1947.06.24
On 24 June, 1947, a civilian pilot flying over the Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington observed nine flying disc-shaped aircraft traveling in formation at a high rate of speed. Although this was not the first known sighting of such objects, it was the first to gain widespread attention in the public media. Hundreds of reports of sightings of similar objects followed.
(Eisenhower briefing)
The media attention which was generated from those few minutes over Washington state gave birth to the UFO phenomenon.
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
The modern period of the phenomenon began with a widely publicized sighting made by Kenneth Arnold in Washington state in 1947.
(UFOs: What to Do? {RAND Corporation document}, Kocher)
Arnold, with over 4,000 hours’ flying experience, was a 32-year-old businessman who sold and installed the Great Western fire control system – an apparatus he had designed and patented himself. He was also a flying deputy for the Ada County aerial posse, an acting deputy federal United States marshal, and a member of the Maho search and rescue mercy flyers…
“I had just finished installing some firefighting apparatus at Chehalis, Washington. The job finished, I began a chat with Herb Critzen, chief pilot for Central Air Service. We talked about the possible location of a lost marine transport which had gone down in the mountains. I decided to look for it. It meant a $5,000 reward, and I hoped that via my proposed route to Yakima, Washington, I might be lucky enough to find it. I decided to spend enough time in the air in the vicinity of Mount Rainier to make a good attempt at locating the wreckage.”
His own aircraft, a single-enginned [CallAir], was specially designed for mountain work – capable of landing in rough fields and pastures.
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
14.00
At two pm Arnold took off to start his search for the Marine Curtess C-46 commando transport plane which had disappeared somewhere in the mountains and had so far eluded discovery. He figured his journey to Yakima would be delayed by about an hour while he searched the 14,400-foot-high plateau of Mount Rainier.
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
Eventually he abandoned the search over a small town called Mineral, and set course at a height of 2,800 metres for Yakima in the east.
After setting the autopilot, he was able to look about him. The air was crystal clear, with visibility up to 80 km (at least).
(The UFO Mystery Solved, Campbell)
Arnold was at an altitude of about 9,200 feet (2,800 metres) above the town of Mineral (about 25 miles {40 km} southwest of the peak of Mount Rainier), and was making a 180° turn when “a tremendously bright flash lit up the surfaces of my aircraft.”
(UFO: The Government Files, Brookesmith)
Arnold‘s heart skipped a beat. He thought he had just had a near miss with another aircraft and began searching the skies frantically trying to identify it and avoid a collision.
He spotted a DC-4 in the distance behind him, but it was too far off to have caused the flash. He began to assume he had been buzzed by a USAF P-51 fighter. Then there was a second flash.
This time Arnold was able to see the source.
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
14.59
At one minute before 3.00 pm, “I observed,” he reported drily, “far to my left and to the north, a formation of very bright objects coming from the vicinity of Mount Baker, flying very close to the mountain tops and traveling at tremendous speed…”
(UFO: The Government Files, Brookesmith)
He estimated them to be about 160 kilometres/100 miles away and they were coming in his direction.
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
“I watched as these objects rapidly neared the snow border of Mount Rainier, all the time thinking to myself that I was observing a whole formation of jets. In group count, such as I have used in counting cattle and game from the air, they numbered nine. They were flying diagonally in an echelon formation with a larger gap in their echelon between the first four and the last five. What startled me most at this point was the fact that I could not find any tails on them.”
(UFOs and How to See Them, Randles)
” I observed the objects’ outline plainly as they flipped and flashed along against the snow and sky… They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across water.”
(UFOS: A Pictorial History from Antiquity to the Present, Knight)
”I was fascinated by this formation of aircraft. They didn’t fly like any aircraft I had seen before. In the first place, their echelon formation was backward from that practised by our Air Force. The elevation of the first craft was greater than that of the last. They flew in a definite formation, but erratically. As I described them at the time, their flight was like that of speedboats 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 being very similar to a formation of geese, in a rather diagonal chain-like line, as if they were linked together.
