Flying Saucers Attack Winona!

"Flying Saucers Bombard City; Alert Air Raid Warden Recovers One" reads an article from the July 11th, 1947 issue of the Winona Republican-Herald. Did UFOs really descend on my hometown one post-war summer day, darkening the bluffs with their fleet and sending the townsfolk into a panic?

No. As quickly related in this gimmicky PR piece for the Civil Air Patrol vis-a-vis Major Joseph Parks of Minneapolis, "liaison officer between the army air corps and the Minnesota Civil Air Patrol, who happened to be in Winona on business." Parks and his "aides", consisting of Lieutenant H.C. Aakre, commander of the Winona unit of the CAP, and Sgt. Robert Reynolds, army recruiter and CAP public relations officer, bombarded the city of Winona with novelty pie plates stamped 

Join The 

Civil Air Patrol

Army Recruiting Station

Post Office, Winona, Minn.

Parks clearly had tongue firmly in cheek when visiting to bolster CAP recruitment numbers. The "saucers" were taken to Parks and his aides who, after studying the alien object for a half-hour, "emerged and announced that they, too, would swear that the missile was a pie plate IF they didn't know about the 'flying saucers.'"

"We are, frankly, disturbed that our cosmic visitors are so acquainted with our pattern of life," Parks is quoted, "but we appreciate the publicity...." Clearly. The piece, puff clearly provided by Parks that rides the line between eye-rolling and damn entertaining, goes on to promote "aviation training opportunities available to youths...between 15 and 18..." to become cadets in the Air Patrol, and take what I have to assume are supervised flying lessons. "CAP instructors and members only need to pay for the gas and oil, which runs about 95 cents an hour."

Well, flying saucers must have been either in the air, or on the minds, of Americans in general–and Winonans in specific, for the purposes of this post–because tarnation if that very same issue of the Winona Republican-Herald didn't have a second saucer-centric article in it. This one from a surly Winonan who diagnoses the then-prolific saucer sightings in Blair, Wisconsin (about 45 mins NE, across the Mississippi from Winona) as hallucinations of taunting, empty dinner plates, brought on by rising food costs. Being truly Midwestern, and perhaps-not-entirely endemic to the upper portion I've spent nearly four decades in, a wisecracking auto dealer adds his 2¢ with a loaded jab about some stolen wheels. Leave it to a Minnesotan to make a tongue-in-cheek reference to his woes as a passive-aggressive way to complain about/add humor to a larger issue.