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1C THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JUNE 23, 2017 CONTACT US Erick Bengel | Weekend Editor ebengel@dailyastorian.com WEEKEND FOLLOW US facebook.com/ DailyAstorian BREAK THE SIGHTING FLYING SAUCERS STILL EVASIVE 70 YEARS AFTER PILOT’S TOUCHSTONE REPORT By PHIL WRIGHT EO Media Group B oise businessman Ken Arnold had no idea he would change the world when he told reporters in Pendle- ton he saw nine strange objects fl y- ing along the Cascades. But 70 years ago June 25, that’s what he did. East Oregonian reporter Bill Bequette and editor Nolan Skiff didn’t fi gure the 191- word story they banged out that Wednesday just in time for the evening paper and The Associated Press noon wire would take off, well, like a fl ying saucer. But it captured the attention of the nation. The headline at the bottom of the front page of the EO for June 25, 1947, reads: “Impossible! Maybe, But Seein’ Is Believin’, Says Flyer.” And in the seven sentences that followed, Bequette and Skiff reported Arnold’s claims that, on the day before, he saw “nine saucer-like aircraft fl ying in formation” at an altitude between 9,500 and 10,000 feet between Mount Rainer and Mount Adams moving at “the amazing speed of about 1,200 miles an hour.” That would make them faster than any aircraft the U.S. or any other nation had back then. While the imagery was there, the EO never used the phrase “fl ying saucer” in its reporting, contrary to plenty of reports. Within days of the EO breaking the story, some bright newspaper writer elsewhere coined “fl ying saucer.” The term stuck in the lexicon and the American psyche. A daughter remembers The reporting Skiff died in 1970, Arnold in 1984 and Bequette in 2011. Bequette in interviews about the sighting reported Arnold came off as honest, level-headed and credible. By all accounts, Arnold — 6 feet tall, 200 pounds, an Eagle Scout and all-state football player in high school — had a reputation as solid as his shoulders were wide. After the EO’s fi rst story — not much more than a blurb, really — Bequette inter- viewed Arnold at length and churned out a feature for the June 26 paper. Here’s what he reported: Arnold was fl y- ing from Chehalis, Washington, to Yakima in his single-engine CallAir A-2 when he took a detour around Mount Rainer to look for the wreckage of a Curtis Commando R5C transport plane that crashed Dec. 10, 1946, with 32 Marines aboard. Finding the Associated Press file photo Ken Arnold was photographed in 1947 with his CallAir plane shortly after he report- ed seeing nine high-speed objects “flying like a saucer would” near Mount Rainier. Significant Northwest Okanogan 5 Columb i a River UFO Sightings Spokane WASHINGTON 90 Tacoma Olympia MONTANA 90 90 2 6 Coeur d'Alene Yakima Longview bia Riv e C o l um 8 1 iver Snake R Moscow Pasco Phil Wright and Alan Kenaga/ EO Media Group Some UFOs make the news, some don’t Pendleton Portland Salem P OREGON Eugene 84 5 Redmond IDAHO Challis 7 Bend Boise Burns 5 na S 3 ke 40 miles River e r Kim Arnold, 63, of Meridian, Idaho, said her father was not seeking publicity when he told his story. The objects scared and baffl ed him, she said, and he wanted to know what they were. “It didn’t make sense to him how fast they fl ew,” she said. “My father was a real nuts-and-bolts realist. He really believed there were explanations for things.” Ken Arnold was 32 at the time of the sighting. He and his wife, Doris, lived in Boise, and had two little girls. He had a reputation as a respected businessman sell- ing fi re suppression equipment. Kim came along in 1954 and another daughter fol- lowed a few years later. Of the four sib- lings, Kim Arnold said she knows the most about her father and what happened. She said the only reason her father said anything about the sighting was out of fear that Russians had developed a craft capa- ble of fl ying faster than anything the U.S. was fl ying, and could use that for a nuclear advantage. The U.S. had unleashed the ter- rifying power of atomic weapons less than two years earlier to end World War II. The Soviet Union, our ally in the war, was now our enemy with impressive military might. “He believed that our military would come forth and tell everyone what these strange things really were,” she said. “And it never happened.” Instead, she said, her parents received 10,000 letters after the story went interna- tional, and their home phone rang off the hook. “My father became the most famous man in the world practically overnight,” she said. “It really disrupted their life.” The sighting also launched the UFO wave of 1947, with fl ying saucer stories grabbing hundreds of newspaper head- lines. The county music duo The Buchanan Brothers in mid-July even released the tune “(When You See) Those Flying Saucers.” Yet no subsequent sighting caught the attention of the public the way Arnold’s did. 84 Twin Falls Medford 5 CALIFORNIA NEVADA Sightings by location 1. January 1945, Pasco, Washington — A fireball on three separate nights flies over the Hanford plutonium production plant and pings on Military radar. Navy fighter planes respond one night but can’t catch the object. 