Kenneth Arnold’s Adventure of a Lifetime
If Kenneth Arnold had been a Hollywood actor registered with Central Casting, he would have been called for jobs playing police lieutenants, attorneys, Army majors, and businessmen. In 1947, he was handsomely masculine, with dark hair swept to one side in a sensible pompadour; and level, dark eyes set in a square face. Just thirty-two, Arnold had been a high school football star, and participated in swimming trials for the 1932 Olympics. He held a pilot’s license, and yes, he owned a business, the Great Western Fire Control Supply Co. From his home in Boise, Idaho, Arnold pursued sales by flying forty to a hundred hours a month across five western states. June 1947 brought him to Washington State to oversee installation of fire-control equipment at Central Air Service, located in Chehalis.
On Tuesday, June 24, Arnold had completed his business and was flying alone in his three-seat, single-engine CallAir A-2 at about ninety-two hundred feet. (One or two sources identify Arnold’s CallAir as an A-3.) With a bit of time on his hands, he decided to see if he could spot a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane that had gone missing in the area the previous January. The military offered a five-thousand-dollar reward, so Arnold diverted his flight path from his destination, Yakima, until he reached a spot some twenty-five miles away from Washington’s Cascade Range, approaching the west faces of Mount Adams and Mount Rainier.
A few minutes before 3:00 p.m., Arnold’s attention was captured by “nine peculiar-looking aircraft” flying in diagonal formation. His immediate thought had been geese—the big birds can fly as high as twenty-thousand feet—but Arnold dismissed the idea when he was momentarily blinded by “a tremendous bright flash” off the crafts’ skins, and periodic flashes after that, as the objects heeled in the sky.
The objects moved in an odd, undulating unison that Arnold likened to the weaving “tail of a Chinese kite.” The craft flying at point had a crescent shape with a pointed, delta-shaped aft portion; the eight that followed were disc-shaped and more fully rounded. (After returning to the sky above Mount Adams days later, to double-check on landmarks, Arnold estimated that the nine objects had been strung out for about five miles.) A uniform lack of tail assemblies perplexed Arnold, who removed his sunglasses and opened his port window for a clearer look. Sure enough, none of the craft showed tails, standard wings, or anything else required to maneuver a powered aircraft.
The CallAir flew in a clear, bright sky. Anyone aloft that day enjoyed visibility approaching fifty miles. While maintaining a steady hand on the controls, Arnold observed the nine objects for about two-and-a-half minutes. He was an experienced pilot with twenty-nine hundred flight hours and a clear grasp of precisely where he was in the sky, and the positions of the nine craft in relation to his own. He estimated that as he observed, the UFOs traveled forty-seven miles. (At one point, the craft passed behind a mountain peak located twenty- five miles from Arnold’s position, giving the pilot a useful point of reference.) Beginning at 2:59 p.m., and for the next minute and forty-two seconds, Arnold studied the objects, utilizing the peaks of Adams and Rainier, a cowling tool, and a DC-4 visible some fifteen miles off the port side of his plane as reference points. While trying to calculate the objects’ approximate speed, he estimated the nine craft at twenty to twenty-five miles distant—considerably closer than the hundred miles when Arnold first saw them. The distances suggested that the UFOs maintained an arc of at least two degrees; anything less, and they would not have been visible to Arnold at all.
Although Arnold’s initial report estimated the length of each craft as forty-five to fifty feet, a later look at Arnold’s calculations suggested an individual length of 210 feet, and an astonishing speed of 1,200 miles per hour. (At the time of Arnold’s sighting, the fastest piloted flight dated to July 1944, when German test pilot Heini Dittmar took an experimental Me 163B Komet rocket plane to 700 miles per hour. The fastest American flight had been accomplished on June 19, 1947, by Col. Albert Boyd, who reached 624 mph in a P-80 Shooting Star, a U.S. jet fighter. In November 1947, five months after Edwards’s sighting, an American X-1 rocket plane flown in a secret test by Chuck Yeager reached 891 mph.) Arnold’s last look at the nine craft came as they flew south and vanished behind the peak of Mount Adams.
