Mother Ship - in Science Fiction and UFOs

In Science Fiction and UFOs

The term has achieved prominence in science fiction and in UFO lore, which extend the idea to apply to spaceships serving as the heart of a fleet. The concept of mothership (almost always spelled as a single word) clearly implies that the other ships in the fleet are dependent on the mothership for at least some services. Motherships are essentially the sci-fi equivalent to modern flagships. Typically, a mothership will take up station in an area and remain there for long periods, while smaller ships sortie to interesting destinations. Sometimes a mothership is large enough to operate alone, or is so huge that it contains a fleet in its body.

A variant of the term mother ship can be traced to the hundreds of claimed UFO sightings in the U.S. during the summer of 1947, when a woman in Palmdale, California was quoted by contemporary press as describing a "mother saucer (with a) bunch of little saucers playing around it." The term was further popularized in UFO lore through the UFO sightings of George Adamski in the 1950s, who claimed to sometimes see large cigar shaped Venusian motherships out of which flew smaller sized flying saucers.