Whose Turn Is It? The Medium Handoffs of the ET Topic, 1752–1951
Media History / Research Reference
Before Roswell: How Two Thousand Years of Alien Stories Built the American Mind
Full sequence, full source lists, every verified date — books to the summer of 1947.
In June 1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw something strange over the Cascades, a newspaperman coined "flying saucer," and the modern UFO age supposedly began. That's backwards. By 1947 the vocabulary — Martians, invasion, first contact, craft from another world — had already been built, tested, hoaxed, and mass-distributed for nearly two thousand years, going back to a Greek satirist writing about a war between Moon-kings and Sun-kings. This is the full paper trail, in order, with the receipts.
The idea didn't start with pulps. It started as a small, deliberately-read shelf of books — mostly stretching back to the 1600s, with one much older, rare outlier — small in volume the whole way, but where every core template got built. (Note: space travel counts here too, even without an actual alien encounter — a few entries below qualify on that basis alone.)
Ancient (c. 160–180 AD) — Standing AloneThe book-publisher wrinkle worth knowing: Burroughs' Mars serials reached readers through cheap magazines first. The actual hardcover editions — including The Chessmen of Mars, Nov 1922 — came from A.C. McClurg & Co. of Chicago, always the second, smaller-reach step after the pulp serialization had already done the work.
Spotlight: the first interplanetary war ever written (c. 160–180 AD)
1894 illustration by William Strang, depicting the Book One battle scene — Lucian, A True Story
A True Story (also known as True History), by Lucian of Samosata — a Greek-language satirist writing from Syria under the Roman Empire — opens with the author flatly announcing that everything to follow is a lie. It's a direct parody of historians and travel-writers like Herodotus and Ctesias, who dressed up impossible myths as literal geography. Lucian simply took that habit to its logical extreme.
His fifty-odd sailors set out past the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) and get blown off course by a storm. Their first landfall is an island with a river of wine full of fish and bears, marked with a sign showing Heracles and Dionysus once passed through, and trees shaped like women. It's only after leaving this island that a whirlwind carries the ship into the sky and drops it on the Moon, ruled by King Endymion — a mortal kidnapped from Earth in his sleep and made king in his absence. Lucian didn't invent that name: Endymion was already a famous figure in Greek myth, a shepherd loved by Selene the moon goddess and granted eternal sleep and youth — Lucian is deliberately borrowing a name his readers would instantly recognize as "the Moon guy." Endymion is at war with King Phaethon (also a borrowed name, mythologically the son of the sun god Helios), ruler of the Sun, over the right to colonize the Morning Star (Venus), which is uninhabited. The armies are where the text earns its "first sci-fi" reputation: Endymion's cavalry rides Hippogypians, three-headed vultures with wingspans wider than a warship's mainsail, backed by flea cavalry mounted on fleas the size of twelve elephants and "salad-wing" fighters riding birds feathered in lettuce. Phaethon answers with ant-riders, gnat-cavalry, cloud-centaurs, and vegetable-armed infantry — mushroom shields, asparagus spears, radish catapults, and Acorn-Dogs, part canine and part wood-ant. Endymion's forces alone are said to number over sixty million.
The Sun's side wins by simply blocking the Moon's light with cloud cover; both kings then sign a peace treaty. Back on Earth, Lucian and his crew are swallowed by a whale roughly two hundred miles long, fight a war against fish-people living inside its belly, and escape by lighting a fire and propping its mouth open. Later stops include a sea of milk, an island made of cheese, a vast ocean chasm they sail around, and the Island of the Blessed — a paradise of gold cities and emerald walls, ruled by Rhadamanthus, where Lucian meets Homer, Pythagoras, and the heroes of the Trojan War. There, they find sinners being punished, the worst reserved specifically for writers of lies and fantasies — Lucian names both Herodotus and Ctesias by name serving that sentence. As they leave, Odysseus slips them a private letter for his old lover Calypso, admitting he regrets ever leaving her. The book ends abruptly as the travelers sight an unnamed new continent, with Lucian promising the rest of the story in a sequel he never actually wrote.
