June 24, 1947. Kenneth Arnold, a fire extinguisher salesman from Idaho, was flying over Mt. Rainier in Washington, searching for a missing WWII aircraft and hoping to collect a reward. Suddenly, while flying from west to east, Arnold spotted 9 airborne objects traveling from north to south in reverse echelon formation - with the leader at the top. At first, he assumed it was a flock of geese, then reasoned that they were too big to be geese, so they must be planes, roughly the size of DC-9's, but without discernable wings or tails aside from a sort of triangular shape on one of the objects (second to last). He described them as shiny and silvery, reflecting the afternoon sun with dazzling brilliance. They flipped like a fish or the tail of a box kite, he said, estimating their speed at between 1,200 and 1,700 miles per hour. Arnold admitted he "could be wrong" about the speed of the objects.
"They were shaped like saucers and were so thin I could barely see them..." Kenneth Arnold, June 25, 1947
"[I]t seemed everybody around the airfield was listening to the story of my experience. I mentioned the speed I had calculated but assured everybody that I was positive that my mathematics were lousy." - Kenneth Arnold, The Coming of the Saucers, 1952
Scientists weigh in:
"I think a lot of the reports are phony...To judge height and speed, even trained observers must know the size of an object." - Wagner Schlesinger, director, Adler Planetarium, Chicago, 1947
"The first skyhooks [high altitude research balloons] were sent up in 1947, the year flying saucers were first reported. Arnold's original description of what he saw above the Cascade Mountains tallies remarkably well with what he would be expected to see had he flown near a group of smaller plastic balloons often used in place of the single large one. He estimated their size as smaller than a plane and the distance as about twenty-five miles or twice the length of Manhattan Island. At this distance they would have been mere specks in the sky, and since Arnold was seeing them with unaided eyes, we cannot trust his guesses as to their actual size, shape, distance, or speed. Estimates of speed presuppose accurate knowledge of distance, and this in turn cannot be gauged unless the exact size is known." - Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952)
"[Arnold’s] description showed some inconsistencies that made it difficult to decide what the nine disks really were. If they had actually been forty-five or fifty feet long, they must have been much closer than he thought; objects that size would not have been visible at a distance of twenty to twenty-five miles. However, if the estimated distance was correct, then in order to be visible the objects must have been much larger, at least 210 feet long. One of the estimates must be wrong—but which one? Until that question was settled, the computed speed was meaningless, since to estimate the velocity of a moving object an observer must know either its true distance or its true size. Even after a careful study, Air Force investigators could not identify the disks; they might have been clouds, a mirage, or some kind of aircraft, but no definite answer was possible from the evidence available." - Donald Menzel, The World of Flying Saucers (1963)
"[Kenneth Arnold] stated that [the] objects seemed about 20 times as long as wide, estimating them as 40-50 ft long.
He also estimated the distance as 20-25 miles and clocked them as going 47 miles in 102 seconds (1700 mph).
If the distance were correct, then in order for details to be seen, objects must have been of the order of 100 x 2000 ft in size.
If we adopt a reasonable size, Arnold's own estimate, in fact, of 50 ft long, hence about 3 ft wide, the objects must have been closer than a mile, obviously contrary to his statement.
If we adopt a reasonable limiting size of the objects of 20 x 400 ft, objects must have been closer than 6 miles to have shown the detail indicated by Arnold. At this distance, angular speed observed corresponds to a maximum speed of 400 mph.
In all probably, therefore, objects were much closer than thought and moving at definitely sub-sonic speeds." - J. Allen Hyneck, The Hyneck Report (1977).
Our conclusion:
Based on Arnold's description, and factoring his size/distance/speed miscalculations (illustrated by Hyneck) into the equation, as well as the parallax illusion of increased speed caused by both the objects and the observation platform (Arnold's plane) being in motion, the "discs" possess characteristics consistent with a balloon-borne weather device or atmospheric research payload with three or more radar targets:
• Bright metallic silver
• No sound
• No wings
• No tail, only a convex "v" shape
• Flying in a reverse echelon formation
• Weaving, dipping, skipping, skimming
• Flipping like fish or the tail of a box kite
• Reflecting bright flashes as they flipped
There should be little doubt that these - the very first flying saucers - were, indeed, components of a weather balloon.
Had the press described Arnold's sighting as "flying silver box kites" instead of "flying saucers," the public - or at least the weather bureau - might have quickly deduced that weather balloons were the culprit. They could have announced the roll-out of the newest weather devices, particularly the shiny, silvery, kite-like, radar/wind target, or "rawin," made famous two weeks later when an Army intelligence officer at Roswell, New Mexico, hastily identified a crashed rawin as a "flying disk." In a way, of course, the officer was 100% correct: the rawin and the flying disc were one and the same from the very beginning.
Project Mogul balloon launch, Alamagordo, NM, July 1947.
Four "flying discs" over Morristown, NJ, July 1947. The witness who took this photo described the topmost object as being a dull greyish-white while the other three appeared to be bright metallic silver. The objects ascended and drifted southward until, from his vantage point, they quickly disappeared. A personal note: after reading scores of descriptions of June/July 1947 objects which sounded like weather balloons, the Morristown report was like a Rosetta stone, helping to unravel the saucer mystery: unlike all the others, this one was accompanied by a photograph (c/o Blocher report, 1967) which appears to show a weather balloon with three radar targets. However, the Morristown objects remain officially "unsolved" in the files of Project Blue Book.
Meanwhile Arnold's objects were reckoned by the experts to be either birds or mirages. Arnold took great umbrage at the latter suggestion as he thought it implied he was insane. His credibility as a witness to something extraordinary is somewhat degraded if he is unclear about the objective nature of mirages. It suffers further damage when he aligns himself with Ray Palmer, co-author and promoter of the Shaver Mystery hoax, and Fred Crisman, inventer of the Maury Island hoax. In less than a month, Arnold's credibility was squandered. The saucers vanished from the headlines for a time. They returned after three years heraldic by new saucer celebrities:
Donald Keyhoe, whose 1950 book accused the U.S. government of covering up knowledge of extraterrestrial visitors.
Frank Scully, whose 1950 book disclosed secret knowledge of a crashed saucer and dead aliens (later exposed as a hoax).
Ray Dimmick, another crashed saucer/dead aliens claimant who captured headlines in the spring of 1950 before admitting to fabricating the story.
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(c) 2023, R. A. Henning
Center For IFO Studies
