No, actually, one local newspaper printing a headline that was quickly withdrawn the next day when it was revealed it was a weather balloon, isn't meaningful.
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Here's the thing. in 1947, no one was thinking "Aliens" when talking about "Flying Saucers" or Flying Discs". The assumption was that these were some new Soviet aircraft (perhaps made with captured German Technology).
That didn't come until later, when pulp publisher Raymond Palmer started promoting conspiracy theories of Richard Shaver, claiming what were previously promoted as fiction stories were true and flying saucers were proof of that. Then Hollywood took the ball and ran with it.
Here's the interesting thing about "aliens". They reflect what Hollywood tells us they should be. In the 1950's, you had a series of Sci-Fi movies like "
The Day the Earth Stood Still" where they posited that aliens looked just like us. And lo and behold, you had a bunch of "Contactees" from the 1950 through the 1960s who encountered aliens who looked "just like us".
Then in the 1970's, Hollywood created the "Gray Alien", starting with the TV movie "
An Interrupted Journey" and followed up with "
Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and lo and behold, THAT'S what people started seeing.
So, no, there are no "little green men", or "Little Gray Proctologists".