It's satire from front to back — Lucian tells you outright none of it happened — but the war between the Moon and the Sun over colonizing a third world is, as far as anyone can document, the first interplanetary battle ever put into writing. Roswell sits nearly 1,800 years downstream of it.
One more echo worth naming: the Selene/Endymion myth Lucian borrowed his Moon-king's name from resurfaces independently almost two thousand years later in Sailor Moon (1990s) — the heroine's true identity, Princess Serenity, is a direct echo of Selene the moon goddess, and her love interest Prince Endymion replays the same moon-goddess-and-mortal-lover pairing nearly beat for beat.
By adaptations and citation frequency, not sales — the top handful and bottom handful are solid, the middle is a reasonable-but-approximate estimate.
Tier 1 — The TitansWhat genre this actually lived in, pre-1950
Science fiction is the overwhelming home of this topic, but not the only one: horror/weird fiction carries Lovecraft's ancient-astronaut material, satire is where Voltaire's Micromégas lives, comedy is the whole premise of Mr. Skygack, and nonfiction/journalism is essentially negligible before 1950 — Donald Keyhoe's first UFO book lands just past this window's edge, in 1950.
What literature invented vs. what the pulps industrialized
Literature's contribution, built entirely between 1880 and 1901, decades before a single pulp magazine existed: alien invasion as a concept, cold and advanced alien societies, Earth's counter-invasion, and first contact as a plot idea before the term even existed. The pulps then took that short list and multiplied it — space opera as an ongoing mode rather than a single event, the first genuinely alien alien design, the formalized term "first contact" itself, and sheer volume: dozens of stories a year, against one novel every several years out of literature. The precise way to put it: literature invented the themes; the pulps industrialized them.
Aug 25, 1835: the New York Sun runs the first of six articles claiming astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered life on the Moon — bison-like creatures, one-horned blue goats, miniature zebras, unicorns, fire-carrying bipedal beavers, and bat-winged humanoids (Vespertilio-homo) building temples. Real author: Sun reporter Richard Adams Locke, satirizing a genuinely popular astronomer of the day, Rev. Thomas Dick, who had seriously argued on religious grounds that the Moon must be inhabited.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Aug 25–31, 1835 | Full six-part series runs; believed at face value |
| Aug 31, 1835 | Rival editor James Gordon Bennett publicly calls it a hoax, same day series ends |
| Mid-Sept 1835 | Real mail from Europe arrives with no corroboration |
| Sept 16, 1835 | The Sun admits fabrication — 22 days out, no formal retraction |
Reach: became, by several accounts, the most circulated paper in the world at that moment; reprinted across the US and Europe; 60,000 pamphlet copies sold in a month. Herschel complained he was "pestered from all quarters... in English, French, Italian, and German." Believed as real for roughly three weeks — the first confirmed genuine mass-consciousness moment for this topic in American history.
Dec 1897–early 1898: Hearst's New York Evening Journal rewrites Wells as Fighters from Mars — Martians land in New Jersey, march on New York. The Boston Post independently relocates the invasion to Boston, tracing the exact route British troops marched in the Revolution. Both run it daily for about ten weeks, at the height of the Hearst–Pulitzer circulation war. Then comes the commissioned sequel, Edison's Conquest of Mars (Feb 1898, Garrett P. Serviss): Edison reverse-engineers the wrecked war machines, builds a disintegrator ray and an antigravity fleet, leads a united-Earth counter-invasion, finds a human slave colony on Deimos and "evidence" the Martians built the pyramids — a 19th-century ancient-aliens idea decades early — then floods the planet, wiping out the Martian population. Often credited as the first space battle in print. Legal only because the US had no copyright protection for foreign authors in 1898 — Wells had no say over any of it.
Biggest single reach of anything pre-pulp era: real, confirmed, and a one-time flash, never repeated as an ongoing channel.
Nov 1896: hundreds of witnesses in San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento watch a searchlight-equipped airship doing maneuvers no known craft could manage. By spring 1897 it's nationwide — Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri, Texas — thousands of sightings across at least 21 towns in a single five-day span at peak.
