An illustration of one of the objects reported by Arnold. *(The Coming of the Saucers)*

This month marks the 75th anniversary of private pilot Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 report of nine bright, glowing, blue-white objects seen flying in a "V" formation over Mount Rainier in Washington.

Arnold’s sighting took place at approximately 3 p.m. on June 24th as he flew from Chehalis, Washington, to Yakima, Washington, in a CallAir A-2 monoplane.

The weather conditions were clear and bright with good visibility.

On his way, he decided to spend some time searching for a downed C-46 Marine transport that had crashed into Mount Rainier's southwest side, and for which a $5,000 reward was being offered.

It was during that search when “a very bright flash lit up the plane and the sky around me,” Arnold said in a 1977 interview with Erik Lacitus for the Seattle Times.

It startled me. I just assumed it was some military lieutenant out with a shiny B-51 and I had withstood the reflection of the sun hitting the wings of his plane.
But the flash happened again, and that’s when I saw where it was coming from. It came spasmodically from a chain of nine circular-type aircraft way up from the vicinity of Mount Baker.
They were on a 170-degree course, so I knew they were going to approach Mount Rainier. At the time, I was 22 or 23 miles west of Mount Rainier. I was going to be at a right angle as they crossed in front of me.
I could not find any tails on these things. They didn’t leave a jet trail behind them. I judged their size to be at least 100 feet in wingspan. I thought it was a new type of missile.
I determined to clock their speed because, you know, most of pilots’ conversations are about how fast the military are building their planes these days.
I watched these objects carefully. I had a big sweep second hand on a 24-hour clock on the instrument panel. The nearest I could determine, they covered a distance between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams in 1 minute 42 seconds.
That figured out to something like 1,760 miles an hour, which I could hardly believe. I know that figure couldn’t be entirely accurate, but I’d say it was within a couple hundred miles accurate.
It was one of the darnedest things I ever saw. I was pretty well familiar with most civilian and military aircraft . . . and it wasn’t any type of our manufacture.

The term “flying saucers” reportedly came after Arnold described the objects’ erratic flight pattern to a reporter.

“Well, they flew erratically, like speedboats on rough water,” he said. “Or, erratically like if you took a saucer and skipped it across the water.”

This led to headlines like “Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted by Idaho Pilot,” published in the June 26th, 1947, edition of The Chicago Sun Times.

Arnold insisted the objects were not saucer-shaped, but rather described them as more disclike. The objects are also often portrayed as having a crescent shape, including in the 1952 book The Coming of the Saucers, published by Arnold with Fate magazine founder Ray Palmer.

The media’s treatment of Arnold following his sighting left him with a distaste for how stories like his are covered.

“I have, of course, suffered some embarrassment here and there by misquotes and misinformation,” he said. “I’ll tell you, sometimes I think that an editor of a newspaper says to the newsman, ‘Now, lookit, I want you to write a story about these flying saucers and make this goofy bastard look silly!’ You know, that’s just the way I think they go about it. They misspell your name, misspell the place it happened, get it all fouled up.”

A drawing by Arnold of one of the objects. *(Wikimedia Commons)*

But Arnold’s sighting wasn’t without corroboration.

On July 4th, the Oregon Daily Journal in Portland received a letter from L.G. Bernier of Richland, Washington—110 miles east of Mount Adams and 140 miles southeast of Mount Rainier.

Bernier claimed to have seen three of the objects flying over Richland at extremely high speed about a half an hour before Arnold.

"I have seen a P-38 appear seemingly on one horizon and then gone to the opposite horizon in no time at all, but these disks certainly were traveling faster than any P-38," he said. "No doubt Mr. Arnold saw them just a few minutes or seconds later, according to their speed."

He described them as flying "almost edgewise" and thought the three were part of a larger formation.

Meanwhile, about 60 miles west-northwest of Richland, a woman named Ethel Wheelhouse in Yakima, Washington, also reported seeing several flying discs moving startlingly fast at around the same time.

An investigation done by military intelligence in early July turned up a member of the Washington State Forest Service who said he'd been on fire watch in a tower at Diamond Gap, roughly 20 miles south of Yakima, when he saw several "flashes" over Mount Rainier at the exact same time as Arnold's sighting. They appeared to be moving in a straight line.

At the same time, Sidney B. Gallagher of Washington reportedly saw nine shiny discs flying to the north.

Then, on July 4th, a United Airlines crew over Idaho, enroute to Seattle, reportedly witnessed five to nine disclike objects pace their aircraft for 10 to 15 minutes before suddenly disappearing.

Also, on the same day as Arnold's sighting, the Oregon Daily Journal reported that two men from Oklahoma City had also seen nine unidentified flying objects, which one of the men said were “a shiny silvery color—very big—and . . . moving at a terrific rate of speed.” The same paper also reported on a man in Kansas City, Missouri, who said he'd seen the same objects while working on a roof, saying that "they were flying so fast I barely had time to count them before they were gone. They were leaving vapor trails.”

Arnold’s sighting was reported just two weeks prior to when Roswell Army Air Field public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that personnel from the 509th Operations Group had recovered a "flying disc" after it crashed on the J.B. Foster ranch, following the reported discovery of debris of unknown origin there by foreman William Brazel sometime between mid-June and early July.

Interest in UFOs at the time was high, and in 1948 the U.S. Air Force began Project Sign to investigate such reports.

According to Major Edward J. Ruppelt, who wrote about Project Sign in his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,

I found that there was a lot of speculation on this report. Two factions at [the Air Technical Intelligence Center] had joined up behind two lines of reasoning. One side said that Arnold had seen plain, everyday jet airplanes flying in formation. This side's argument was based on the physical limitations of the human eye, visual acuity, the eye's ability to see a small, distant object . . . The "Arnold-saw-airplanes" faction maintained that since Arnold said that the objects were 45 to 50 feet long they would have had to be much closer than he had estimated or he couldn't even have seen them at all.
[...]
The other side didn't buy this idea at all. They based their argument on the fact that Arnold knew where the objects were when he timed them . . . To cinch this point the fact that the objects had passed behind a mountain peak was brought up. This positively established the distance the objects were from Arnold and confirmed his calculated 1,700-miles-per-hour speed. Besides, no airplane can weave in and out between mountain peaks in the short time that Arnold was watching them. The visual acuity factor only strengthened the "Arnold-saw-a- flying-saucer" faction's theory that what he'd seen was a spaceship. If he could see the objects 20 to 25 miles away, they must have been about 210 feet long instead of the poorly estimated 45 to 50 feet.

To date, there is no definitive explanation for what Kenneth Arnold witnessed.

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