“It is my conviction that the facts already at hand must not be buried beneath a mass of official stupidity and a smokescreen of variant idiocies. It is time the truth was sifted from the untruth, the facts from the fakery, the real flying saucer from the fanciful.” – Kenneth Arnold, 1952
People across the world have been bombarded with news of alleged extraterrestrial beings and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), such as the supposed 1,000-year-old alien corpses in Mexico, or the rumored long-concealed United States government program that has reverse-engineered UAPs. With a constant flood of information, it’s impossible to weed out the truth, just as Kenneth Arnold proclaimed decades ago.
How did we get into such a frenzy about these unexplained phenomena? Arnold is widely credited with being the inspiration for the modern era of UFO folklore after reporting the sighting of nine unidentified flying “saucers” in 1947.
As a child, Arnold loved the outdoors; you’d often find him in nature, swimming, collecting insects, and bird watching. He had his first taste of flight when he was 14, and took his first flying lesson at 16. “As a little boy, my head was always in the clouds. The reason I enjoyed bird study, I think, was because I so envied their ability to fly,” said Arnold in an excerpt from his 1952 book, The Coming of the Saucers, co-written by pulp magazine publisher Raymond A. Palmer.
Professionally, Arnold aided search-and-rescue flights in Idaho, served as a relief deputy U.S. marshal, and frequently flew prisoners to a federal penitentiary in Washington. On June 24, 1947, Arnold took to the clear sky over the Cascade Mountains in his CallAir A-2, hoping to claim the $5,000 reward for locating the wreckage of a C-46 that had gone down in the range.
Flying around Mount Rainier at an altitude of 9,200 feet, he experienced what he described as a “tremendously bright flash light up the surfaces of my aircraft.” He thought maybe it was a pilot in a P-51 buzzing by, reflecting the sun off its wings. Another flash of light came, but this time he caught where it was coming from, and it wasn’t everyone’s favorite WWII fighter.
Arnold claimed to see nine objects flying in an echelon formation that flew “like speed boats on rough water,” or as he told the newspeople, like a saucer if you skipped it across water. These flying saucers didn’t have tails, so he thought perhaps the Air Force was testing some new camouflage technology. He also noted those bright, blue-white flashes of light seemingly weren’t being emitted, but rather the sun reflecting off the highly polished surface of these objects.
He followed the group of craft as they dipped in and out of the mountain peaks between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, attempting to clock their speed – he estimated they went about 50 miles in under two minutes, or well over 1,000 mph. For reference, it wasn’t until October of that year that Gen. Chuck Yeager would be the first to break the sound barrier at 700 mph. As Arnold said in his book, “I was amazed, thinking at the time, what will these aeronautical engineers dream up next?”
When he landed and shared his sighting, his fellow pilots chalked it up to a new line of guided missiles. Though, the following day, he stepped into the offices of the East Oregonian newspaper and shared his story. By June 26, 1947, headlines of these saucers flooded newsstands, and Arnold started receiving thousands of letters and calls practically overnight. The flying saucer frenzy had begun, and report after report of strange aerial sightings plastered mainstream news for weeks to follow.
Kenneth Arnold’s influence still lingers in today’s stories of unexplained sightings, and what he experienced that day over the mountains was never explained. Some of you reading this may believe what he saw was evidence of an extraterrestrial visit, and some of you may chalk it up to a pilot’s imagination running wild.
The truth is out there – the question is, will we find it?