UFOs on the Niagara Frontier

Are we alone out there? While many of us still ponder that question, it’s no longer a question that receives the sort of mainstream media attention that it once did. At some point, we stopped thinking of UFO sightings as news. Maybe it was around the time society started thinking of people who see UFOs as fringe kooks. But through the 1950s and 60s, everyday people made reports– and those reports were in turn, put in print.

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A joking paragraph in 1951 Courier-Express article

Here are a few of those reports from Buffalo area newspapers. They show the cross-section of opinion with a mix of straightforward reporting, sensationalism, and skepticism.

Since conspiracy theories abound,  rest assured the only edits made to these images were, in some cases, taking the date and name of the newspaper from the page on which the story occurred,  and resizing it and pasting it to the top of the story. Nothing else was changed from the microfilmed copies of the newspapers.

 

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This story was about DC, and made no mention of Buffalo.

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Courier Express, 1969

 

This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com

Published by

Steve Cichon

Steve Cichon writes about Buffalo’s pop culture history. His stories of Buffalo's past have appeared more than 1600 times in The Buffalo News. He's a proud Buffalonian helping the world experience the city he loves. Since the earliest days of the internet, Cichon's been creating content celebrating the people, places, and ideas that make Buffalo unique and special. The 25-year veteran of Buffalo radio and television has written five books and curates The Buffalo Stories Archives-- hundreds of thousands of books, images, and audio/visual media which tell the stories of who we are in Western New York.