SPACE INVADERS?
Witnesses reported ‘discs’ in the sky
It was 24th June 1947, just before 3pm. Kenneth Arnold, a flying salesman from America’s Pacific Northwest, was piloting his two-seater plane over the town of Mineral, Washington State, when he saw something odd. Around 30 miles ahead of him were nine bright objects, as big as passenger planes, seemingly weaving in and out of formation ‘like the tail of a kite’.
When Kenneth landed at the nearby Yakima airstrip, he mentioned what he’d seen and, before he knew it, he was addressing newspaper reporters about the strange flying objects. He described them as being flat like pie dishes, reflecting the Sun like mirrors and undulating ‘like saucers skimmed across water’.
Experts expressed doubts about anything travelling at the 1200mph speed Kenneth estimated for the objects and suggested various mundane explanations. These included weather balloons, a mirage, reflections from other aircraft, ‘snow blindness’ from ultraviolet rays reflecting off the snow-capped Mount Rainier below, or ‘persistence of vision’, an optic phenomenon where you continue to ‘see’ an object, even after the rays of light reflected from it have stopped entering the eye. Others suggested electronic interference, or St Elmo’s fire, a weather event in which a bright, glowing ball of light is seen near pointed objects, like masts. Some unkinder commenters even said Kenneth had clearly been dreaming!
But within days another pilot, Byron Savage from Oklahoma City, had come forward to say he too had seen a disc-like object moving at tremendous speed, six weeks earlier. Apparently he’d kept quiet from fear of ridicule.
There were other reports that seemed to back up Kenneth, too. Beachgoers in North Carolina had seen strange lights offshore on the day of his sighting, a carpenter from Kansas City, Missouri, reckoned he’d also seen nine speeding objects moving west in the sky, while a series of objects had apparently sped by a woman called Ethel Wheelhouse so fast she hadn’t been able to count them!
Five days before Kenneth’s experience, Washington driver Archie Edes claimed to have seen an oval ‘blue-white flame’ hurtling towards the ground before exploding in sparks, while Elma Shingler, who lived near the Cascade Mountains, said she’d twice in the past 10 days seen ‘platter-like’ light-reflecting objects moving at incredible speeds in the sky. An E.H. Sprinkle even produced a photo of seven dots in what appeared to be military formation.
Still, on 3rd July, an Army
Air Forces spokesman in Washington said there weren’t enough facts to warrant further investigation. That might have been that, except, just a day later, a group of 60 picnickers saw something in the skies over Twin Falls, Idaho – while in Portland, Oregon so many reports of unidentified flying objects came in, the police put out an ‘all cars’ broadcast!
Single witnesses were easy to brush off. Large crowds who’d all apparently seen the same thing, less so.
That same day, 4th July, Captain A.J. Smith, an experienced United Airlines pilot, joked as he climbed the ramp into his plane that he’d ‘believe the flying discs when he saw them’. Just 10 minutes later he radioed the ground, shaken, after apparently spotting five of them from his cockpit! His co-pilot and stewardess backed up his story.
And Washington housewife, Mrs Kole, claimed to have been woken at 4am that morning by a light, before seeing something round and
large and with a reddish tinge hovering in the sky.
The day after, even more witnesses – including an Army Air Forces Sergeant – reported seeing ‘discs’ in the sky.
By now the press were referring to the flat circular objects as ‘flying saucers’ – and there seemed too many reports for them all to be groundless, with witnesses including experienced pilots and military personnel, plus a Seattle coastguard who’d tried to photograph the objects.
Still, the Army was ‘mystified’ while the Navy had ‘no theories’.
But by mid-July reports had come in from 38 states and Canada. Many said they’d seen round, oval, or cigar-shaped reflective objects skimming the skies at terrific speeds.
Some continued to scoff, saying with so many UFOs whizzing around it was lucky there weren’t more collisions!
‘Pie in the Sky?’ asked the Wilmington Morning Star newspaper on 13th July, blaming depressing foreign news and the hot weather for the numerous ‘sightings’.
Others looked for more serious explanations.
Were the Americans – or Russians – testing weapons or aircraft? Or was relatively new work trying to harness nuclear energy to blame? Psychologists pointed to ‘mass hysteria’, or said the sightings were down to ‘auto-suggestion’.
Events took a tragic turn in the August, when two intelligence officers flying back to Washington after talking to Kenneth died when their plane crashed and, eventually the reports fell out of the papers. But 75 years on Kenneth’s sighting is thought to be responsible for birthing the now common term for UFOs – ‘flying saucers’ – and his is often credited as the first UFO sighting of the modern era, as well as the reason spaceships in sci-fi films and TV shows are generally round in shape.
But what, if anything, did he really see?
Theory 1
Immediately after Kenneth’s sighting, ironmonger Ray Taro told reporters he’d been blasting aluminium beer bottle caps into the sky from 40ft stacks during his melting operations. Could this be behind the 1947 ‘flying saucer craze’? Or was Kenneth initially fooled by an optical illusion or natural phenomenon?
Theory 2
A 1967 report counted 853 reports of flying disc sightings in 1947 alone, across 140 newspapers, from nearly every US state and Canada. Some witnesses were experienced pilots and military men, who had little to gain by reporting these sightings. Could they really all have been victims of mass hysteria?
Theory 3
Did Kenneth witness military testing? US armed forces always denied this – and no weapon or aircraft like Kenneth described has ever become public. Was there a cover-up? Or were the Russians behind the sighting?
Theory 4
Did Kenneth – and others – see a sudden flurry of alien craft in the sky? I am being told that ‘celestial timing’ is relevant in this case.