英語翻譯
UFO
Origin:1953
It is no coincidence that the first reported sightings of unidentified flying objects came after the revelations of the secret military projects of World War II.America has always been a land of invention,from the cotton gin to the telephone,from the airplane to the Motel (1925).But wartime inventions raised the status of our technology from awe-inspiring to mythic.Working in total secrecy while spending billions of dollars building whole cities and manufacturing plants,the Manhattan Project succeeded in extracting the energy of the atom and building a doomsday weapon.What could not be accomplished by the American military working in secret?What else was being accomplished?
This was the background for sightings of peculiar objects in the skies,beginning in June 1947,in the Southwestern desert area which had so many secret military installations.The objects could be some new super-secret aircraft developed by the U.S.military.Or could they have been developed by some other technologically advanced beings,perhaps from beyond the Earth or the solar system?After all,we now knew that the technology to permit space travel was possible.And these elusive objects traveled far faster and maneuvered far more adroitly than even a jet airplane.
There were many skeptics,however,who considered the objects pie in the sky--or more exactly "flying saucers" (1947),since excited observers had described the objects as saucer-shaped.The name flying saucers caught on,making serious research difficult.As a 1953 book Flying Saucers Have Landed complained,"ever since the cliché 'flying saucer' was coined,the greatest and most exciting mystery of our age has been automatically reduced to the level of a music hall joke."
The believers preferred the solemn government designation unidentified flying object,first used in 1950.But that was a little weighty for everyday use,so in 1953 the acronym UFO was coined to replace it.It has dignified the pursuit of the elusive objects ever since.Those who study them have been known at least since 1959 as ufologists,and their field of study has been ufology.But most people still couldn't find the alien spaceship in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet of 1997,and the saucers--oops,UFOs--still haven't landed on the White House lawn.