
© Unknown
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.