June 24 1947 Flying Saucers Sighted Over Mount Rainier

[Valin]

 

Wired: June 24, 1947: They Came From ... Outer Space?

Tony Long Email

06.24.08

 

1947: Pilot Kenneth Arnold sights a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington's Mt. Rainier. It's the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States, and, thanks to Arnold's description of what he saw, leads the press to coin the term flying saucer.

 

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At the time, Arnold said, the appearance of these flying saucers didn't particularly alarm him, because he assumed they were some kind of experimental military aircraft. If they were, nobody in the War Department (soon to be merged into the Department of Defense) was saying.

 

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Whether Arnold actually saw something or not, the resulting publicity touched off a worldwide spate of UFO sightings. Barely two weeks after Arnold's flight, the Roswell story broke, and UFO hysteria was on.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NFfNTDAJ5M