"unidentified flying object"

[Jonathan Lighter]

The OED's primary "UFO" quote is from a magazine excerpt from Maj.
Donald E. Keyhoe's   _Flying Saucers from Outer Space_ (N.Y.: Holt),
published Oct. 5, 1953.

Further information from the farthest reaches of my library:

P. 10 (rpt. London: Tandem,. 1970): "The [aircraft] had been hit by an
unidentified flying body. (In the United States, the official term for
a flying saucer is an 'unidentified flying object.'"

P. 11: "Did the UFO (unidentified flying object) seem to be piloted or
under remote control? ...On and on went the probing questions, worked
out by the Air Technical Intelligence Center [at Wright-Patterson AFB]
to identify UFO types."

Keyhoe uses "UFO" throughout, in what was the first book-length
journalistic attempt to show that "saucers" were actually from space.
Keyhoe thus publicized the acronym "UFO."

It seems most likely that "UFO" was coined (as the 1956 OED cite
suggests) at Project Blue Book, the tiny office of ATIC dedicated to
investigating such reports, very possibly during the summer of 1952:
this was a period which saw many news reports of "flying saucers," as
well as the first known relevant use of the phrase "unidentified
flying object." Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, chief of Blue Book from early
1952, offhandedly claimed credit for the acronym (as in the OED cite).

Before the appearance of Keyhoe's book (or the excerpt from it, which
seems to have appeared a little earlier), "UFO" was a term quite
unknown to the public.

JL

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "unidentified flying object"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 1952 _Wisconsin State Journal_ (Madison) (Aug. 2) I 2 [NewspArch]:
> Several persons have shown snapshots purporting to show saucers or
> some sort of unidentified flying object, but this is the first photo
> with any kind of official attachment.
>
> A slightly earlier ex., from July, 1952, cannot be loaded.
>
> The phrase became a common synonym for "flying saucer" over the next
> two or three years. OED's primary "UFO" quote is from fall, 1953.
>
> JL
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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