Hermann Oberth

Hermann Oberth was one of the three founding fathers of modern rocketry, alongside Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose 1923 doctoral thesis on rocket-powered spaceflight and subsequent work with Germany's Verein für Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel) directly shaped the V-2 program and, through his protege Wernher von Braun, the postwar American and Soviet space programs. His towering technical credibility made his public statements on UFOs unusually consequential: in a widely reported 1954 magazine article and subsequent statements, Oberth argued that some flying saucer reports could represent genuine extraterrestrial spacecraft, reasoning from his own expertise that no known human propulsion technology of the era could account for the maneuvers described by credible witnesses. Unlike most rocket scientists of his generation, who avoided the topic to protect institutional standing, Oberth engaged with ufologists and lent his name to organizations studying the phenomenon, giving early flying-saucer researchers a rare endorsement from an unimpeachable technical authority. He later grew more circumspect in his public statements, but his early advocacy is still cited by researchers as evidence that serious aerospace engineers of the mid-twentieth century did not consider the extraterrestrial hypothesis inherently absurd. He died in 1989.