Was It a Bird? Was it a Plane?
Seventy years after pilot Kenneth Arnold’s seminal UFO sighting, NIGEL WATSON asks whether a top secret test flight might have been responsible for the birth of the flying saucer age and lines up the unusual suspects...
Kenneth Arnold’s famous UFO sighting is so detailed and persuasive that it is hard to believe he saw anything other than solid, artificial objects streaking across the sky at high speed. The original newspaper reports describe him seeing nine thin “pie plate”-shaped objects, which looked as if they were nickel-plated, flying in formation.
It seems unlikely that a temperature inversion, mirage, reflections or a similar phenomenon would cause such an illusion, and Arnold’s first thought was that they were some form of jet aircraft. In a confidential statement to Army Air Force (AAF) Intelligence dated 12 July 1947, he noted: “I am convinced in my own mind that they were some type of airplane, even though they didn’t conform with the many aspects of the conventional type of planes that I know.” 1
In a radio interview broadcast in April 1950, he reiterated that view: “I assumed at the time they were a new formation or a new type of jet, though I was baffled by the fact that they did not have any tails.”
He thought they probably had something to do with the Army or Air Force, but he, and other pilots who witnessed UFOs, felt that if the US government didn’t know what they were “it was only our duty to report it to our nation, and to our Air Force.” 2
On landing, he first told his story to flight instructors and helicopter instructors at Yakima airport, where his excitement was quickly quashed by a helicopter pilot who said: “Ah, it’s just a flight of those guided missiles from Moses Lake.” 3 Arnold had never heard of this missile base, and, anyway, the consensus was that he had witnessed something out of the ordinary.
Two days after his sighting, Arnold said that he had at first thought he was seeing snow geese; then, after deciding they must be jet planes, he had to admit: “I guess I don’t know what they were – unless they were guided missiles.” A Washington, DC, Army spokesman said that guided missiles like the V2 rocket travelled too fast to
He told them a Nazi flying saucer was destroyed before the Allies could capture it
have been responsible, and in any case no experimental tests were being conducted in that area at that time. 4
In an interview with the Chicago Times on 7 July 1947, the possibility that the objects were craft from another planet was mentioned. Whatever their origin, Arnold didn’t think they were trying to hurt anyone. It was his view that because they made abrupt and fast turns “it would have been impossible for human pilots inside to have survived the pressure”, indicating to him that they were guided from elsewhere. Indeed, AAF intelligence officers who interviewed him suggested that he had seen guided missiles of some new type. 5
By 19 July 1947 Arnold was telling the Associated Press that the discs were not flown by a foreign power and the Army didn’t seem to have an explanation for them, leading him to seriously think they had extraterrestrial origins. 6 There is the more credible possibility that he did see experimental aircraft on a top-secret test flight. On Kevin Randle’s ‘A Different Perspective’ blog site, a lively discussion has been going on over the possibility that secret prototype aircraft were responsible. 7 (For a history of ‘manmade UFOs, see Philip Jarrett, “Saucers from Earth’, FT188:32-38.)
Brian Bells commented that Arnold’s drawing of the ‘saucers’ “resembles a near if not perfectly drawn outline of the early 1950’s AVRO Canada ‘Project Y’ that used a radical design featuring a radial flow gas turbine engine in the centre.
“While that design was officially contracted for production in 1952, it has been documented that English designer ‘Jack’ (John) Frost believed the Nazis had already created saucer aircraft and then attempted to design his own. While he arrived in Canada in June 1947, it has been suggested that he was already working on these design prototypes for the British parent company AVRO Ltd as early as 1945.
“If this is true, Arnold may have reported a squadron of prototypes coming from the Avro airfields just across the border for transport to USAAF fields in the southwest and California. Project Y could travel at Mach 2.5 and could easily hit the 1,500mph Arnold estimated.”
Neal Foy responded with a few reasonable objections to this hypothesis: “If the AVRO Project Y was already built in 1947 then why was the contract for the prototype [signed] in 1952? From what I can tell it never went to more than a wooden prototype and was never produced. The figures for performance appear to be theoretical. The later Avrocar was a much simplified version of a Frost design and it was an abject failure.”
