In keeping with my reading on the Roswell incident I decided to take a look at one of the first, if not the first, movie to deal with flying saucers in a dramatic way. The Flying Saucer is a crappy movie with very little actual flying saucer action, but it is important for highlighting a certain truth about how flying saucers were perceived at the time. This truth explains a lot about the whole Roswell incident, and has been all but ignored by the UFO community.

The Flying Saucer was produced and directed by Mikel Conrad, who also stars. Conrad plays Mike Trent, who worked for the U.S. government in some capacity never explicitly described. He retired and has been living the life of a playboy in New York, but he’s called to Washington by his old boss. Uncle Sam is worried about the flying saucers that have been spotted over various parts of the country. Trent’s boss explains that the only use for a craft like a flying saucer would be to deliver an atom bomb, and therefore the U.S. must find the flying saucer before any foreign power. Mike was originally from Alaska, and because the most promising lead they have is up there, Mike is to pretend to have a nervous breakdown and hole up in his father’s hunting cabin north of Juneau. The government sends a pretty female agent, Vee (Pat Garrison, beginning a rich career of one movie), with him to pretend to be his nurse.

Mike is generally sour, unlikable, and basically the worst secret agent ever. When he arrives at cabin and finds a creepy new (German!) caretaker the first thing he asks the man is, “Have you see any Russian spies around here?” Vee wants to follow orders and stay at the cabin until their local contact shows up, but Mike grouses and eventually sneaks away to Juneau, where he proceeds to get roaring drunk for no good reason. After trying unsuccessfully to take a ride on the town whore, Mike runs into an equally drunk guy he knows, and finds out that someone is renting the other guy’s boat for a hundred dollars a day. Obviously these are Russian agents, and the next day Mike sobers up enough for all the information he needs to know about the flying saucer to just fall into his lap. As it turns out the scientist who built the saucer is actually in the lower 48, trying to sell the design aeronautical companies, but the scientist’s assistant is going to sell the craft to the Russians. Mike rents a plane, finds where the saucer is hidden, then flies back to the cabin. After he lands the caretaker tries to kill him, either because the caretaker is a Russian agent or because the guy is just fed up with Mike being a jerk. The Russian agents manage to kidnap Vee and the scientist (who arrived back in Alaska when no one was interested in buying his designs), and Mike flies out to the hidden flying saucer to rescue them. He confronts the Russians in an ice cave, takes one of them hostage, and in a truly hilarious moment, uses the man as a human shield when the chief Russkie empties the entire clip of a machine gun at him from about 6 inches away. Apparently the hostage was wearing his kevlar thermal underwear, because Mike is untouched. There’s a cave-in, and Mike, the scientist and Vee escape. The scientist’s assistant reaches the flying saucer and takes off, only to have it explode. Seems the scientist booby trapped it, meaning nothing Mike or Vee did really mattered. The end.

There are only three or so shots of a painfully cheesy flying saucer model flying around, though Mikel Conrad tried to pass this footage off as genuine flying saucer footage. The movie opens with a card thanking the “those in authority” for helping the movie be a reality, and the following article ran in the Long Beach Independent in the months before the movie was released.

I assume that describing Conrad as “husky” is a nice way of saying “pudgy and looks nearly twice his actual age.” Mikel Conrad’s career never took off, despite this vanity project. His last screen appearance was as George Lawrence in the American scenes of Godzilla, King of the Monster.

So what makes this film interesting as it relates to Roswell? Notice how I never mentioned aliens. Never in this movie does anybody even hint that a flying saucers are alien. This reflects the general thinking on flying saucers in the first couple years after that terms was coined in June, 1947. People might not have known what flying saucers were, but the debate was generally between people who thought they were Russian airplanes intruding in U.S. airspace and people who thought they were the U.S. army testing secret aircraft. This movie reflects that. The Roswell incident occurred a scant three weeks after original “flying saucer” report, so when the Roswell AFB press office announced they had found a flying saucer in early July of 1947 they weren’t admitting they’d found an alien spacecraft as UFO believers claim, but rather that they’d found a Russian secret aircraft of some sort. The alien identification of of flying saucers didn’t start to become popular until 1950 or so. As far as I can tell the first fictional take on flying saucers as alien spacecraft was the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Maybe I should revisit that movie.