The Big Book of UFOs. Chris A. Rutkowski

a perfect day for flying. He saw a DC-4 in the air about 24 kilometres away from him, but at a much higher altitude.

      Suddenly, a bright flash attracted his attention. He looked around for the source and eventually saw nine “peculiar” aircraft flying south at about the same altitude as his own plane. He noted they were flying very fast, approaching the mountain, and he thought they were jets. The flashes recurred as they would occasionally dip and adjust their flight slightly, catching the Sun.

      Arnold couldn’t tell what kind of aircraft they were because they were initially very far away, but he soon got closer as they drew nearer the mountain, and he could see them against the snow. He was surprised to see that they didn’t have tails or stabilizers like jets would. He timed their speed with the clock on his dash and a distant reference point. They were indeed going very fast, as fast as or faster than some military planes.

      To make sure that he was not seeing a mirage or reflection, Arnold opened the cockpit window and watched them through the clear high air. After almost three minutes, the formation of odd objects had passed behind a distant ridge of mountains out of sight. But Arnold had a good enough look at the objects as they wobbled in flight that he could determine they were roughly disc-shaped, with a missing chord at their trailing edges that made them look like chubby crescents.

      In 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw a formation of disc-like objects flying over mountains in the Pacific Northwest. These were the first reported flying saucers.

      When Arnold landed at Yakima, he told his story to the ground crew there. A helicopter pilot told Arnold the discs were probably just a flight of guided missiles from a nearby military base. Arnold then flew to Pendleton, Oregon, but wasn’t aware that someone from the Yakima airport had called ahead to let them know a pilot on his way there had seen some very unusual objects. Pendleton was in the midst of an air show, and when Arnold landed there, many people wanted to hear his story.

      The next day, although he had been told by some skeptics he had just seen guided missiles, Arnold was certain he had seen something more unusual, and he went to Pendleton’s newspaper office to speak with reporters there. The result was a wire service news story written by reporter Bill Bequette, which read:

      Pendleton, Ore., 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, [a] 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 he clocked and estimated their speed at 1200 miles an hour.

      Although it is sometimes noted that Bequette was the one who first coined the term flying saucer, that term does not actually appear in his news story. What likely happened is that as the wire story went out to newspapers across the continent, headline writers composing the story in their local papers created the phrase from a quick reading of the news copy. The result was that many newspapers carried the Bequette story under a headline that contained the now-familiar term flying saucer, even though neither Arnold nor Bequette actually called the objects that at all.

      Several explanations for Arnold’s sighting have been put forth over the years by skeptics and debunkers, all of which are inadequate. An example is that suggested by Harvard University astronomer Dr. Donald Menzel, who in 1977 proposed that the discs Arnold observed were actually raindrops on the Callair aircraft’s windows.

      This, of course, makes no sense when Arnold’s own testimony is read, which clearly indicates he had thought of such an explanation himself and opened the window to rule this possibility out.

      If one was to propose a more reasonable explanation for Arnold’s sighting, it is more likely that what he saw was a group of secret military test vehicles, perhaps missiles with their fins and/or ailerons rendered invisible by the bright sunlight reflecting off their surfaces. However, no evidence uncovered through any investigation of the case has been offered which would support this contention.

      We are left with a sighting of nine saucer-like objects that sparked the popular imagination and impressed the image of flying saucers indelibly on our collective memories.

THE ROSWELL UFO CRASH

      Strictly speaking, the famous (or infamous, if you prefer) case involving a crash of a flying saucer near the town of Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, is not a very “good” UFO report. In fact, were it not for a series of events that followed the sighting of an unusual bright object, the case might have remained lost to history. But this incident has become possibly the best-known UFO case in the annals of ufology, spawning books, movies, TV series, and achieving legendary status among hard-core believers and the general public.

      On July 2, 1947, business owner Dan Wilmot and his wife were sitting outside on their porch, enjoying the summer evening. At about 9:50 p.m., they saw a bright, disc-shaped object with glowing lights flying northwest very rapidly. To a reporter from the Roswell Daily Record, Wilmot described the object as shaped like “two inverted saucers mouth to mouth” and an estimated six to eight metres in diameter.

      Over the next few days, sightings of unusual objects were reported in the general area. Most were of bright fireballs, such as one on July 4 described as a “brilliant light” plunging to Earth, similar to an aircraft on fire and falling from the sky.

      This handful of sightings was hardly remarkable. In fact, the cases have characteristics of astronomical phenomena known as bolides — pieces of comets or planetary debris which impact the Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds and immediately burn up, leaving a trail of light that is often blue, green, or orange. Each year, many of these objects are seen and reported as UFOs, but later assigned an “explained” or “possibly explained” status by investigators and researchers.

      If the Roswell case rested solely on these relatively unexciting reports, it would have faded into obscurity. However, on July 4, rancher Mac Brazel had been watching the skies during a severe lightning storm and heard a large boom that didn’t sound like thunder.

      The next day, July 5, 1947, he was riding his horse through a pasture when he came upon a large mass of debris unlike anything he had seen before. Scattered throughout an area 400 metres long by hundreds of metres wide were numerous metallic strips that looked like dark tinfoil. Examining it in some detail, he said that as he crumpled it in his hand then released it, a strip would assume its original shape and could not be bent or wrinkled. As well, he found sticks of lightweight material like balsa wood, upon which were inscribed odd writings like hieroglyphics.

      Brazel collected some of the pieces and took them home. He showed them to his family and to some neighbours, who all marvelled at the unusual quality of the material. Brazel notified the local Sheriff, George Wilcox, who in turn contacted the nearby Roswell Army Air Field, since the two thought the debris had come from a military operation of some kind.

      Major Jesse Marcel, Intelligence Officer of the 509th Bomb Group, drove from the base to Wilcox’s office, where he interviewed Brazel and examined some of the debris he had brought into town. Upon hearing the details of Brazel’s find, Marcel believed the crash to be that of an aircraft and decided to travel to the site along with Captain Sheridan Cavitt, a counterintelligence officer from the Roswell base. Driving in separate vehicles, they arrived at the location too late to be able to do an extensive search, so Marcel and Cavitt decided to sleep overnight there in the desert.

      In the morning, they explored the area in detail and found material scattered throughout a large crash site over a kilometre long and almost 300 metres wide. They also found pieces of debris that resembled tinfoil and several lengths of light rods like balsa wood. However, unlike balsa wood, the rods could not seem to be bent or broken.

      Cavitt