UFO, the United Farmers of Ontario! Wow!
I'd say chances are slim that the Ontario farmers would have chosen such a name for themselves if they had thought that the acrononym would make people think they were aliens. But they didn't worry about that, so chances are that people back then didn't think that aliens were making regular stops on the Earth during their interstellar flights between 61 Cygni and Alpha Centauri. Back then, other kinds of beings were all the rage: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, very very seriously believed in fairies and tried to photograph them too. Or at least he believed that others had photographed them.
Sir Arthur Conan Coyle contemplating fairies.
It so happened that the real military breakthrough for aircraft coincided with the decision of aliens to fly their saucer-shaped spacecraft across the light-years to the Earth and come here to show themselves to farmers and other folks in Ontario and Iowa and Oklahoma and what not some time after 1940. Talk about coincidence. In 1939 flying saucers were unheard of and airplanes were still a curiosity much more than a fact of life. They were toys for adventure-seekers like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, not something you could expect to see in the sky every week.
Charles Lindbergh. Not a man you could expect to fly past over your head on a regular basis between 1914 and 1939.
But in 1939 Canada declared war on Germany and joined the Allies in the Second World War, and military airplanes no doubt became a much more common sight in Canada. And in 1940, the Ontario farmers called their UFO union quits. Then after the war the Roswell incidence caused a stir, and people started throwing hubcaps into the air and photographing them as they flew by, and they may have received money for calling their hubcaps spaceships and offering their photographs to newspapers. And suddenly UFOs were all the rage.
A hubcap UFO.
Now in a sense the UFO-farmers are back. I suppose it's them who make the spectacular crops circles in fields. And if a crop circle will earn you more money than a barrel of wheat, why not?
Artwork by farmers in Ontario?
Ann