What had Arnold seen? His first thought was camouflaged American bombers, or a phalanx of wholly experimental aircraft. (A helicopter pilot in the area saw the objects, too, and wrote them off as test-fired American missiles.) Arnold worried that disaster might result if the craft were somehow fitted with atomic bombs. He decided to talk with the FBI. After a quick stop at Yakima, he flew to the nearest local office, at Pendleton, Oregon. Because the office was closed, Arnold visited Pendleton’s East Oregonian newspaper, where he found reporters Bill Bequette (who reported for UPI, as well as the East Oregonian) and Nolan Skiff.
Arnold gave his first press interview to Bequette. During the conversation, Arnold described the nine mysterious craft as “shiny, crescent-shaped plates,” adding that they moved “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” The saucer image struck Bequette’s imagination, and when the story ran on the front page of the East Oregonian’s June 26, 1947, edition, Arnold’s crescents had become “saucer-like.” It was from that description, of course, that reporters and others later derived “flying saucer.” The “flying saucer” descriptor stuck immediately. For example, in the August 31, 1947, Sunday installment of the Superman newspaper strip—a continuity in which Superman tosses large plates into the sky as an advertising stunt—an astronomer at the eyepiece of an enormous telescope exclaims, “It looks like a flying saucer! It is a flying saucer!” Creators of comic strips worked four to six weeks ahead of publication, which means that Superman writers Jerry Siegel and Alvin Schwartz, and artist Wayne Boring, invoked “flying saucers” mere weeks after the Arnold story broke.
A tense world situation, apprehension that the craft belonged to a foreign government, and sheer novelty helped put the Arnold story on page one. Still, the East Oregonian’s headline writer struck a whimsical tone: “Impossible!
Maybe. But Seein’ is Believin’, Says Flier.” By the time the Oregonian story appeared on the AP wire, Arnold’s crescent- shaped craft had become “nine bright saucer-like objects.” A follow-on story in the Norman, Oklahoma, Transcript quoted remarks Arnold made to a local businessman named Jack Whitman. Whitman had apparently absorbed the “saucer” remark, telling the Transcript that Arnold described the craft to him as “shaped like saucers.” Later in the week, Portland’s Oregon Daily Journal quoted Byron Savage, an Oklahoma City man who had seen a single, silvery flying object on May 17, 1947, more than a month before Arnold’s sighting of nine. Savage’s wife and some skeptical friends suggested he may have seen lightning. “I kept quiet after that,” Savage said, “until I read about that man [Arnold] seeing nine of the same things. I saw it and I thought it only fair to back him up.” By June 27, the term “flying saucer” appeared in a headline in a Boise, Idaho, Statesman story. The same day, a fresh Arnold description appeared in the East Oregonian:
I saw them, weaving and ducking in and out as they came south not more than 500 feet over the plateau. They looked like they were rocking. I looked for the tails but suddenly realized they didn’t have any. They were half- moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear. I was in a beautiful position to watch them. . . . I knew they were like nothing I had ever heard of before. There were no bulges or cowlings. They looked like a big flat disc.
Arnold had seen the craft just a half-week before, and his daily life was already taking some strange turns. Skeptics had lined up to take potshots at him, and a woman who spotted him in a Pendleton diner shrieked, “There’s the man who saw the men from Mars!” Later, Arnold took a phone call from a Texas preacher, who informed him that the craft heralded doomsday. The preacher confided that he was preparing his congregation for “the end of this world.” During June 27–28, other people reported seeing UFOs. A man in Eugene, Oregon, snapped photos of unidentified craft flying in an “X” or “V” formation (lab workers shrugged off the UFOs as dust on the negative). In Bellingham, Washington, a man reported seeing three wingless flying objects traveling “real fast.” In two separate incidents, a Kansas City carpenter and an Oklahoma City pilot saw nine discs, and in Yakima, Washington, housewife Ethel Wheelhouse rang authorities to say she’d seen “the whatzits.” The first nighttime sighting came from a Wenatchee, Washington, motorist named Archie Eden, who witnessed a large, wingless object descend rapidly toward the Earth and then explode about two hundred feet in the air.
In a short time, consensus among the American public was that Arnold had spotted secret weapons created by the USA or the Soviet Union. Despite the “men from Mars” idea familiar to fans of science fiction, the extraterrestrial angle had yet to catch fire. The American military did not routinely inform the FBI about secret American military projects, and the bureau had its doubts about Soviet capability to engineer flying saucers. Still, the Arnold story (or maybe just the news coverage it generated) piqued FBI interest, and led to an investigation of a possible Soviet campaign of disinformation. (Although the bureau gave Arnold himself no encouragement, it quickly began to assemble a file on him.) Because nothing in Arnold’s background suggested itself as sinister, the FBI worried that American news media had set themselves up to be duped by phony reports of sightings and other mischief ginned up by Communist agents.
