June 24 - First “Flying Saucer” Reports

Posted on June 24, 2021

Key points

This is an update of my post published on June 24, 2010:

On this day in 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine lights that seemed to pace his airplane and then zoom past Mount Rainier in Washington. He described the moving lights as boomerang shaped but also said that they moved like saucers skipping over water.

Somehow Arnold was misunderstood and misquoted, and many people thought he said that the strange objects he saw looked like saucers flying through the sky. Soon reporters dubbed the sighting as “flying saucers.” Suddenly many people, worried or thrilled, started studying the night sky and seeing saucer-shaped unidentified flying objects.

And so began the modern UFO craze. Since people expected to see saucer-shaped items, they did see saucer-shaped items. This was very frustrating for Arnold, who has been photographed with a picture of what he did see (remember, he said shaped like a boomerang – see the photo at the top of the article).

These clouds are called “UFO clouds” – but their proper name
is “lenticular clouds.” They sometimes look really solid.

Of course, many people over the years have assumed that “flying saucers” – aka UFOs – are and were extra-terrestrials (aliens) in spaceships.

All of these four pictures (above) are things that humans have drawn
or painted – NOT things that anyone has actually seen!

However, most reliable accounts and photos of unidentified flying objects can be explained in ordinary, non-E.T. ways: birds, the planet Venus, fireballs, meteors, human-built aircraft, mirages, hoaxes, clouds – the list goes on and on.

What is the explanation for Arnold’s sighting? Given the shapes and motions he saw, some likely explanations are pelicans, mirages of mountain peaks, or meteors. We will never know for sure, but those explanations are far more likely than aliens.