On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold saw nine UFOs in the sky near Mount Rainier, Washington, kicking off the modern ufo era. Arnold, a 32-year-old businessman and pilot, was looking for a downed transport plane at the time.

He thought the objects were jets at first, but he couldn’t make out any tails on the ends of what he thought were airplane fuselages at the time.

He noticed that, upon closer inspection, all but one of the items resembled flat disks. The story of Arnold’s sighting was almost immediately reported in newspaper articles, and the headline writers used the term “flying saucers” for this story for the first time.

Arnold told reporters in East Oregon on June 24, 1947, that he had seen a chain of nine strange-looking aircraft in the area around Mt. Rainier, each about the size of a C-54, while flying between Chehalis and Yakima in his own plane.

Later, he stated, “They flew close to the mountaintops, in a diagonal chainlike line.” It appeared as though they were connected. It appeared as though the disks were twenty-five to twenty-five miles apart and moving at a tremendous rate. According to Arnold, the speed was 1200 miles per hour.

He stated, “I watched them for about three minutes.” They were swerving around the high mountain peaks in and out. They were as shiny as pie pans and reflected the sun like mirrors. Nothing has ever been so flat to me. Their backs were triangular in the back, but one of them looked like a crescent. Their fronts were circular. Arnold assumed that they were traveling at least twice the speed of sound.

Breaking the sound barrier was still a dream for pilots in the final days of June 1947, and there was a lot of speculation and discussion about it. Arnold had the initial impression that they were either brand-new secret jets or guided missiles. However, after some thought, he also considered the following: Soviet aircraft because 1947 marked a turning point in the waning Cold War.

He told his story to the pilots at yakima, who thought the craft must have been guided missiles coming from Moses Lake, Washington. “I felt satisfied that that’s probably what they were,” Arnold recalled. Nevertheless, I had never heard of Moses Lake’s missile base.

Arnold discovered that his story had arrived before him when he arrived at Pendleton. The yakima pilots had called Pendleton to let him know that Arnold was coming and had told him about his adventure. In contrast to what is frequently stated in ufo books, none of these individuals were reporters.

Arnold went to the local fbI office “armed” with his maps and calculations to provide “the best description I could” after discussing this with them and concluding that these missiles were unusual. He found the office closed.

Arnold made the decision to look up the journalists from East Oregon because he was unsuccessful with the fbI. He appears to have been pushed by one particular factor. He told them that he had met a man from Ukiah, Oregon, who said he had seen a similar craft formation there, probably at the Hotel Pendleton where he was staying.

He then went to the East Oregonian’s offices before leaving Pendleton. He shared his adventure with Bill Bequette and Nolan Skiff. They moved “like a saucer if you skipped it across the water,” according to Arnold. Skiff, at first skeptical, was quickly persuaded of arnold’s sincerity. Bequette was as well. As he always did with local news, the latter dispatched an associated press release.

Sightings of flying disks increased as soon as arnold’s story was made public. Throughout the days that followed the 26th of June, hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of newspaper articles were devoted to flying disks.

Scientists and military experts frequently denied the existence of saucers, stating that “the observers just imagined they saw something, or there is some meteorological explanation for the phenomenon.” Expressions such as “mass hypnosis” and “foolish things” are frequently used in statements cited in these stories. The Saucer was likened to the Loch Ness Monster.

The saucer craze caused so much chaos that the United States In the early days of July, the United States Air Force began an investigation. Arnold sent a written report to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, detailing his sighting at the request of the Air Materiel Command.

Two members of the armed forces—Lieutenant Frank M. Brown and Captain William Davidson—came from Hamilton Field in California to pay him a visit a few days later. Brown and Davidson wanted to bring back an account from Arnold as well as a perspective on him.

As a result, when the inquirers got back to their base, they wrote a report about the information they had gathered. The details of the sightings and their impressions of the witnesses’ personalities make up the majority of this report.

Arnold’s report ended up on J. A. Hynek’s desk in 1948. The air force had asked an astronomer named Hynek to look over the reports to make sure they weren’t confused with astronomical phenomena. Arnold had seen some kind of aircraft, according to Hynek. However, Arnold received no response regarding the eventual location of his report. In order to resolve his sighting, he had to try other methods.

He accepted an invitation to investigate a second sighting in Tacoma, Washington, from ray palmer, a Chicago editor. Amazing Stories, a pulp magazine, was edited by Ray Palmer. At least from the perspective of the FBI agents, the case that Arnold investigated turned out to be a crude hoax.

Arnold called in the two military detectives who had previously interviewed him and asked him to get in touch with them if he heard anything interesting. Brown and Davidson perished in an airplane crash shortly thereafter. The saucer story went in different directions from there.

The newly formed United States Project Sign was launched by the US Air Force to investigate the sightings. The public only had access to the press reports for this project, which was part of the Technical Intelligence division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It was kept a secret.

The Kenneth Arnold affair presents a difficulty for sociology and social history. Sadly, historians have only looked at it at random. Even if they are more sophisticated, the majority of historiographical works on ufos have been written by non-academic amateurs.