The confirmed hoaxes inside the wave
- Waterloo, Iowa (Apr 16, 1897) — the biggest fake: businessmen built a 40-foot airship for $60, wrote a fake pilot's logbook, paid a man to pose as its inventor. Thousands came to see it in person. Reported coast-to-coast before the materials were found too heavy to fly.
- Aurora, Texas (Apr 1897) — a supposed crash, dead alien pilot buried in the town cemetery, "hieroglyphic" papers found. Ran in the Dallas Morning News. Widely regarded by historians as invented.
- Rogers Park, Illinois — faked photos: a painted canvas rigged on wires.
- Omaha, Nebraska & Burlington, Iowa — groups of men admitted sending up balloons specifically to fool watchers.
Pulling every non-fiction thread in this history into one sorted list — because "was this ever taken as real" is a different question from "was this fiction," and it deserves its own table.
Tier 1 — Mass-news heavy hitters (national reach, sustained coverage)
- 1835 — The Great Moon Hoax
- 1896–97 — The Mystery Airships
- 1938 — Orson Welles's radio broadcast
Tier 2 — Local releases, real reach for their size
- 1639, Boston — John Winthrop's journal records a light moving between a boat and Charlestown for two to three hours; the men later found their boat back at its starting point despite the tide, with no memory of rowing back — a genuine "missing time" element in the primary source itself. Winthrop notes "divers other credible persons saw the same light," meaning real local, word-of-mouth awareness at the time. But it stayed a private manuscript for 151 years, first printed in 1790 — no public reach at the time it happened.
- 1865, St. Louis — the Daily Missouri Democrat reports trapper James Lumley finding a hieroglyph-marked meteor fragment near the actual Cadotte Pass, Montana (not the state of Missouri — a common mix-up). No confirmed circulation figure for the paper; era-typical estimate for a leading daily is 5,000–15,000 copies/day against a city of ~160,000 — several thousand real readers, on the conservative end, treating the possibility as credible news. No evidence it spread beyond St. Louis.
Tier 3 — Turned out not credible / fabricated
- 1884, Nebraska — a "celestial visitor" crash whose wreckage conveniently dissolved in rain; locals decades later said it never happened
- 1887, Georgia — a blue metallic sphere with writing on it; no follow-up, story vanished
- Plus the four 1897 airship hoaxes listed above (Waterloo, Aurora, Rogers Park, Omaha/Burlington)
Tier 4 — Genuine and institutionally serious, but never given to the public
- 1944–45, Foo Fighters — Allied pilots reported glowing spheres trailing aircraft; the OSS genuinely investigated as a possible secret enemy weapon
- 1946, Ghost Rockets — missile-shaped objects over Sweden, monitored by the direct predecessor to the CIA; Sweden suppressed its own files for 40 years — the public never saw this at all
The double function of every hoax on this list: real newspaper, real byline, sourced to sound credible — fabricated for money, attention, or a laugh. Each one still gave the public a real, brief reason to believe something extraordinary was happening. And each debunking built this exact subject's long-running reputation for being full of fakes, decades before Roswell. That reputation isn't a modern overlay. It's original equipment.
Mr. Skygack, From Mars (Oct 2, 1907, Chicago Day Book, creator A.D. Condo) is the first alien character in American comics — a Martian "special correspondent" comically misreading human behavior, syndicated via NEA/Scripps to papers including the Seattle Star, Milwaukee Journal, and Pittsburgh Press. A man wore a Skygack costume to a masquerade in 1908 — likely the first recorded sci-fi cosplay on record. The strip ran alone in its category for twenty-two years.
Buck Rogers debuted Jan 7, 1929 — but its first full year of storylines ("Meeting the Mongols," "Capturing the Mongol Emperor," "Pact of Perpetual Peace," "Defeat of the Mongol Rebels") fought only human Han/Mongol warlords carried over from the original pulp story. Its actual first alien content, "Tiger Men of Mars" (Jan 22–May 21, 1930), is confirmed by fan archivists as the strip's literal first space story — Martians abduct Wilma Deering, and the Tiger Men are revealed to have descended from tigers the way humans descended from apes. Later storylines added the Asterites (dwarf-like inhabitants of the Asteroid belt) and the Mekkanos (giant robots). Flash Gordon followed in 1934. Also in the roster: Connie (1927, space arc from 1938, an underused thread most research skips), Brick Bradford (1933), Speed Spaulding (1939).