In the meanwhile, saucer sightings in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest blossomed like dandelions, giving local authorities and the FBI still more to think about. During the first week after Arnold’s encounter, saucer reports came in from the Cascades (a prospector); the Grand Canyon (a medical doctor); Lake Meade, Nevada (a USAF pilot); and New Mexico (a rocket engineer). In addition, a sighting dated June 23, a day before the Kenneth Arnold event, was reported by a railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (It is possible, though far from certain, that this witness backdated his sighting,) Excluding the nine craft witnessed by Arnold, these June 1947 sightings account for twenty-five flying discs.
UFOlogists with good antennae surmised that Arnold and the prospector at work in the Cascades had seen the same objects.
The pattern continued throughout July 1947, with another sixteen reports (accounting for as many as sixty objects, most of them disc-shaped) coming from Portland, Seattle, Boise, New Mexico, Texas, and Edwards Air Force Base (near Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California). Sightings from Wyoming, Massachusetts, and Ohio defied the intriguing geographical pattern. The witnesses included Air Force pilots and technicians, an astronomer, USAF intelligence officers, an interior decorator, and the crew of a Nevada-based B-25 bomber.
Meanwhile, the scientific community made an erroneous assumption about Arnold’s sighting, reasoning that because Arnold was not a scientist, a serious investigation of his claim was pointless. And with that, Big Science relegated Kenneth Arnold to the fringe.
More Discs, Disaster, and the Army’s Final Word
In July 1947, the Army Air Forces requested that Arnold prepare a report about his experiences, and send it to the commander of Wright Field (renamed Wright- Patterson AFB in 1948, following the establishment of the USAF), near Dayton, Ohio. Arnold complied, and even complemented his account with sketches of what he had seen. Not surprisingly, he felt “considerable disappointment” when the Air Forces did not reply. He was mystified that the military seemed unimpressed that his story had a corroborating account, from United Airlines DC-3 pilot Emil Smith and co-pilot Ralph Stevens. Just eight minutes after taking off from Boise, en route to Seattle, at about 9:00 p.m. on July 4, 1947, the DC-3 encountered five disc-like objects, followed shortly after by a separate group of four. Smith and Stevens flashed their landing lights at the first phalanx, assuming they were looking at other conventional aircraft. When both groups of discs exhibited unorthodox maneuvers, Smith and Stevens called the flight attendant, Marty Morrow, into the cockpit, so that she could function as a third witness.
The Army Air Forces were aware of the DC-3 case, as well as a June 21 incident at Maury Island, Washington (see chapter fifteen), when one of six unidentified flying objects dumped steaming slag into Puget Sound, astounding a witness and killing a dog.
The Air Forces’ silence, and the other Washington State incidents, inspired Arnold to send a follow-up telegram to Wright Field. The message reiterated Arnold’s belief that the mysterious craft “belonged to our government.” Well, if that was the case, the USAAF wasn’t going to admit as much to Kenneth Arnold, and not to anybody else, either. But even as the Army feigned disinterest, two of its own, Capt. William Davidson and Lt. Frank M. Brown, probed the sighting. They also looked into Arnold’s background and personal life, and investigated the Maury Island event, too.
The officers met with Arnold and a Maury Island witness at a Tacoma hotel on the evening of July 31. Early in the morning of August 1, 1947, the B-25 carrying Davidson and Brown (who had departed the hotel clutching a bulging classified file) exploded and crashed near Tacoma, just minutes out of McChord Field. The smashup startled and discouraged Kenneth Arnold, and—not surprisingly—went on to encourage seventy years of speculation about conspiracy and cover-up.
Stung by media coverage of Arnold and Maury Island, plus the fiery deaths of Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown, the USAAF remained mum about the Arnold sighting for weeks more.
The explanation that finally came remains shocking in its uselessness: “mirage.”
