What Was The Scientific Reaction To The Spate Of UFO Sightings In The 1950's?

Most scientists tended to pooh-pooh the excitement. Astronomers were particularly unimpressed. They pointed out that it was their business to watch the skies, but they had not seen any "flying saucers." Besides, they asked, where would they come from? Mars? Venus? From what we already knew of these planets it would be quite impossible for any humanlike creature to live there, since there was no air or water. And interplanetary probes, testing the atmosphere of Venus and taking closeup pictures of Mars, reinforced this opinion. Venus was found hot enough to melt zinc, Mars cold and dead as the moon. Few scientists considered the subject of UFO's interesting enough to devote any research time to it, or even to talk about it in public. It was rarely mentioned in their journals. One astronomer took the trouble to write a book showing how mirages could produce effects like the bobbing "saucers" seen at Mt. Rainier, or the lights at Lubbock.
It seemed likely that most of the "flying saucers" being seen were merely misconceptions of ordinary things like stars, meteors, airplanes, balloons, and mirages, not to exclude hoaxes and hallucinations.