1947. It is the dawn of the nuclear age and events during the summer of ’47 would change the way we look at the sky and interpret what we see. On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, from Boise, Idaho unknowingly ushered in the era of the Flying Saucer.
On that day, Arnold took off from an airfield at Chehalis, Washington and headed for the Cascade Mountains. He was a member of the Idaho search and rescue organization. His intention was to look for a crashed military aircraft. As he scoured the slopes of Mount Rainier something happened that changed his life and trigger a worldwide obsession that endures to this day.
Arnold describes his encounter in a 1981 interview with Arthur C. Clark. “I had this terrific flash hit the air. My aircraft lit up the inside of my aircraft and I assumed, of course at the time, in a split second that it was probably a P-51 fighter. It dove over my nose and that it was the sun’s reflecting upon these bright wing surfaces that caused it however before I gathered my wits together. I looked way
off to the north. Then when I saw where the flash came from, it was a an XXXX formation of very peculiar looking aircraft. They were rapidly approaching the mountain and it was at about this point when I got here I could see their tail surfaces or the rear end of them. The second craft from the rear
had a more or less crescent-shaped look and it had a hole in the center of it! Of course I kept mulling in my mind that’s a damnedest looking airplane I ever saw.”
Arnold timed the craft as they sped between two mountain peaks. “Almost 50 miles apart I looked at my sweep-secondhand on my 24-hour clock and they had covered this distance of approximately 50 miles in a minute and 42 seconds. It is placing their speed at approximately 1700 miles an hour. 1781, it came out at that distance which is of course, was unheard of in 1947.
He abandoned his search for the military craft and landed. Later he was besieged by reporters. One of them asked him how the objects flew. Arnold later explained I say well. I tell you, they flew erratically. Like, a saucer would if you skipped it across the water. And of course then, all of a sudden the term Flying Disc and this type of thing are crescent-shaped or whatnot was completely dropped and everybody started seeing Flying Saucers…and they’ve been seeing them ever since!
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