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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (June 17, 2017)
OFF PAGE ONE Saturday, June 17, 2017 East Oregonian Page 13A UFO: Arnold’s sighting launched the UFO wave of 1947 Continued from 1A Significant Northwest Okanogan 5 Columb i a River UFO Sightings Spokane Tacoma Olympia Yakima Longview iver Snake R Moscow Pasco 8 Phil Wright and Alan Kenaga/ EO Media Group Pendleton ive r ia Riv e r umb 1 Portland Sn a ke R Ocean MONTANA 90 90 2 6 Coeur d'Alene WASHINGTON 90 Pacific OREGON Eugene 84 5 Redmond Corvallis IDAHO Challis 7 Ontario Bend Boise 40 miles 84 ve r 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 devel- oped a craft capable of fl ying faster than anything the U.S. was fl ying, and could use that for a nuclear advantage. The U.S. unleashed the terrifying 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 international, 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 grab- bing hundreds of newspaper headlines. 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 atten- tion of the public the way Arnold’s did. 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 reputa- tion as solid as his shoulders were wide. After the EO’s fi rst story — not much more than a blurb, really — Bequette interviewed Arnold at length and churned out a feature for 3 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. anglers spot a saucer-shaped craft that still holds up as an unexplained sighting. 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. 3. May 24, 1949, near mouth of the Rogue River — Five 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 the June 26 paper. Here’s what he reported: Arnold was fl ying 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 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.” 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. 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) 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 tempo- rarily 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 Cascade 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 zooming objects” according to Rev. Lester Carlson, were “the signs of the second coming of Christ.” Peter Davenport is the director of the National UFO Reporting Center, located in rural northeastern Wash- ington. He said he wonders whether the work the EO did covering 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 understand 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 apparent presence on our planet of the UFOs themselves.” Some UFOs make the news, some don’t 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 ghters” — bright, sometimes fi ery balls of red, orange or white light — chasing Allied aircraft 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 Colo- rado is a regular speaker at the annual UFOfest in McMinnville and has worked more than 40 years researching UFOs and their interactions with nuclear weapons. UFOs in January 1945, he said, buzzed the Hanford plutonium produc- tion site in Pasco on three separate 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 personnel saw the objects, which also appeared on military radar, and one night an F6F Hellcat fi ghter pilot tried to intercept whatever was fl ying over the site. Clarence R. “Bud” Clem was a lieutenant junior grade in U.S. Naval Reserves at the time, and at 84 years of age told Hastings in 2009 how he was in the fl ight tower and assisted with commu- nications between radar operators and the pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Richard Brown. See UFO/14A ؏ EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY ؏ Feel the Thrill of a New Toyota! Administrative Assistant 10 New 2017 TOYOTAS with over Great work environment. Super awesome team. Good pay. Excellent health insurance. Retirement plan. Weekends off . Interested? $ 2000 Cash Back We are looking for a motivated, self-confi dent individual to join our inside sales team at East Oregonian in Pendleton. We have an opening for an administrative assistant position. No newspaper experience? 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