To those on the ground, the flying saucer didn't appear to depend on the same stresses and strains as the jet plane or helicopter to get into the air. Rather than heaving itself up towards the sky, it seemed to swoop effortlessly down from above. In his 1959 study, Flying Saucers: A modern myth of things seen in the skies, the eminent psychologist C J Jung interpreted the flying saucer as a contemporary expression of the human desire for wholeness and unity, the round spinning disc representing 'an integration of the individual psyche with the forces of the cosmos'.

Hollywood had already come to a similar conclusion. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, released in 1952, the alien Klaatu landed his flying saucer on the Washington mall to stop the inhabitants of Earth from warring with each other. His intervention evidently worked: by 1956's Forbidden Planet the human race is able to send a saucer of its own, the United Planets Cruiser C57-D, out into deep space.

The appearance of the flying saucer in popular culture marked a transition from mechanical forms of energy transfer to electronic ones: an early model transistor being tested in 1947, the same year as the first saucer sightings. Like radio waves, TV signals and atomic energy, whatever powered and steered the flying saucer remained a strange and unseen mystery. Or so it seemed.

In a 1929 article for Science and Invention magazine, 'How I Control Gravity', physicist T Townsend Brown expounded on his observation that a high-voltage electric current passing through a capacitor caused a tiny force to move it towards its positive pole. Postulating that there might be a connection between gravity and electromagnetic fields, he foresaw a radical new means of transportation. 'Perhaps even the fantastic 'space cars' and the promised visit to Mars may be the final outcome,' he mused, 'Who can tell?'

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