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A great deal of UFO scholarship is concentrated on the time period that spans the Truman and Eisenhower administrations – the period known as “The Fifties”, even when its cultural borders do not exactly match the chronological ones. A culture of large cars, fear of juvenile delinquency, terrified by the Red Menace and disquieted by flying saucers. Interestingly enough, the cultural construct of the “The Fifties” does not truly exist beyond the U.S.A and perhaps Canada. The decade of abundance and rock and roll meant little to a Europe slowly emerging from the ravages of a world war; Central and South America went on much the same as they had a decade earlier. No sock-hops there, either. But the presence of “flying saucers” became a common denominator worldwide as a citizenry pushed unwillingly into the Nuclear Age -- and beguiled by the promise of the incipient Space Age -- began to show interest in the strange things happening in the skies overhead.
Reports of unusual objects in the sky were not unknown in the Spanish-speaking Americas. As has been written elsewhere, the first “UFO flap” can be dated back to the Aztec era in Mexico, and South America and The Caribbean had filed away sightings of oddities as prodigios (prodigies or miracles) contained in sea captain’s logs and the formal reports made by government ministers to higher-ups. Religious significance was attached to some of them, especially if the sighting coincided with a religious holiday. Early on, nocturnal lights had been considered a welcome phenomenon, as they reputedly marked the location of buried treasure, thus sending locals on digging sprees. In the 1970s, few UFO books could go by without mentioning the objects seen “against the disk of the sun” by astronomer José Bonilla in Mexico a century earlier.
But the mid-20th century was different. Science fiction had already made inroads on the popular imagination and thoughts of venusinos and marcianos –whether courtesy of comic books or Flash Gordon serials dubbed into Spanish – raised the intriguing possibility that sentient beings, either much like ourselves or wholly monstrous, occupied these distant yet somehow familiar orbs. The platillo volador even became commonplace in movies, particularly comedies. World politics served to further rarify the atmosphere, as nuke-toting superpowers glared at each other from opposing hemispheres. Thoughts of benevolent space aliens bent on keeping humanity from annihilation filled the minds of many.
Puerto Rico, for instance, had emerged from over half a century of post-colonial mismanagement, natural disasters and starvation to become a self-governing commonwealth under the U.S. flag in 1952. That very same year, the old Borinquen Army Air Field in the island’s northwestern tip welcomed the arrival of the Strategic Air Command’s 72nd Bombardment Wing and its B-36’s, placing the island in harm’s way in the extent of any East-West hostilities. The jitters probably got worse when Statofortresses were stationed at the end of the decade (the reader will allow a brief digression at this point: the Borinquen Air Field was renamed Ramey Air Force Base in honor of Gen. Howard Ramey, a casualty of World War II, and not after Brig. Gen Roger Ramey of the 8th Army Air Force – one of the main players in the Roswell controversy). The wish for a saucer-enforced Pax Intergalactica in those troubled times tinted the messages of the active contactee communities of the period.
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