Another characteristic of these craft that made a tremendous impression on me was how they fluttered and sailed, tipping their wings alternately and emitting those very bright blue-white flashes from their surfaces. At the time, I did not get the impression these flashes were emitted by them, but rather that it was the sun’s reflection from the extremely polished surface of their wings.’
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
Arnold was bothered by the fact that he could see no tail fins on the craft; no aircraft could fly without this distinctive feature. They appeared merely as a thin black lens shape, but every few seconds two or three of them would produce a brilliant blue-white flash which Arnold interpreted as sunlight reflecting off wings as the craft dipped them (although he could see no wings). When flashing, the objects appeared to be completely round, although one was darker and a different shape.
(The UFO Mystery Solved, Campbell)
One of the craft looked different from the rest: darker and crescent-shaped.
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
Given their distance – estimated at 25 miles (40 km) away – Arnold was unable to make out their shapes clearly but believed that when they passed in front of the snow-covered Mount Rainier he could then see their outlines distinctly… The shapes were disturbing, however; he thought they were jet planes but could find no tails.
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
The direction of the flight never varied, although the individual objects did swerve in and out of the mountain peaks – flying in front of some, disappearing momentarily behind others.
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
Arnold did as much as possible to analyze the observation including opening his window to get a clear view.
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
They were now about twenty miles away. If they carried on their present course they would pass between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. Using the mountains as markers, Arnold timed the passage between them using his wristwatch, hoping to work out their speed later.
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
Arnold estimated the objects were moving between 1,300 – 1,700 miles (2,092 – 2,736 km) per hour, far faster than any plane of the day could have achieved. Of all of his estimates… the most difficult to determine with accuracy was the distance from the aircraft to the objects and the length of their formation, which he estimated at five miles (eight km).
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
Between the two mountains lies a very high plateau; Arnold observed that, as the first unit of craft cleared the far southernmost edge of the plateau, the second part of the echelon was just entering the opposite, northern edge. That meant the formation was five miles long!
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
He estimated the individual size of the objects at approximately two-thirds that of the DC-4 aircraft which was sharing the sky with him – equivalent to about 67 feet (nineteen metres).
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
As the nine objects flew out of sight, he unsuccessfully tried to explain them away in his own mind as some sort of technological wonder belonging to the Air Force. They made him feel “eerie”, and he tried to focus his mind on the search for the downed C-46 which had crashed some months earlier with 32 marines aboard. Somehow the $5,000 didn’t seem important to him any more. “I wanted to get to Yakima and tell some of the boys what I had seen,” he explained.
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
16.00
A flight of guided missiles?
At around four o’clock Arnold landed at Yakima, went straight to see Al Baxter, general manager of Central Aircraft, and asked to see him alone. When he had related his story and drawn some pictures, Baxter was bemused. He knew Arnold was neither crazy nor the type to pull a stunt: he was in fact a level-headed character and an experienced pilot. Besides, he had nothing to gain from making up such a story, and everything to lose. Yet Baxter could not disguise his feelings of incredulity. It was written all across his face, and Arnold saw it. Was there a rational explanation for the experience?
Baxter called in several of his helicopter instructors and flight pilots for their opinions. After listening carefully to the story, they discussed it amongst themselves. Arnold related what happened next. “The high captain – Tom Brown, public relations representative for the Army Air Force – said they did not know what the saucers were, but they did not believe that anyone in this country, or outside this country, had developed a guided missile that will go 1,200 miles an hour as some reports have indicated.
… Point of my enthusiasm got its top knocked off when one of the helicopter pilots said: ‘Ah, it’s just a flight of those guided missiles from Moses Lake.’”
Arnold returned to his aircraft and took off for Pendleton, Oregon. Was that the explanation? He was not even aware of a base at Moses Lake. Besides, he had not mentioned the incredible speed of the objects, nor the fact that one of the craft looked different from the rest. This had been darker, crescent-shaped, with a small dome on top. If they had indeed been missiles they were of a completely new and previously unknown design. The other eight objects had resembled pie pans – so shiny that they reflected the sun as well as a mirror.
