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On June 24th, 1947, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold
spotted a group of lustrous, delta-shaped objects flying around the Cascade mountains in Washington state.
Arnold’s story made headlines across the country, inspiring a world-wide fascination with “flying saucers”
and over twenty years of U.S. government research.
Arnold’s wasn't the first anomalous aerial sighting in human history, or even the first in 1947,
but it captured the public imagination like few sightings before,
and it birthed a new mythology of extraterrestrial visitation.
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Around 2:15 pm on June 24th, 1947,
businessman and private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, left Chehalis, Washington,
in his CallAir Model A plane on a business flight to Yakima.
Just before 3:00 pm, Arnold spotted what looked like a chain or a Chinese kite
weaving across the face of Mount Rainier.
As it got closer he could distinguish 9 separate objects in reverse-echelon formation
around 2900 meters altitude.
The objects were rounded and delta shaped, with concave triangular protrusions on their rears.
They appeared to repeatedly “dip” in the sky and tilt their wings in Arnold’s direction,
reflecting intensely bright flashes of light through his windshield.
The objects were moving so fast that Arnold decided they must have been fighter jets flying in formation.
However, they flew with the leading craft at the highest altitude,
not the lowest, and Arnold could not see any tails.
He clocked the time it took the formation to travel between the peaks of Mount Rainier and Mount Adams,
which he knew to be 30 to 40 kilometres away.
Immediately after landing in Yakima, Arnold told a number of friends and fellow pilots about his sighting.
He also used his measurements to calculate that the objects were between 13 to 15 meters long
and that they were travelling nearly 2000 kilometres per hour at the time of the sighting.
Arnold took his story to the East Oregonian Newspaper,
reporting that the objects seemed to bounce through the air like "a saucer skipping across water.”
Within two days, newspapers were running front page stories on Arnold’s "flying saucers,”
although Arnold himself had not called them that.
The term stuck, however, until being replaced by the Air Force term, “UFO,” in the early 1950s.
The media buzz encouraged others to go public with their own anomalous sightings,
most of which involved disc-shaped craft.
In the following weeks, flying saucers were showing up around the world,
and witnesses’ stories were making national news.
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The U.S. Army Air Forces (the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force)
took interest in flying saucers after a few military sightings on July 8th.
A classified order directed all UFO reports and information to Air Material Command, or AMC,
at Wright-Patterson Field, and two intelligence officers met with Arnold to collect his deposition.
Record shows that Air Material Command were genuinely convinced in the reality of flying saucers,
but were sharply divided on how to explain them.
To save face in the public eye, the Air Force pursued a policy of mostly debunking popular sightings,
but behind the scenes, experts took the phenomenon quite seriously, and suspected Soviet involvement.
A report authored by AMC Commander, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining,
confirmed on the basis of information collected so far
that flying saucers were “real and not visionary or fictitious”
and that some of them were likely controlled, “manually, automatically, or remotely.”
On December 30th, 1947, Air Material Command had ordered
the creation of a permanent flying saucer investigations group called “Project Sign.”
Within a year, the project produced a top-secret estimate of the situation,
which concluded that UFOs were not Soviet craft,
as Air Force intelligence had assumed, but likely extraterrestrial ones.
Air Force Chief of Staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg,
rejected this explanation, as many intelligence officials do today.
Project Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge in 1949, and then by Project Blue Book in 1952.
Blue Book continued to downplay UFO reports until its closure in 1970.
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No conceivable causes, either man made or natural,
could account for all the maneuvers that Arnold reported.
No bird on the planet was big enough to be visible from the distance Arnold spotted the objects,
and no bird, jet, or airplane could have approached the estimated speed of nearly 2000 kilometres per hour.
The press, the public, and the intelligence community were all at a loss for explanation.
Air Force experts eventually attributed Arnold's sighting to a particularly vivid mirage,
and provided similarly crude explanations for most other reports.
Speculation on the origin of the flying saucers ran wild, however, and quickly left the atmosphere.
Within two weeks of the sighting, Arnold began suggesting a possible extraterrestrial explanation,
and the Chicago Times ran an article which listed alien visitation as a possible cause.
Only after journalist Donald Keyhoe insisted on extraterrestrial origins in a famous True article in 1950,
however, did the UFO phenomenon become synonymous with alien visitation.
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The Kenneth Arnold case was only one of tens of thousands of UFO sightings in human history,
but it had a lasting effect on the way we conceive of aerial anomalies.
For most of history, people saw strange things in the sky as supernatural omens,
integrating them into mythology, but after Arnold,
people became much more likely to interpret them mechanistically, as foreign craft.
The case for the “nuts-and-bolts” flying saucer, assumed to be the spaceship of an alien civilization,
didn’t rely on any supernatural concepts, and could not easily be dismissed as a physical impossibility.
Arnold’s sighting also spurred the Air Force into beginning their own UFO research,
if only for security’s sake.
Because the U.S. Air Force first approached the UFO question as a matter of national defence,
they set a permanent expectation in peoples’ minds that UFOs were the responsibility of the military.
This is why we still turn to the government to investigate UFOs,
rather than to the scientific community, who have also neglected study of the UFO phenomenon.
Unsatisfied with the Air Force’s approach, Arnold began personal investigations into public UFO sightings,
becoming one of the first independent ufologists in modern history.
Frustrated with the military’s debunking agenda, Arnold retreated from the public for most of the 1960s and '70s.
He resurfaced at the first International UFO congress in 1977, however,
to express his disbelief in society’s collective denial of the evidence.
Arnold: We've seen something, I've seen something, hundreds of pilots have seen something in the skies.
We have dutifully reported these things.
And we have to have 15 million witnesses before anybody is going to look into the problem seriously?
Why this is utterly fantastic!
This is more fantastic than flying saucers, or people from Venus, or anything as far as I'm concerned.
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(Sources are listed in the video description.)
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