaving me, temporarily, with little time or energy for blogging.

One of these opportunities in particular directly affects this piece of UFO real estate. I've just signed with a literary agent, and I'm working with her now to polish the 60+ page book proposal for my J. Allen Hynek book to make it more marketable to publishers. That could take a few days or a few weeks, and it will keep me from blogging as regularly as I'd like, but in the meantime I will do my best to look on here from time to time to collect the mail and keep the lawn mowed.

In the middle of all this, both my wife and my dad forwarded me a link to a web page that I found pretty entertaining. It's also very convenient, in that it allows me to write an extremely lazy post today! Perfect!

Roswell, NM, back when it was easier to believe...

The page is a feature from The New York Times that gives a brief overview of how some "famous names or terms" first appeared in its pages. Well, this week the term was "flying saucers," and its history in The Times is noteworthy, coinciding as it does with the Roswell saucer crash to-do.

You can find the article here.

What's most curious about this sequence of flying saucer articles is that they remind one that there may well have been a pretty banal reason for the actions of those two troublemakers Jesse Marcel, Jr. and Warren Haught. Considering all the UFOs popping up all over the country and then being reported in The Times in the days leading up to Mac Brazel's discovery, it's not hard to see where Marcel and Haught got the idea that the Reynolds Wrap and balsa wood recovered from the ranch were the wreckage of a flying saucer crash.

Poor sods.