As a matter of routine, the officials at Yakima had to notify those at Pendleton of Arnold‘s imminent arrival. With this information went news of the businessman’s strange sighting. So when he landed a group of people were waiting for him, anxious to hear the story. Using the figures Arnold had recorded at the time of the incident, it was calculated that the objects had been travelling at around 1,300 miles per hour! The pilot was now certain of one thing. If they were terrestrial they were remotely controlled. The human body could not survive the terrific gravity forces generated at such speeds.
Armed with his maps and calculations, Arnold decided he should report the incident. “I kind of felt I ought to tell the FBI because I knew that during the war we were flying aircraft over the pole to Russia, and I thought these things could possibly be from Russia.”
The birth of the flying saucer
Ironically, when he arrived at the local FBI office he found it shut. So instead he went to see Nolan Skiff, editor of the End of the Week column in the East Oregonian. Initially Skiff was sceptical, but the pilot’s credentials and sincerity convinced him. Another journalist, Bill Becquette, was also present and, realising that the story would have national interest, sent off an Associated Press despatch. It was while Arnold was trying to explain the strange movement of the aircraft that he unwittingly gave the media a phrase they grew to love, but one which later ufologists loved to hate: “They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across water.”
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
This phrase was slightly garbled by Becquette, who thus originated the term “flying saucers”…
(UFO: The Government Files, Brookesmith)
Arnold was undoubtedly a credible witness in the popular view. He was president of a company which made fire extinguishers and also an acting deputy US marshal…
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
Arnold had the makings of a reliable witness. He was a respected businessman and an experienced pilot – not to mention a qualified eagle scout and a one-time Olympic hopeful in “fancy diving”, as the sighting report he filed with the US Air Force proudly announced – and seemed to be neither exaggerating what he had seen, nor adding sensational details to his report. He also gave the impression of being a careful observer. As he watched the formation of bright lights pass his aircraft, he tried to gauge their speed by measuring the time it took them to travel from one mountain peak to another, calculating from this that the objects were moving at the then astonishing speed of 1,700 miles per hour. He then estimated their size by comparing them to a DC4 airliner visible in the distance, concluding that they were rather smaller than the jet. These details impressed the newspapermen who interviewed him and lent credibility to his report.
(Borderlands, Dash)
The story broke on the Associated Press wire.
(UFO: The Government Files, Brookesmith)
The despatch which was to ensure Kenneth Arnold‘s place in history said:
June 25 (AP) – Nine bright saucer-like objects flying at “incredible speed” at 10,000 feet altitude were reported here today by Kenneth Arnold, Boise, Idaho, pilot who said he could not hazard a guess as to what they were.
Arnold, a United States Forest Service employee engaged in searching for a missing plane, said he sighted the mysterious objects yesterday at three pm. They were flying between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, in Washington state, he said, and appeared to weave in and out of formation. Arnold said that he clocked and estimated their speed at 1,200 miles an hour.
Enquiries at Yakima last night brought only blank stares, he said, but he added he talked today with an unidentified man from Utah, south of here, who said he had seen similar objects over the mountains near Ukiah yesterday.
“It seems impossible,” Arnold said, “but there it is.”
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
For three days at Pendleton Arnold was besieged with enquiries.
(UFO: The Government Files, Brookesmith)
“I could have gone to sleep that night if the reporters, newsmen, and press agencies of every conceivable description had left me alone. I didn’t share the general excitement. I can’t begin to estimate the number of people, letters, telegrams and phone calls I tried to answer. After three days of this hubbub I came to the conclusion that I was the only sane one in the bunch. In order to stop what I thought was a lot of foolishness and since I couldn’t get any work done, I went out to the airport, cranked up my airplane, and flew home to Boise.”