Frost’s first spade-shaped Avro VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft looked like Arnold’s tail-less craft, but later Avro projects were saucer-shaped, conforming to how we imagine a ‘flying saucer’ would look rather than fitting the actual descriptions given by Arnold. 8
It is recorded that in 1953, John Frost, who was then Avro Canada’s Chief Designer, along with members of the RCAF and British Intelligence, had a meeting with an unnamed German engineer. He told them he worked on a Nazi flying saucer project during the war. It was successfully flown but the saucer craft, and all the information concerning it, was destroyed before the Allies could capture it. Whether or not the British and Canadians took this intelligence seriously, Frost had already begun work on Project Y and went on to develop saucer-shaped craft that were expensive failures. 9 There was another prototype aircraft that also looked like what Arnold reported,
and unlike the Avro, actually took to the skies. This was the V-173, nicknamed
the ‘Flying Pancake’. This unusual twinengine aircraft was designed by Charles H Zimmerman for Vought in the 1930s. The first V-173 rolled out onto the tarmac of an airstrip on 23 November 1942, and was described as a “queer, saucer-shaped object on two long, stilted legs”. It has been claimed that these test flights in 1942 to 1943 caused panicked civilians to report sightings of strange flying objects to the authorities. A revamped version, the XF5U1 or ‘Flying Flapjack’, with more powerful engines was tested in June 1947, but had already been cancelled by the US Navy in March 1947 in favour of more conventional jet aircraft. 10
The main problem with the Flying Pancake explanation, which was offered as early as 6 July 1947, is that it was a slowmoving aircraft with a flat edge at the front with two large propellers and a circular rear with two tails, whereas Arnold’s objects had a circular front section and convex rear with no tail.
Also in early July 1947 Arnold made an important addition to his testimony, stating that the second-from-last craft in the formation was darker in colour than the others, had bigger and lighter-coloured wings and did not reflect sunlight. He described it as looking wraith-like in comparison to the others, which looked tadpole-like. 11
Such a boomerang or bat-like craft would more closely resemble the flying wing aircraft being developed at this time. Before moving to Avro, John Frost had worked on the tailless, swept wing de Havilland DH 108 ‘Swallow’ jet aircraft in Britain. It was based on the German Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket plane, and it made experimental flights from May 1946 to May 1950.12
The first V-173 was described as a “queer, saucershaped object on two stilted legs”
It is also noteworthy that Moses Lake Army Air Base was used to test the swept wing Boeing B47 Stratojet bomber, which was based on research conducted by the Germans in WWII. The first test flight to Moses Lake was on 17 December 1947 though, so it couldn’t have been the cause of Arnold’s sighting. 13
A more likely contender was the Northrop YB-35 bomber, first tested on 25 June 1946 and part of a programme to produce a flying wing aircraft that had been initiated during World War II. 14 A multitude of such
projects had arisen out of the conflict, the most notable being the German flying wing craft produced by the Horten brothers. Their designs for the Horten Ho 229 bomber look very much like Arnold’s bat-like UFO, and the prototype was captured by the US military and sent to the USA. 15
The Ho 229 and other saucer-like Nazi designs have been eagerly promoted as the origin of secret US or Soviet aircraft responsible for causing UFO reports (see Kevin McClure, ‘Nazi UFOs’, FT175:42-47). Yet, in June 1947 it seems very unlikely that any nation was able to fly one, let alone a formation of nine of them, over Mount Rainier.
NEW FRONTIER
If a real aircraft or missile was not responsible, perhaps some more mundane stimulus, like a flock of birds or a mirage, triggered an imaginative response from Arnold. In the immediate context, he was searching for a missing Curtis Commando C-46 transport plane and he later claimed that when the crashed aircraft was found the bodies of the victims were missing. Perhaps he thought that the unidentified objects were a danger to him. 16
In a wider context, this was a time of remarkable and frightening new inventions and technology. Atom bombs, jets and rockets could now obliterate humanity and Cold War tensions meant this appeared to be a distinct, even imminent, possibility.
Significantly, just a month before his sighting, the May 1947 edition of Mechanix
Illustrated shows the Flying Pancake aircraft on its front cover, and an article by Gilbert Paust enthusiastically states that a future Flying Flapjack fitted with a jet or rocket engine would be a sure bet to smash the supersonic sound barrier. It concludes: “So don’t be amazed when one of these days you hear a whistling sound from the sky and see a blurred, circular object scaling across the heavens at a speed never before attained by man! It will be the Navy’s Flapjack, the XF5U-1, breaking through another frontier in aviation’s history.” 17
Whatever it was that he saw that day 70 years ago, Kenneth Arnold was amazed by it, and in response helped create the new frontier of ufology. If one believes Martin Kottmeyer, Arnold’s misperception was of some “waterfowl”, but it was coloured by the psychology of paranoia and Arnold unconsciously used his knowledge of hightech aircraft to fill in the gaps. 18
Ironically, Arnold’s sighting was influenced by the flying wing designs of Frost, Northrop and the Horten brothers, which through the mistaken idea that he saw saucer-shaped craft led the US (and no doubt other nations and private inventors) to try to build ‘saucers’ of their own. In the process, the fantastic world of flying saucers took flight and the UFO age was born.
✒ NIGEL WATSON is a veteran UFO reseacher and author of a number of books on the subject, including UFOs of the First World War: Phantom Airships, Balloons, Aircraft and Other Mysterious Aerial Phenomena (2015).