For more than two hundred years, since the invention of the hot-air balloon, people all over the world have been terrified of unidentified flying objects because their very existence makes man feel vulnerable from an attack from above. The War of the Worlds radio-broadcast phenomenon was far from the first such incident. The first pictorially recorded panic over a UFO event occurred in August of 1783, shortly after two French brothers named Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier secured patronage from the king of France to design and fly a hot-air balloon—the eighteenth-century version of a modern-day defense contract. During one of the Montgolfiers’ early flight tests, a balloon got caught in a thunderstorm and crashed in a small French village called Gonesse. The peasants that inhabited the town thought the balloon was a monster attacking them from the sky. A pen-and-ink drawing from that time shows men with pitchforks and scythes ripping the crashed balloon to shreds. Townsfolk in the background can be seen running away, flailing their arms above their heads in fear. From this story, it is easy to see that with any new form of flight comes the archetypal fear of an attack from above. In the more than two hundred years since, these fears have taken dramatic twists and turns.
Twenty years into the American jet age, in the mid-1960s, fears of unidentified flying objects continued to shape cultural thinking and spawn industries. By then, millions of Americans correctly believed that various factions inside the U.S. government were actively engaged in a cover-up regarding UFOs. Many citizens believed the government was trying to cover up the existence of extraterrestrial beings; people did not consider the fact that by overfocusing on Martians, they would pay less attention to other UFO realities, namely, that these were sightings of radical aircraft made by men. By the late 1960s, the two government agencies at the forefront of citizens’ wrath—the CIA and the Air Force—had been using cover and deception as tools to keep classified programs out of the public eye. Cover conceals the truth, and deception conveys false information. From cover stories about airplane crashes to deception campaigns about covert UFO study programs, both organizations had created complex webs of lies. How exactly a deception campaign works on ordinary people is best exemplified by this factual, dawn-of-the-jet-age U.S. Army Air Corps tale.
In 1942, when the jet engine was first being developed, the Army Air Corps desired to keep the radical new form of flight a secret until the military was ready to unveil the technology on its own terms. Before the jet engine, airplanes flew by propellers, and before 1942, for most people it was a totally foreign concept for an airplane to fly without the blades of a propeller spinning around. With the jet engine, in order to maintain silence on this technological breakthrough, the Army Air Corps entered into a rather benign strategic deception campaign involving a group of its pilots. Every time a test pilot took a Bell XP-59A jet aircraft out on a flight test over the Muroc dry lake bed in California’s Mojave Desert, the crew attached a dummy propeller to the airplane’s nose first. The Bell pilots had a swath of airspace in which to perform flight tests but every now and then a pilot training on a P-38 Lightning would cruise into the adjacent vicinity to try to get a look at the airplane. The airplane was seen trailing smoke, and eventually, rumors started to circulate at local pilot bars. Pilots wanted to know what was being hidden from them.
According to Edwards Air Force Base historian Dr. James Young, the chief XP-59A Bell test pilot, a man by the name of Jack Woolams, got an idea. He ordered a gorilla mask from a Hollywood prop house. On his next flight, Woolams removed the mock-up propeller from the nose of his jet airplane and put on the gorilla mask. When a P-38 Lightning came flying nearby for a look, Woolams maneuvered his airplane close enough so that the P-38 pilot could look inside the cockpit of the jet plane. The Lightning pilot was astonished. Instead of seeing Woolams, the pilot saw a gorilla flying an airplane—an airplane that had no propeller. The stunned pilot landed and went straight to the local bar, where he sat down and ordered a stiff drink. There, he began telling other pilots what he had definitely seen with his own eyes. His colleagues told him he was drunk, that what he was saying was an embarrassment, and that he should go home. Meanwhile, the concept of the gorilla mask caught on among other Bell XP-59A test pilots and soon Woolams’s colleagues joined the act. Over the course of the next few months, other P-38 Lightning pilots spotted the gorilla flying the propellerless airplane. Some versions of the historical record have the psychiatrist for the U.S. Army Air Corps getting involved, helping the Lightning pilots to understand how a clear-thinking fighter pilot could become disoriented at altitude and believe he had seen something that clearly was not really there. Everyone knows that a gorilla can’t fly an airplane. Whether or not the psychiatrist really did get involved—and if he did, whether he was aware of the gorilla masks—remains ambiguous to Dr. Craig Luther, a contemporary historian at Edwards Air Force Base. But for the purposes of a strategic deception campaign, the point is clear: no one wants to be mistaken for a fool.