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
But there was no escape for Doris and Kenneth Arnold. Even at home they were besieged by television crews and reporters.
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
Shortly after arriving there, Arnold was telephoned by his friend Dave Johnson, the aviation editor of the Idaho Statesman.
(UFO: The Government Files, Brookesmith)
[Arnold] was still convinced that the objects were of advanced terrestrial origin.
“When I caught the look in his eye and the tone of his words, ‘flying saucers’ suddenly took a different and serious significance. The doubt he displayed of the authenticity of my story told me, and I am sure he was in a position to know, that it was not a new military guided missile, and that if what I had seen was true it did not belong to the good old USA. It was then I really began to wonder.”
Dave Johnson told him that the Wright Field base wanted a report so they could check it out. They were not the only ones. Journalists and TV crews besieged the home of Doris and Kenneth Arnold.
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
Later, as people tired of the UFO madness, Arnold found himself on the receiving end again. This time he was dismissed as a nutcase.
“These nameless, faceless people ridiculed me,” he said [in 1981]. “I was considered an Orson Welles, a fraud. I loved my country. I was very naive about the whole thing. I was the unfortunate goat who first reported them.”
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
Kenneth Arnold, tired of the publicity following his sighting, later commented, “If I ever see again a phenomenon of that sort, even if it’s a ten-storey building, I won’t say a word about it.”
(paranetinfo.com – now defunct)
To the suggestion that he had seen reflections… Arnold responded that he had observed the objects through an open cockpit window…
(The UFO Mystery Solved, Campbell)
He sent a detailed report to the Air Force, which carried out an investigation. At that time, astronomer Dr J Allen Hynek was their UFO consultant. Many years later, after realising the Government were hoodwinking the American people, Hynek founded CUFOS – the Center for UFO Studies…
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
1947.07
In July two TID officers [Brown and Davidson] visited Kenneth Arnold. Their report – listed as incident 17 in the files and classified confidential – grudgingly acknowledged his sincerity and credibility with the remark that “If Mr Arnold could write a report of such a character and did not see the objects he was in the wrong business and should be engaged in writing Buck Rogers fiction.”
(UFO: The Government Files, Brookesmith)
The most resounding evidence in Arnold‘s favour are the words of an FBI agent who quizzed him in 1947 after the first incident. The agent wrote: “It is the personal opinion of the interviewer that (Arnold) actually saw what he states he saw in the attached report. It is also the opinion of the interviewer that (Arnold) would have much more to lose than gain and would have to be very strongly convinced that he actually saw something before he would report such an incident and open himself up for ridicule that would accompany such a report.”
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
It is reported that the USAF concluded that the objects were mirages, but there has been no elaboration or confirmation of this hypothesis.
(The UFO Mystery Solved, Campbell)
He had emphasized that “the air was so smooth that day” and that “the sky and air was… as clear as crystal”…
Arnold [asserted], without contradiction, that the USAAF knew what he had seen and had photographs of the objects.
(UFO: The Government Files, Brookesmith)
By mid-summer of 1947, he publicized this… impression in magazine articles which gained wide attention… The fact that the two officers [Brown and Davidson] who visited him were later killed in an airplane crash while investigating another report fuelled further rumours…
An explanation already (apparently) adopted by the USAF, but perhaps without justification, and one suggested by Menzel, [is that] Arnold saw mirages of nine snow-capped peaks of the Cascade range, although they were between 100 and 200 km away from him. However, because they were so far away they appeared to be travelling over the nearer mountains.
(The UFO Mystery Solved, Campbell)
1948.03c
By the time his story was told in the first edition of Fate magazine in the spring of 1948, the cover illustration depicting the encounter was a gross distortion of the original story. The objects are seen in close proximity to Arnold‘s plane and they are clearly saucer shapes with just a slight modification at the rear…
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
A few years later even the cover of Arnold‘s own book portrayed the UFOs as more saucer-like than he had described them.