Popularity ranking (no hard circulation data exists — treat the middle as approximate)
- Flash Gordon
- Buck Rogers
- Brick Bradford
- Connie
- Speed Spaulding
- Mr. Skygack
The single biggest research trap in this entire project: several of these magazines changed names mid-run, and counting only from the newest name makes them look artificially young and small. Corrected below.
| Magazine (full lineage) | Corrected years | Issues through 1947 |
|---|---|---|
| Amazing Stories | 1926–1947 | ~235 |
| Astounding (of Super-Science → Stories → Science-Fiction) | 1930–1947, not 1938 | ~210 (nearly double a "1938 start" estimate) |
| Wonder Stories (Science Wonder → Wonder → Thrilling Wonder) | 1929–1947, not just 1930–36 | ~151 (12 + 69 + ~70 — more than double a narrow count) |
| Startling Stories | 1939–1947 | ~45 |
| Planet Stories | 1939–1947 | ~33 |
The publisher families, name changes included
Weird Tales (1923) is a separate strand entirely — weird/horror fiction, home to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos from 1928. It's also where a young pulp writer named Donald Keyhoe — later "the first modern ufologist," author of The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950) — sold four stories here in the 1920s ("The Grim Passenger," 1925; "The Mystery Under the Sea" and "Through the Vortex," both 1926; "The Master of Doom," 1927), alongside years of work for Flying Aces. When Roswell happened, Keyhoe wasn't a layperson borrowing a vocabulary. He'd spent two decades manufacturing it professionally.
Argosy/All-Story: the vehicle that predates its own content by 16 years
Frank Munsey's Argosy became the actual first pulp magazine in October 1896 — cheap paper, adult audience, every genre imaginable — and ran zero alien content for its first sixteen years. Here's the complete list of what changed that, before Amazing Stories existed:
- 1912 (Feb–Jul) — Under the Moons of Mars (Burroughs), All-Story — introduces John Carter, Barsoom, the Tharks
- 1913 — The Gods of Mars (Burroughs)
- 1913–14 — The Warlord of Mars (Burroughs)
- 1916 — Thuvia, Maid of Mars (Burroughs)
- 1918 (Jun) — "The Moon Pool" (Merritt)
- 1918 (Jul) — Palos of the Dog Star Pack (Giesy) — astral projection to a planet orbiting Sirius
- 1919 — The Conquest of the Moon Pool (Merritt)
- 1920 (Aug–Sep) — The Metal Monster (Merritt) — a hive-mind of living metal; Lovecraft called it the most remarkable depiction of the utterly alien he'd encountered
- 1922 (Feb–Mar) — The Chessmen of Mars (Burroughs)
- 1923 (Sep) — "The Face in the Abyss" (Merritt) — borderline, more lost-race fantasy than strictly extraterrestrial
Ten entries, three authors, eleven years. Then nothing until 1926. (Side note: Argosy circled back to this exact subject at the very end of its life — its 1960s–70s run included special annual issues specifically on Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, and UFOs, before ceasing publication in 1979.)
Amazing Stories, 1926–1929: the honest percentage
Five confirmed alien-content stories in this window: "The Fate of the Poseidonia" (1927, Clare Winger Harris), "The Master Mind of Mars" (1927, Burroughs, rejected elsewhere partly for satirizing religious fundamentalism), "The Return of the Martians" (1928), "The Skylark of Space" (1928, first true space opera), and "The Other Side of the Moon" (1929). Against an estimated 200–360 total stories published in that window, that's a confirmed floor of roughly 2% — not a ceiling, since a full issue-by-issue check hasn't been done, but the honest, sourced number as it stands.
Science Wonder Stories, 1929–1930: the other new arrival
Twelve issues before merging into "Wonder Stories" in June 1930. Confirmed content: "The Alien Intelligence" (Jack Williamson, July–Aug 1929, a two-part serial that's more a Merritt-style lost-world tale than strict extraterrestrial contact), and a genuinely alien-heavy November 1929 issue carrying "My Little Martian Sweetheart" (a poem), "The Space-Dwellers" (Raymond Z. Gallun), and "The Green Intelligence" (Harley S. Aldinger) all in one number. A working floor of 3–4 out of 12 issues confirmed, same caveat as above.