Arnold Presses On
Celebrity suited Kenneth Arnold reasonably well, but he pursued it on his own terms before finally allowing it to dissipate. Besides his photogenic looks, he had a pleasing, mid-range voice, free of accent and given to occasional, self- deprecating scoffs of laughter. Although responding to numberless phone queries and interviews, Arnold resisted attempts to paint him as quaint, amusing, kooky, or nuts. (Unknown to Arnold, a 1947 FBI report erroneously—or, perhaps, cleverly—claimed that “he is practically a moron in the eyes of the
majority of the population of the United States.) Arnold knew what he saw when he saw it, and that was that. Frustrated by apparently lukewarm official interest, Arnold told his story on radio programs and television shows, gave talks and made other personal appearances, and contributed a saucer article to the first issue (1948) of editor-publisher Ray Palmer’s Fate. In 1950, Arnold self- published a booklet, The Flying Saucer as I Saw It.
The booklet is an unusual piece, sober rather than nakedly self-promotional, but sufficiently brave (or reckless) to identify the late Lt. Frank Brown as a “counterespionage agent” who operated out of New York’s Mitchell Field.
Arnold claimed that he had been contacted by Brown within days of the Mount Rainier sighting. Brown informed him that photographs of flying saucers were already held by the government. Accepting an invitation to visit Hamilton Field on San Pablo Bay, south of Novato, California, Arnold was met by intelligence officer Lt. Col. Donald Springer, who handed over prints of two of the saucer images, as a thank-you for Arnold’s assistance in the official investigation of the Mount Rainier episode. Arnold’s booklet includes both of those photos. One page is devoted to the Maury Island incident, and another to a December 18, 1948, letter sent to Arnold by Velma Brown, widow of Lt. Brown. In it, Mrs. Brown wrote, “I have never thought that Frank’s death was an accident.” In 1952, Arnold collaborated with Ray Palmer on a nonfiction saucer piece for Other Worlds magazine (February 1952 issue) and a book, The Coming of the Saucers: A Documentary Report on Sky Objects That Have Mystified the World.
Despite the book’s title, Arnold used the text to reiterate that the craft he saw were crescent shaped. But Arnold probably knew his fight against “flying saucer” was in vain. Regardless, as late as 1966, he again tried to repudiate the saucer trope, this time in a widely distributed news photo in which Arnold holds an artist’s rendering of a crescent-shaped craft.
As the 1970s approached, public interest in Arnold had naturally declined.
Arnold himself had grown tired of the familiar questions and government obfuscation, and he allowed his story to recede. But he pulled a surprise in 1977, when he traveled to Chicago to speak at the First International UFO Congress.
As always, he expressed frustration with the lack of transparent government investigation of UFOs.
USAF: Arnold as a Cultural Marker
Iconographic status connotes neither competence nor ineptitude; honesty nor deception. Many unsavory persons and institutions are icons. The beauty of Kenneth Arnold as a seminal witness to a kind of phenomenon often not taken seriously is that he lived as “a solid citizen.” He became an Eagle Scout at fourteen, and later competed successfully in sports and business. He supported a wife and two children. His neighbors liked him. Any UFO skeptic that hoped to paint Arnold as a dunce or a crank came away disappointed.
Arnold was a “type”: sturdy, calmly confident, and comfortable in a sober suit.
His public persona filtered into the back of America’s group mind, and even without realizing it, Hollywood moviemakers riffed on Arnold to create another type: the straight, stolid SF-thriller hero that marshals facts, science, and the help of his associates to defeat alien invaders. Kenneth Arnold became the face of the first widely reported UFO event, and also suggested the sort of man qualified to deal effectively with the visitors. Other than astronauts and professional pilots, few eyewitnesses to UFOs surpass Arnold’s aura of credibility.
Significantly, Arnold had no truck with the extraterrestrial hypothesis of UFOs. He remained convinced that the craft were of earthly origin, finding in that explanation a situation more fateful than any speculation about what he dismissed as “people from Venus.” Ironically, then, Arnold’s encounter turned out to be an enormous factor in the growth of the “little green men” notion, and helped encourage a later (and considerably more serious) study of extraterrestrials. Little of that, though, was clear during the fourth week of June 1947. It was enough that, for the briefest of periods, Kenneth Arnold’s experience stood as the most exciting of all UFO sightings to date.
Then, in the New Mexico desert barely two weeks after the Arnold incident, a complex stew of things—aeronautics, the military, government secrecy, and questions of humankind’s place in the cosmos—collided at a place called Roswell.