(The Complete Book of UFOs, Hough and Randles)
Arnold‘s “flying saucer” sighting was only the first of many he was to have during his life…
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
For Arnold, his sighting was to change his life completely and he became an active flying saucer researcher and a devotee up until his death on 16 January 1984. He had many further sightings during his life and they seemed to have convinced him of an extraordinary interpretation of the UFO phenomenon: that the objects are masses of living organisms that live in our atmosphere.
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
In an interview with Ed Murrow, Arnold is reported to have said: “I never could understand why the world got so upset about nine discs, as these things did not seem to be a menace.”
(UFO Visitation, Watts)
UNCLASSIFIED
Page 9
I have received lots of requests from people who told me to make a lot of wild guesses. I have based what I have written here in this article on positive facts and as far as guessing what it was that I observed, it is just as much a mystery to me as it is to the rest of the world.
My pilot’s license is 333487. I fly a Callair airplane; it is a three-place single engine land ship that is designed and manufactured at Afton, Wyoming as an extremely high performance, high altitude airplane that was made for mountain work. The national certificate of my plane is 33365.
Box 587
Boise, Idaho.
traveling this way
Top
They seemed longer than wide
their thickness was about 1/20th of their width
Side view
traveling this way
Mirror Bright
they did not appear to me to whirl or spin but seemed in fixed position traveling as I have made drawing.
[Blacked out] UNCLASSIFIED 17
Arnold‘s original sketch of one of the objects he saw. In addition he noted that they were “’mirror bright”’ and that their width was about twenty times their thickness. His sketch shows the width only about ten times the thickness.
(The UFO Mystery Solved, Campbell)
Top
Very Bright
like [silver?] on
mirror.
(No smoke trail
or vapor trail)
one [illegible]
like this the
second from…
of the formation
seemed a little [illegible]
Direction of travel
appeared Black
outline as [illegible]
against snow of
Mt. Rainier.
Side view (Black)
[Illegible]
[Click here to listen to Bill Berquette interview Kenneth Arnold on KWRC 1947.06.25]
Bill Berquette
… newscaster and every newspaper across the nation has made headlines out of it and this afternoon we are honoured indeed to have here in our studio this man, Kenneth Arnold, who we believe may be able to give us a first-hand account, and give you the same, on what happened. Kenneth, first of all, if you’ll move up here to the microphone, just a little closer, we’ll ask you to just tell in your own fashion, as you told us last night in your hotel room and again this morning, what you were doing there and how this entire thing started. Go ahead, Kenneth.
Kenneth Arnold
Well, at about 2.15 I took off from Chehalis, Washington, en route to Yakima, and of course every time that any of us fly over the country near Mount Rainier we spend an hour or two in search of the Marine plane that’s never been found that they believe is in the snow some place southwest of that particular area. That area’s located at about – its elevation is about 10,000 foot, and I had made one sweep in close to Mount Rainier and down one of the canyons and was dragging it for any types of object that might prove to be the Marine ship; and as I come out of the canyon there – it was about fifteen minutes, I was approximately 25 to 28 miles from Mount Rainier – I climbed back up to 9200 feet and I noticed to the left of me a chain, which looked to me like the tail of a Chinese kite, kind of weaving and going at a terrific speed across the face of Mount Rainier. I at first thought they were geese because it flew like geese, but it was going so fast that I immediately changed my mind and decided it was a bunch of new jet planes in formation. Well, as the planes come to the edge of Mount Rainier, flying at about 160° south, I thought I would clock them, because it was such a clear day; and I didn’t know where their destination was, but due to the fact that I had Mount St Helens and Mount Adams to clock them by, I just thought I’d see just how fast they were going, since among pilots we argue about speed so much. And they seemed to flip and flash in the sun just like a mirror; and in fact I happened to be at an angle from the sun that seemed to hit the tops of these peculiar-looking things in such a way that it almost blinded you when you looked at them through your plexiglass windshield. Well, I – it was about one minute to three when I started clocking them on my sweep-second-hand clock, and as I kept looking at them, I kept looking for their tails and they didn’t have any tails. [Laughs] I thought, “Well, maybe