Astounding Stories, 1930: the vehicle-predates-content pattern, a third time
Astounding's first issue (cover-dated Jan 1930, on newsstands Dec 1929) was checked in full — seven stories, and not one of them is alien content: a mad-scientist beetle-monster tale, a cave horror, an interdimensional "fourth dimension" story, a mind-theft plot, a disappearing professor, a war story, and an invisibility tale. The magazine's actual first alien content arrives the very next issue: "Spawn of the Stars" (Charles Willard Diffin, Feb 1930) — amoeba-like aliens invading Earth inside comet-like globes, described by critics at the time as a pulpier, less subtle retread of War of the Worlds.
Comic books as a format began in 1935 and treated aliens as a minor gimmick for most of the next fifteen years. Five publishers touched the subject before 1947 — but only one committed to it as a real, sustained line.
| Title | Publisher | Total issues |
|---|---|---|
| New Fun Comics | DC/National | 6 |
| Marvel Mystery Comics | Timely | 91 |
| Mystic Comics | Timely | 10 |
| Planet Comics | Fiction House | 73 |
| Science Comics | Fox Feature Syndicate | 8 |
| Startling Comics | Nedor/Standard | 53 |
- DC: New Fun Comics #3 (1935, "Don Drake on the Planet Saro"); Action Comics #1 (1938, Superman's alien origin — background lore only, no space threats until Brainiac in 1958)
- Timely: Marvel Mystery Comics #3 (1940, Human Torch vs. Martians); Mystic Comics #2–3 (1940, "Space Rangers")
- Fiction House: Planet Comics (1940–53) — the real volume leader within comics specifically, though Superman and the Human Torch still vastly outsold it overall
- Fox Feature Syndicate: Science Comics (1940) — "Cosmic Carson" vs. the Fang Men of Jupiter, averaging 345,000+ copies/issue at peak, one of the best-documented circulation figures in this whole research
- Nedor/Standard: "Lance Lewis, Space Detective" — Saturnian pirates and alien crab-men, running through Startling Comics #53 (Sept 1948)
Ruled out: the widely-repeated claim that Fawcett's Captain Midnight pivoted to alien threats in the late 1940s doesn't hold up — his actual stories are WWII-espionage content, not extraterrestrials.
Where these company names actually came from
Marvel: 1939, Timely Publications (founded by Martin Goodman) → 1951, Atlas Comics → 1961, Marvel Comics, starting with Fantastic Four #1. DC: 1934, National Allied Publications (Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson) → 1937, Detective Comics, Inc. → 1939, All-American Publications (Max Gaines) → 1946, the three merge into National Comics Publications → 1961, renamed National Periodical Publications → 1977, formally becomes DC Comics — the initials had informally stood for "Detective Comics" since the late '30s.
Film: five isolated productions across 38 years, never a sustained tradition — A Trip to the Moon (1902), A Trip to Mars (1910), A Message from Mars (1913/1921), Aelita (1924), Just Imagine (1930), plus the Flash Gordon serials (1936–40). This industry was centered in Hollywood, not New York.
Radio: essentially one entry — Orson Welles, Oct 30, 1938, CBS.
Animation: Trip on Mars (1924, Fleischer Studios) is the only genuine pre-Roswell entry. Bob Clampett's John Carter of Mars test reel (~1936) was never released to any audience. Marvin the Martian's debut, Haredevil Hare, is 1948 — technically after Roswell.
