The UFO sighting that coined the term ‘Flying Saucer’

(Before It's News)

Kenneth Arnold holds artist conception based on his description of the UFOs

Kenneth Arnold’s Sighting

On June 24, 1947, the civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects, glowing bright blue-white, flying in a “V” formation over Washington’s Mount Rainier. He estimated the objects’ flight speed at 1700 mph and compared their motion to “a saucer if you skip it across water.” (In newspaper reports of Arnold’s sighting, this description was mistakenly taken to mean that the objects were shaped like saucers, leading to the popularization of the term “flying saucer” as a synonym for UFO.) Though Arnold said he initially thought what he had seen were test flights of military aircraft, the military later said they had been conducting no test flights during the time of the incident. A prospector on Mt. Adams saw the objects at around the same time as Arnold, bolstering his story.

After news of Arnold’s sightings hit the media, similar sightings began to be reported in increasing numbers across the United States. Also in July 1947, a Roswell, New Mexico newspaper claimed that personnel of the nearby U.S. Army airfield had recovered a crashed flying saucer. The Army, in turn, explained that the crash was that of a wrecked weather balloon. (Though the Roswell incident was mostly forgotten until the late 1970s, around that time several eyewitnesses began to come forward claiming the “weather balloon” was in fact an alien craft; conspiracy theories regarding Roswell still abound among ufologists.)

Kenneth Arnold’s report to Army Air Forces (AAF) intelligence, dated July 12, 1947, which includes annotated sketches of the typical craft in the chain of nine objects.

Governmental Response 

In response to the increasing number of UFO sightings that followed Arnold’s report, the U.S. Air Force began an investigation of these reports, called Operation Sign, in 1948. Among the initial theories of the project’s participants was that the UFOs were actually types of sophisticated Soviet aircraft, although there was also a hypothesis that they might be extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Regarding the June 1947 sighting over Mount Rainier, Air Force investigators deemed both Arnold and the prospector to be credible witnesses, but concluded that what they had seen was a mirage, not actual flying ships.

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