I – something’s wrong with my eyes,” and I turned the plane around and opened the window and looked out the window, and, sure enough, I couldn’t find any tails on them. And the whole observation of these particular ships didn’t last more than about 2½ minutes, and I could see them only plainly when they seemed to tip their wing, or whatever it was, and the sun flashed on them. They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear. Now, I thought “Well, they’re, maybe they’re jet planes with just the tails painted green or brown or something,” and didn’t think too much of it but kept on watching them. They didn’t fly in a conventional formation that’s taught in our army – they seemed to kind of weave in and out right above the mountain tops, and I would say that they even went down into the canyons in several instances, oh, probably a hundred feet. But I could see them against the snow, of course, on Mount Rainier and against the snow on Mount Adams as they were flashing, and against a high ridge that happens to lay in between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. But when I observed the tail end of the last one passing Mount Adams, and I was at an angle near Mount Rainier from it, but I looked at my watch and it showed one minute and 42 seconds. Well, I felt that, “Well, that’s pretty fast,” and I didn’t stop to think what the distance was between the two mountains.
Well, I landed at Yakima, Washington, and Al Baxter was there to greet me, and he told me “I guess I’d better change my brand.” [Laughs] But he kind of gave me a mysterious sort of a look that maybe I had seen something – he didn’t know. Well, I just kind of forgot it then till I got down to Pendleton and I began looking at my map and taking measurements on it, and the best calculation I could figure out, now even in spite of error, would be around 1200 miles an hour, because making the distance from Mount Rainier to Mount Adams in, we’ll say, approximately two minutes – it’s almost – well, it’d be around 25 miles per minute. Now, allowing for error, we can give them three minutes or four minutes to make it, and they’re still going more than 800 miles an hour, and to my knowledge there isn’t anything that I’ve read about, outside of some of the German rockets, that would go that fast. These were flying in more or less a level, constant altitude: they weren’t going up and they weren’t going down. They were just simply flying straight and level and I [laughs] – I laughed when I told the [inaudible]: I said that they sure must have had a tail wind. But it didn’t seem to help me much. But to the best of my knowledge and the best of my descriptions, that is what I actually saw, and like I told Associated Press, I’ll, I’d be glad to confirm it with my hands on a Bible because I did see it, and whether it has anything to do with our Army or our Intelligence or whether it has to do with some foreign country, I don’t know. But I did see it, and I did clock it, and I just happened to be in a beautiful position to do it, and it’s just as much a mystery to me as it is to everyone else who’s been calling me the last 24 hours, wondering what it was.
Bill Berquette
Well Kenneth, thank you very much. I know that you’ve certainly been busy these past 24 hours because I’ve spent some of the time with you myself, and I know that the press associations, both Associated Press and our press, the United Press, has been right after you every minute, and the Associated and United Press all over the nation have been after this story. It’s been on every newscast over the air and in every newspaper I know of. The United Press in Portland has made several telephone calls here to Pendleton to me and to you this morning, and from New York, I understand, they’re after this story, and we may have an afterthought before night, because if is some new type of Army or Navy secret missile then probably a story [will] come out on it from the Army or Navy asking, saying that it is a new secret plane and that’ll be all there is to it and they will hush up the story, or perhaps that we will finally get a definite answer to it. I understand the United Press is checking out of New York now with the Army and also with the Navy, and we hope to have some concrete answer before nightfall. We certainly want to thank you, Kenneth, for coming in to our studio. We feel very pleased that this news, which is making nationwide news across the country, we are able to give our listeners, over KWRC, a first-hand report direct from you of what you saw, and we urge our listeners to keep tuned to this station because any time this afternoon or this evening and we get something on it on our United Press teletype, which is in direct communications with New York, Chicago, Portland – in fact every United Press bureau across the nation – why, we’ll have it on the air.