Today marks the 77th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting—a milestone not only for UFO enthusiasts but also for lexicographers everywhere, as it gave the English language two fascinating new terms: flying saucer and pelicanist.
For those unfamiliar, Kenneth Arnold was a businessman and aviator who, in 1947, claimed to have seen nine unidentified objects flying past Mount Rainier in Washington State at speeds over a thousand miles per hour. Whether you believe him or not (I do have an opinion, but I’m not telling), his account set off a chain reaction of speculation, skepticism, and, perhaps most importantly, the birth of the term flying saucer.
The origins of the phrase flying saucer are, as with many UFO-related topics, rather murky. Arnold himself insisted that he never used the term. According to him, he merely said the objects moved like saucers skipping across the surface of a lake. Yet, at least one journalist claimed Arnold described the objects as looking like saucers, and soon after, headline writers everywhere pounced on the catchy phrase. Thus, whether by miscommunication or creative headline writing, flying saucer was born.
(As a side note: While I’ve skipped plenty of stones across lakes, I’ve never tried skipping an actual saucer. I can only imagine that those who do must have a serious surplus of dinnerware. It’s a dream, I suppose.)
Regardless of how the phrase came into being, it has stuck with us ever since, bringing with it a whole new era of UFO sightings and alien speculation.
Of course, there were sceptics—those who sought to explain away Arnold’s sighting with more earthly causes. Some claimed the objects were clouds, distant mountain peaks, drops of water on Arnold’s aircraft windows, or, most interestingly, pelicans.
Now, pelicans are large birds, with wingspans that can exceed ten feet, but they don’t really resemble saucers. Nor do they fly at over a thousand miles per hour, unless they’re on an errand of unimaginable urgency. So, as an explanation, the pelican theory is, to put it mildly, a bit silly.
The absurdity of the pelican explanation led UFO enthusiasts to coin the term pelicanist to describe those who attempt to explain away every UFO sighting with preposterous, yet naturalistic explanations. Over time, the term has come to be applied more broadly, referring to anyone who insists on using an outlandish theory to explain an otherwise unexplainable event.
(While I’m on the subject, there’s a lot of pelicanism in the Shakespeare authorship debate. Those who argue that Shakespeare couldn’t have written his own works often claim, “No one man could have written something so brilliant!” So, naturally, it must have been someone else—because that’s more plausible, right?)
Pelicans have an odd connection to the west coast of America. When the Spanish explorers first arrived in the bay of San Francisco, they found an island teeming with pelicans. Naturally, they named it Pelican Island—or, in Spanish, Isla de los Alcatraces. The word alcatraz is derived from the Arabic al ghattas, meaning “sea eagle.” That’s how we ended up with Alcatraz Island, now more famous for its prison than its birds.
Interestingly, the English once used the word alcatras as well, but it seems we weren’t entirely sure what it referred to. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, alcatras might mean pelican… or it might mean albatross. To be fair, both are enormous sea birds, so mistaking one for the other is understandable. And that confusion only deepens the mystery—after all, if you can’t tell an albatross from a pelican, you might as well call them unidentified flying objects.
To close, I leave you with this fitting limerick, immortalising the pelican in verse:
“A gorgeous bird is the pelican,
Whose beak will hold more than his bellican.
He can put in his beak
Food enough for a week.
But I’m damned if I see how in hellecan.”