This concept has occasionally been used in an attempt to explain at least some types of UFO phenomena, perhaps most notably by Kenneth Arnold, whose 1947 sighting of a UFO over Mt. Rainier,Washington, began the modern era of UFO research. While climbing Mount Everest in 1933, Frank Smythe saw two dark objects floating in the sky. They looked like balloons but had short wings and pulsated in and out as though they were breathing. They hovered silently for a minute or two before being obscured by mist. John Philip Bessor of Pennsylvania wrote the U.S. Air Force in 1947 offering his theory about the nature of flying disks. He claimed they were a form of space animal capable of materialization and dematerialization that may be carnivorous.
Countess Zoe Wassilko-Serecki wrote in the September 1955 issue of American Astrology magazine that creatures live in the upper atmosphere-large luminous bladders of colloidal silicones that assume different shapes depending on whether they are stationary or moving. They feed on energy and have appeared more frequently in the lower atmosphere since power production became widespread.
In 1958 Trevor James Constable wrote They Live in the Sky, in which he claimed that aerial entities live in the upper atmosphere and are occasionally visible as meteors or UFOs. Constable even made infrared photographs of the animals. In 1959 Kenneth Arnold, who first spotted flying saucers in 1947, concluded that UFOs are space animals: living organisms in the atmosphere that have the power to change their density and appearance.
In 1962 John M. Cage theorized that UFOs are sentient life-forms that follow airplanes much as dolphins follow ships. The concept has fallen recently into disfavor, simply for being nonparsimonious. However, the existence of such life-forms, whether indigenous to earth or arriving from elsewhere, is not impossible; and certain types of Fortean phenomena, especially immense falls of organic matter, might well be evidence in favor of such a possibility. The subject should probably not be considered to be closed; there continues to be speculation and even controversy over it.
