Cigar-shaped UFOs

In The Girl in the Glass, Declan wonders if people will notice their flying ship. Officer Riggs explains, “We’re moving too fast for anyone to snap more than a few blurry pictures, and only a crazy person would report a flying cigar.”

In reality, throughout the 1950s, amidst the Cold War and “flying saucer” craze, cigar-shaped UFOs were a prominent part of witness reports. Some sightings were investigated by the U.S. military's Project Blue Book, but many were attributed to prosaic causes like weather balloons, or remained unexplained. 

Notable 1950s sightings include the cigar-shaped UFO seen over Oloron-Sainte-Marie, France on October 17, 1952. Numerous people reported seeing a large, cigar-shaped object flying through the sky. Another memorable sighting took place in March 1954 over Malaysia, with multiple CIA documents reporting cigar-shaped objects leaving white trails in their wake.

The U.S. Air Force investigated thousands of UFO reports between 1952 and 1969 through Project Blue Book. A majority of sightings were eventually attributed to natural phenomena or misidentified conventional objects. Weather balloons, for instance, were a common explanation given by Air Force investigators. However, at the end of the project in 1969, 701 of the 12,618 total sightings remained officially unexplained, though the Air Force maintained that none showed any evidence of alien technology or posed a national security threat. 

The idea of cigar-shaped UFOs gained traction again in the 1990s, after video footage captured by ufologist José Escamilla near Roswell, New Mexico, showed blurry, rod-like objects with undulating fins or wings moving at high speed.

In 2017, cigar-shaped UFOs returned to the media when astronomers detected the first confirmed object from another star to visit our solar system. The object, named Oumuamua (Hawaiian for a messenger from afar arriving first), was up to one-quarter mile long and highly elongated, appearing cigar-shaped. Its aspect ratio was greater than any comet or asteroid previously observed in our solar system. As it tumbled through space, its brightness changed periodically. Some researchers, including those at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, theorized it could be an alien probe using a “solar sail”. 

Cigar-shaped UFOs

Artist’s rendition of Oumuamua