2. June 24, 1947, Mount Rainier, Washington — Kenneth Arnold sees nine fast-moving objects near Mount Rainier. His story in the next day’s East Oregonian leads to the term “flying saucer” and the modern UFO age. 3. May 24, 1949, near mouth of the Rogue River — Five plane meant a $5,000 reward. He estimated he was 25-28 miles from Rainier and climbed to 9,200 feet and saw to his left a chain of objects, he said, that looked like the “tail of a Chinese kite.” Arnold considered they could be geese, but they were fl ying south in summer and too high. He wrote off new jet planes because “their motion was wrong for jet jobs.” He opened his window in case they were refl ections and still saw the objects. Arnold said they were as “big as a four-engine airplane” and “fl at like a pie-pan, and somewhat bat-shaped” and fl ashed bright enough to temporarily blind him. They were “saucer-like” he said, and moved “like a fi sh fl ipping in the sun” and appeared to thread their way along the Cas- cade peaks. He told Bequette he timed how fast they fl ew between Mount Rainer and Mount Adams and came up with 1,200 mph. He added he could have been off by 200-300 mph, but “they were still the fastest things I ever saw.” Later news sources reported he actually clocked the speed at 1,700 mph, which Kim Arnold also confi rmed. The EO ran front page follow-ups June 27, 28 and 30 (June 29 was a Sunday, and the EO did not publish on Sundays), some with witnesses corroborating Arnold’s account. “Flying disc” appears in the June 27 Associated Press story, and Bequette uses it in his story of June 28, but the phrase each time is in quotes without attribution. The term “fl ying saucers” fi nally shows up on June 30 in a short AP story about a La Grande reverend declaring the end of the world was “imminent” after residents there reported UFOs. The “strange zoom- ing objects” according to Rev. Lester Carl- son, were “the signs of the second coming of Christ.” Peter Davenport is the director of the National UFO Reporting Center, located in rural northeastern Washington. He said he wonders whether the work the EO did cov- ering the Arnold sighting may have been the pinnacle of press coverage of the UFO phenomenon, and whether the coverage has been in decline ever since. He called today’s press coverage of UFOs “lamentable.” “For the life of me, I cannot under- stand why members of the press are not clamoring for information about the UFO issue,” he stressed in an email, adding the disinterest of the press, in his judgment, “is even more interesting than the appar- ent presence on our planet of the UFOs themselves.” anglers spot a saucer-shaped craft that still holds up as an unexplained sighting. 4. May 11, 1950, Sheridan — Evelyn and Paul Trent see a large disc-shaped craft near their farm. Paul Trent takes two photos of the object, which become famous. 5. Sept. 24, 1959, Redmond — A police officer and a Federal Aviation Administration employee observe a bright reddish UFO that also shows up on radar. 6. Feb. 25, 1999, Longview, Washington — Fourteen forestry workers witness a craft lift an adult elk out of the forest and fly off with the dead or unconscious animal. 7. Sept. 27, 2000, Challis, Idaho — Three hunters see a gigantic, triangular craft pass over their campsite. 8. Feb. 19, 2015, Arlington — A driver on Interstate 84 westbound watches a “small domed craft” fly 10-15 feet above the Columbia River before taking off into the sky. Sources: National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena; National UFO Reporting Center; UFO Evidence; East Oregonian research; Robert Hastings (www.ufohastings.com) IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, REPORT IT If you see a UFO, Peter Davenport says to write down what you saw as soon as you can. Davenport is the director of the National UFO Reporting Center. Maybe 15-20 reports a day come into the center, he said, but out of roughly 20,000 “adult, competent, clear-thinking Ameri- cans who see a UFO, only one has written it down.” He encouraged anyone who sees a UFO to write down a “factual, objective description” of what they saw and submit it to his organization, or to the Mutual UFO Network, or another credi- ble UFO organization. The National UFO Reporting Center at www.nuforc.org and the Mutual UFO Network at www. mufon.com have online forms to make reports. You also can call MUFON headquarters at 949- 476-8366. And the NUFORC has a hotline for sightings within the last week: 206-722-3000. Arnold’s sighting was the fi rst to gain nationwide attention, but it was far from the fi rst unusual fl ying object to receive press coverage. Mystery or phantom airships in the late 19th and early 20th centuries captured headlines from the California Bay Area to the Midwest and in New England, Europe and New Zealand. Stories about “foo fi ght- ers” — bright, sometimes fi ery balls of red, orange or white light — chasing Allied air- craft in Europe made news stories in 1944 and ’45. Other UFO reports from that era would not see the light of day for decades. Robert Hastings of Colorado is a regular speaker at the annual UFOfest in McMin- nville and has worked more than 40 years researching UFOs and their interactions with nuclear weapons. UFOs in January 1945, he said, buzzed the Hanford pluto- nium production site in Pasco on three sep- arate nights. The area was top secret, of course, for making the plutonium that would go into the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped months later on Japan to end World War II. Hastings in his research found base per- sonnel saw the objects, which also appeared on military radar, and one night an F6F Hellcat fi ghter pilot tried to intercept what- ever was fl ying over the site. Clarence R. “Bud” Clem was a lieu- tenant junior grade in U.S. Naval Reserves at the time, and at 84 years of age told Hast- ings in 2009 how he was in the fl ight tower and assisted with communications between radar operators and the pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Richard Brown. Brown reported chasing a bright ball of fi re, according to Clem’s account, but could never catch the thing, which after a few moments zoomed toward Seattle and off radar. See SIGHTING, Page 2C
