The Origin of the Flying Saucer


On June 24th 1947 Kenneth Arnold of Boise Idaho was flying his own personal airplane over the Washington Cascades. He was looking for a missing marine airplane, hoping for the $10,000 reward posted for its discovery. At 2:50 pm as he was traveling east over the mountains toward Mount Adams, he saw nine large metallic flying objects.

These crafts were about twenty-five miles away from his current location in the sky, at an elevation of ten thousand feet, travelin
g very, very fast. He noticed that they did not fly in straight lines like ordinary airplanes or make wide turns. Instead they dipped and swerved, following the mountain peaks all the way from Mount Rainier to Mount Adams. Arnold started the stopwatch on his airplane control panel. And calculating based on the distance between the two mountains (45 miles) and the time it took the objects to travel it, he concluded that they were flying at around 1,200 miles an hour.

Once the strange crafts vanished in the distance, Arnold went back to searching for the missing plane, until he landed in Yakima. Once he alighted, he went and reported the incident that happened during his search to the Civil Aeronautics Administration. the next day he flew to Pendleton, Oregon to continue the search, where the press mobbed him. Before Arnold’s sighting, there had been earlier reports of similar objects, and the press and U.S. government always referred to these objects as flying disks, as did Arnold.

He told reporters that the nine crafts were about 100-feet across, thin, and disk- or crescent-shaped. Although the front was round, the rear looked cropped off and came to a point. He said that he was amazed that that the objects had no tail, as on a normal aircraft, and that the crafts did not make any noise. When one of the reporters asked him how the objects maneuvered, Arnold replied that “they moved kind of like a saucer would move if someone skipped it across a lake.” The reporter wrote down that Arnold said the aircraft looked like flying saucers, and the misquote stuck.

Although this was not the first unidentified flying object ever reported, the publicity this event got set off a rash of new sightings. A number of people from the Seattle area and the Midwest contacted the media and reported seeing multiple flying objects day after day. On July 4th, a United Airlines flight crew reported seeing flying objects over Idaho. A few days after that on July 8th, another flying saucer was reported to have crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and the alien aircraft craze began to take off. Newspapers contacted military officials questioning these rumors, who in turn denied any experimental jet aircraft were being tested in the Washington Cascades.

Skeptics believe that Arnold could have been fooled by mirages created by the air inversions or by reflections of his own airplane off the atmosphere. It has even been suggested that what he’d seen was a swarm of meteors that flashed and burned out quickly. Despite these suggestions, no one could prove or disprove that Arnold was mistaken, including the air force, which launched its own investigation. Their future investigations led them to form a team that eventually turned into Project Blue Book, a formalized government investigation of UFO’s reported from 1952 to 1970.

The issue of whether UFOs are really flying crafts from outer space is as much a controversy on its own, and much of this, including its central term had its beginnings in the pacific northwest. It is interesting to note that although skeptics do not believe that Kenneth Arnold saw flying machines from other worlds, none of them accuse him of deliberately trying to pull the wool over our eyes either. Arnold’s clear honesty and candor led the way for open discussion of the phenomena.


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