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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JUNE 23, 2017
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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
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40 miles
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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