Before June 24, 1947, terms such as UFOs and flying saucers had not entered popular vocabulary. Then, on that afternoon 70 years ago, it all changed because of Kenneth Arnold:
“Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted by Idaho Pilot.”
Arnold reported seeing near Mount Rainier nine “circular-type” objects flying in formation at more than twice the speed of sound.
His was the first widely reported UFO sighting in this country, and it set off a wave of other reported sightings.
In a now-declassified document, the Air Force Materiel Command wrote it off: “The report cannot bear even superficial examination, therefore, must be disregarded.”
Another Air Force document concluded, “It is the Air Force conclusion that the objects of this sighting were due to a mirage.”
For Arnold, it stung.
He didn’t consider himself some kind of kook. He had over 4,000 hours of mountain high-altitude pilot time; he was in the Idaho search and rescue.
“I have been subjected to ridicule, much loss of time and money, newspaper notoriety, magazine stories, reflections on my honesty, my character, my business dealings,” Arnold wrote in his 1952 book, “Coming of the Saucers.”
A long time ago, in 1977, I interviewed Arnold after reaching him by phone.
He died in 1984 at age 68, and in all those years, and with me, he never wavered in his descriptions.
You can draw a direct line between what Arnold repeatedly recounted in detail to FBI and military investigators and our collective fascination with the possibility that aliens have visited us.
Bright flash lit the sky
Arnold’s sighting of the craft was the 1947 version of a story going viral.
“It was a beautiful day. Just as clear as a bell,” Arnold said. He was flying from Chehalis to Yakima and decided to spend an hour or so searching for a downed C-46 Marine transport that had crashed into the southwest side of Mount Rainier.
There was a $5,000 reward for finding it.
It was at 3 p.m., he remembered, “when a very bright flash lit up the plane and the sky around me.”
At first, Arnold thought it was the sun reflecting off another plane.
“But the flash happened again, and that’s when I saw where it was coming from. It came spasmodically from a chain of nine circular-type aircraft way up from the vicinity of Mount Rainier,” said Arnold.
From Yakima, Arnold then flew to an air show in Pendleton, Ore. The next day, on June 25, he stopped by the local newspaper, the East Oregonian. He wanted to know if the military had been testing secret warplanes in the area.
He ended up talking to reporter Bill Bequette, who, in subsequent years, remembered that Arnold “came off as honest, level-headed and credible,” said a story in the East Oregonian.
So Bequette wrote a brief story about what Arnold said he witnessed.
But the brief also went out to The Associated Press, got picked up by numerous newspapers, and the furor began. For the first time, a mass-media story and subsequent headlines used the term “flying saucers.”
There were “many long hours of fruitless flying with a camera, trying and failing to find anything like his saucers again,” says Martin Shough, a well-regarded researcher of the UFO phenomenon, who has written a detailed analysis of Arnold’s account.
In an email, Shough, who lives in the Highlands of Scotland, says, “I am resigned to never knowing what Arnold saw.”
He concludes, “Seventy years on, when so much of the flying saucer mythology that Kenneth Arnold triggered has been explained away, it is somewhat embarrassing that Arnold’s own sighting remains obstinately resistant.
“But there it is.”
