If Kenneth Arnold, while flying on business from Chehalis to Yakima on June 24th, had decided not to assist in the search for a C-46 Marine transport that had crashed on the slopes of Mount Rainier, the introduction to the modern period of UFO activity would have been quite different. He chose to make this side-trip, however, and as a consequence he became one of those persons who are in the right place at the right time. Shortly before three p.m. he was approaching the mountain from the west side, and as he began a turn of a hundred and eighty degrees toward the south, his eye was caught by a flash, as if “a mirror were reflecting sunlight at me.” Alert for other aircraft, he looked around and saw, to his left and north of Mount Rainier, a chain-like formation of nine brightly scintillating objects rapidly approaching the mountain on a roughly southern heading. As they came closer, passing between him and the summit of the mountain, he could see they were nine flat, discoid objects arranged in a diagonally stepped-down, echelon formation, stretched out over a distance that he later calculated to be five miles. They were evenly spaced but for a wider gap between the fourth and fifth objects. As they crossed the snow-covered summit of Rainier and approached a peak to the south of it, he decided to clock their speed; since they were headed toward Mount Adams, the two mountains would make excellent reference points.
He began to time them as the first object reappeared from behind the outlier peak on the southwest flank of Mount Rainier. (He later identified this peak as Goat Rocks, but he may be in error as Goat Rocks is approximately halfway between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams.)The objects followed the hogback that stretches to the south, flying erratically and swerving in and out of the lesser peaks "like the tail of a kite.” He noticed that the objects would flip from side to side, in unison, flashing brightly as they did so. He also noticed something else -- a detail he did not mention in his official report: as the objects flipped from side to side, they presented their lateral surfaces and Arnold saw that one of the objects appeared to be different from the rest, in the shape of a crescent. He hadn’t attached much importance to it at first for, as he wrote of it later in The Coming of the Saucers (pp. 22-23), “I thought it was the angle from which I observed this particular one which made it look different and I wasn’t completely positive about it.”
The objects covered the fifty-mile distance between the two mountains in just one minute and forty-two seconds. Amazed, Arnold began making some rapid calculations as he flew over the area to measure the distance. The results were astonishing: the discs had been flying at a speed of 1,700 miles an hour! To allow for miscalculation he reduced this figure by five hundred but even twelve hundred miles an hour was an amazing speed!
When he landed at Yakima an hour later he went straight to Al Baxter, general manager of Central Aircraft, to tell of his experience. The story quickly spread around the airport, and his descriptions and calculations were discussed with great interest by the pilots and mechanics there. And when Arnold later flew on to Pendleton, word of his strange experiences had preceded him, for on his arrival he found a platoon of incredulous newsmen, looking for a good silly-season story. They had only to meet the originator of this preposterous tale, however -- a pilot with more than four thousand hours of flying experience over some of the most mountainous territory in the United States; a reputable salesman of fire-control equipment over a wide area, who did much of his business by air; a deputy sheriff with the Ada County, Idaho, Sheriffs Aerial Posse department and hear his careful recounting of what had happened, to change their initial skepticism to keen interest. They went over and over his calculations of speed and the figure kept coming out the same. Nothing but rockets went that fast in 1947, and no one knew of any rockets being sent up over Mount Rainier.
(I–2)
As a result of his meeting with newsmen in Pendleton, Kenneth Arnold's story was filed in a reasonably serious, straightforward manner, and appeared in newspapers all over the country the next day. In the more than one hundred and fifty newspapers examined for this report, a wire service account appeared in nearly every one, most often as a front-page feature.
In the Air Force files the sighting is explained as a "mirage," although it has often been referred to as an "unknown." Even the intelligence officers assigned to investigate the case, Lt. Frank Brown and Captain William Davidson, of Hamilton Field, California, were impressed with Arnold's sighting, for their report, in part, says: "It is the personal opinion of the interviewer that Mr. Arnold actually saw what he stated he saw. It is difficult to believe that a man of [his] character and apparent integrity would state that he saw objects and write up a report to the extent that he did if he did not see them."
Dr. J. Allen Hynek, scientific consultant of the Air Forces investigation of UFOs, was said to have found "inconsistencies" in Arnold's report when reviewing the case for Project Sign in late 1948 or early 1949. According to the Project "Saucer" Press Summary, released in April 1949, the problem lay in reconciling Arnold's estimate of speed and distance with his estimate of the objects size. Edward J. Ruppelt, in his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, describes this question of estimates in more detail (p. 33). Arnold reported that the objects had been seen at an estimated distance of twenty to twenty-five miles, and estimated their size to be about "two-thirds the size of a DC-4," or from forty-five to fifty feet in length. The objection raised was that an object that size cannot be resolved by the human eye at that distance; therefore, Arnold's estimate of distance was said to be in error, the objects having been much closer and traveling at subsonic speeds well within the range of normal aircraft. This argument ignored the fact that Arnold had established the distance with fixed reference points, and that it was his estimate of size that must have been in error, the discs probably being a great deal larger than he guessed. In view of Dr. Hynek’s opinion that the objects were probably some kind of conventional aircraft, it is curious that the case is listed as a “mirage” rather than as “possible aircraft.”
Within just days of the publication of Arnold's report, other accounts began to appear. At least twenty people from more than a dozen widely separated places reported that they, too, had seen similar objects. Some of these sightings had occurred before June 24th, some had been made on the same day as Arnold's, and a few were made on the days following. Most of the reports came from the northwest. The floodgates were now open for the rush of reports that were soon to follow. But it had taken a man of Kenneth Arnold’s character and forthright conviction to open them by making public his own report. If it had not been for Arnold, which witness, and which report, might have been the first? It is not possible to single out any of the early witnesses, or cases, for not enough information about them is available. One point is certain, however: it is difficult to imagine that the sightings of strange aerial objects would have remained "hidden" much after June 25th.