“Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted by Idaho Pilot,” a page two article in the Chicago Sun declared on June 26, 1947. “Speed estimated at 1,200 miles an hour when seen 10,000 feet up near Mount Rainier.”
Mount Rainier isn’t located near Chicago but just south of the city of Seattle instead. The distance between the two locales didn’t prevent the Chicago Sun from reporting the incident, however, which was likewise cited in other newspapers across the United States. The account – less than two weeks before reports of a UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico – fascinated Americans from coast-to-coast, giving rise to the term “flying saucers” and speculation about little green men visiting planet Earth as a result.
Kenneth Arnold was a salesman for Great Western Fire Control Supply based in Boise, Idaho. An experienced pilot, Arnold often crisscrossed the country in his small plane for business trips, including the one that took him to the state of Washington in late June 1947. A Marine transport carrier had crashed on Mount Rainier the year before and its wreckage had yet to be found. A $5,000 reward was being offered for its discovery, and since Arnold had an extra hour of travel time on June 24, he decided to conduct his own search while flying from Chehalis to Yakima.
After the allotted hour had expired, Kenneth Arnold climbed to an altitude of 9,200 feet and headed towards Yakima. Within a minute – at approximately 3 p.m. – a bright flash lit up the surface of his airplane. Initially believing that the effect was caused by a nearby craft, Arnold scanned the sky around him until he found the source.
“I observed a chain of nine peculiar aircraft flying north to south at approximately 9,500 feet elevation and going, seemingly, in a definite direction of about 170 degrees,” Arnold later wrote in a letter to the Air Force.
“I watched as these objects approached the snow border of Mount Rainier, all the time thinking that I was observing a whole formation of jets,” Kenneth Arnold further explained in his 1952 book The Coming of the Saucers. “They were flying diagonally in echelon formation with a larger gap in their echelon between the first four and last five. What startled me most at this point was the fact that I could not find any tails on them.”
Arnold was also startled by the speed that the crafts appeared to be travelling. He quickly realized that he had two references points in Mount Rainier and the nearby Mount Adams. Checking his onboard clock just as the first object passed the southern edge of Mount Rainier, Arnold noted that it was 3:01 p.m. By the time the object had made its way to Mount Adams – a distance of 45 miles – a mere 102 seconds had passed, resulting in a calculated speed of 1,760 miles per hour.
Kenneth Arnold watched the nine objects for a full three minutes, allowing for an even greater observation. The front of each craft was shaped in a semicircle while the rear featured a protruding V-shape that was rounded on each side.
The most famous – and misconstrued – observation he made, however, compared their flight to “speed boats on rough water or similar to the tail of a Chinese kite that I once saw blowing in the wind. Or maybe it would be best to describe their flight characteristics as very similar to a formation of geese, in a rather chain-like line, as if they were linked together. As I put it to newsmen in Pendleton, Oregon, they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.”
While Kenneth Arnold only used the term “saucer” to describe how the unidentified crafts flew across the sky as opposed to their actual shape, East Oregonian newspaper reporter Bill Bequette referred to them as “saucer-like objects” in his initial article. The Associated Press picked up the story and transmitted it to other newspapers across the country, and within a day the phrase “saucer-like objects” had been condensed into “flying saucers.” Although an inaccurate description of what Kenneth Arnold had actually seen, the new term stuck and became part of the vernacular when describing UFOs nonetheless.
Kenneth Arnold was not the first person to encounter strange objects in the sky but was the first to garner any attention from the press afterwards. In his 2007 analysis of Arnold’s sighting entitled Three Minutes in June: The UFO Sighting that Changed the World, Bruce Maccabee estimates that there were 114 UFO sightings across the United State during June 1947 – the same month as Arnold’s encounter – and over 500 during the first week of July, just before the reported crash in Roswell. At the time, witnesses to these objects didn’t give them much thought, only later revealing what they had seen after the press coverage surrounding Kenneth Arnold had captivated the country.
The United States Air Force soon took notice as well, and launched their initial UFO investigation during the summer of 1947. While Arnold’s account was determined to not be a hoax, it was ruled as “explainable” through a series of theories that often neglected the testimony of Arnold himself. Ironically, Kenneth Arnold’s sighting was later corroborated in what would be the Air Force’s first “unexplainable” sighting – although it was initially considered to be a separate occurrence from that of Arnold.
Portland resident Fred Johnson made his living as a prospector, and on the afternoon of June 24, 1947, was in the vicinity of Mount Adams when he also saw the flying objects. When he later read about Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, Johnson wrote a letter to the Air Force detailing his own observations.
“At the time the disc was sighted by Johnson it was banking in the sun, and he observed five or six similar objects but only concentrated on one,” the official Air Force investigation report states. “He related that they did not fly in any particular formation and that he would estimate the height to be about one thousand feet from where he was standing. He said the object was about thirty feet in diameter and appeared to have a tail. It made no noise.”
In his letter to the Air Force, Fred Johnson also wrote that the tail “looked like a big hand of a clock shifting from side-to-side like a big magnet” and that “their speed, as far as I know, seemed to be greater than anything I ever saw.”
In early July 1947, an unidentified flying object allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. In 1961, Barney and Betty Hill claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the first such reported abduction. While these are two of the most infamous occurrences within the field of UFOlogy, the sighting of the first “flying saucers” by Kenneth Arnold – just 59 miles away from Seattle, Washington – completes the triumvirate.
No one knows for certain what Kenneth Arnold saw during the afternoon of June 24, 1947, but like Roswell and the Hill abductions, its impact on those who “want to believe” still resonates decades later.
Anthony Letizia