MYSTERY
Kenneth Arnold: The Sighting That Invented the Flying Saucer
On the afternoon of 24 June 1947, a businessman and private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying his small aircraft near Mount Rainier, in the Cascade Range of Washington state, when he saw something that would change the world's imagination. Nine bright objects were streaking through the sky, flying in a chain formation at tremendous speed, weaving between the mountain peaks — moving, by his estimate, far faster than any aircraft of the era could manage. When he landed and described what he had seen to reporters, he reached for an analogy for the way the objects moved: they flew, he said, erratically, dipping and skimming, 'like a saucer would if you skipped it across water.' A reporter distilled this into a memorable phrase, and within days the newspapers of America were full of the term 'flying saucers.' It was, in a sense, a misunderstanding: Arnold had been describing the motion of the objects, not their shape, and the objects themselves he described as more crescent- or heel-shaped than round. But the phrase 'flying saucer' had entered the language, and with it came the idea of the round, disc-shaped craft that would become the iconic image of the UFO for generations. Within weeks, reports of 'flying saucers' were pouring in from across the country, and the crash near Roswell followed in early July. The modern age of UFOs had begun. This is the story of Kenneth Arnold's sighting — of what he saw, of how a phrase was born from a description of motion, and of how a single ambiguous encounter launched a global phenomenon.