Fictional settings, ranked
- Mars — the default setting across nearly the entire history
- The Moon — second most common
- Invented planets (Mongo, Saro, Bronson Alpha)
- Saturn/its moons (Voltaire's companion character; Connie's Titan arc)
- Sirius (Voltaire, 1752; Palos of the Dog Star Pack, 1918)
- Jupiter's moons (Connie's "Master of the Jovian Moons")
- Non-planetary/dimensional origin (Merritt's Moon Pool, Metal Monster)
The whole sequence, one flagship name per transition: Wells's War of the Worlds begins it → Fighters from Mars/Edison's Conquest of Mars takes it to newsprint → Mr. Skygack takes it to a new medium → John Carter takes it into the pulps → Amazing Stories gives it a dedicated genre → Cthulhu gives weird fiction its own strand → Wonder Stories is the second pulp competitor → Buck Rogers' "Tiger Men of Mars" is the strips' second wave → Astounding's "Spawn of the Stars" is the third pulp brand → Flash Gordon is the strips' visual peak → New Fun Comics brings it into comic books → Orson Welles gives radio its one spike → Planet Comics finally gives comics a dedicated line → Foo Fighters and Ghost Rockets run the real-world thread quietly alongside all of it → Kenneth Arnold and Roswell are the endpoint.
This isn't a handful of cherry-picked examples. This is every named book, pulp story, strip, comic, and film in the entire survey, sorted by what actually recurs in it. Some patterns show up in a clear majority of the corpus; a few show up only once or twice but are still worth naming because of how directly later work descends from them.
A. The Conflict Frame — Invasion Is the Overwhelming DefaultThe count, stated plainly: of everything named across this whole survey, direct invasion or territorial conflict is the frame in a clear majority of cases — peaceful first contact shows up exactly twice. Hybrid-creature and hive-mind alien designs recur independently across a 1,800-year span without any of those authors having read each other. And the underlying throughline across all eight categories is the same: almost none of this is really about aliens. It's earthly conflict, colonization, class struggle, and romance, wearing a Martian or lunar costume so each era's audience could look at its own anxieties from a safe distance — true whether the costume was worn by a 2nd-century Greek satirist or a 1938 radio play.
The oldest Baby Boomers, born 1946, were infants when Kenneth Arnold made his sighting. Real childhood media literacy lands around age six to eight — already inside the post-Roswell film-and-TV boom. The generation that actually grew up on the pulps and strips is the tail of the Greatest Generation and most of the Silent Generation, born roughly 1901–1945 — the same generation that witnessed and interpreted 1947 in real time. Kenneth Arnold himself, born 1915, was eleven to thirty-two years old across the exact stretch this vocabulary was being built.
What Boomers actually grew up on — six channels, not three
- Comics, TV, and film — the expected "second wave" (Silver Age comics from 1956, the 1950s film boom, early TV)
- Newspapers/broadcast news — genuinely major: the 1952 flap alone produced over 16,000 newspaper items in six months
- Magazines — Life's "Have We Visitors From Space?" (April 1952) reached over 350 newspapers
- New original fiction — Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, all actively publishing new work, not reprints
- A delayed slice of the old literature — Burroughs' Mars books, out of print through the 1940s–50s, deliberately reissued in paperback in 1962–63, landing exactly as the older half of the Boomer cohort hit their teens
The founding generation — Keyhoe, and the era's other early interpreters — is now entirely gone. Everyone active in this subject today, including its oldest living voices, inherited the vocabulary secondhand through a completely different media wave.
- Pulps: ISFDB (isfdb.org) — full tables of contents by title/author/story. Internet Archive (archive.org) — scanned full issues. Luminist Archive (luminist.org/archives/PU/). pulpmagazines.org/pulp-magazines-to-read/
- Argosy specifically: onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=argosyus — comicbookplus.com/?cid=2501 — luminist.org/archives/PU/ARG_1.htm
- Burroughs bibliography: en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Edgar_Rice_Burroughs
- Comics: Grand Comics Database (comics.org) — full issue-by-issue synopses. Digital Comic Museum (digitalcomicmuseum.com) — free public-domain Golden Age scans. Comic Book Plus (comicbookplus.com)
Two naming traps worth remembering when you dig into these sources yourself: Planet Stories (the pulp magazine) and Planet Comics (the Fiction House comic book) are different companies, different formats, near-identical names. And any pulp that changed its name mid-run — Astounding's 1938 rename, the Gernsback-to-Pines Wonder Stories handoff — will look artificially young if you only count from its newest title.
— Compiled from primary-source research, 1752 to 1947 —
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