Joe Louis & Flying Saucers (1947)

“Search for Opponent for Louis Resembles Flying Saucer Hunt,” Evening Star [Washington DC], Tuesday, July 8, 1947, sports page A -14.

While the phenomenon now termed UFOs goes back much farther, it became an identified phenomenon with Kenneth Arnold's sighting of June 24, 1947, that resulted in an interview and early report on June 25 (my birthday before I was born), and then the sighting was misquoted in the press as a ‘flying saucer’ on June 26. Then, both sightings and the phenomenon called ‘flying saucers’ proliferated rapidly throughout American culture, also resulting in a problem for the U.S. military. Here, we see it took a week and a half at most for the ‘flying saucer’ to become a cultural phenomenon. Note also that coincidentally the application here is to African-American boxer Joe Louis.

Flying Saucers & Afrofuturism — Counternarratives Study Guide