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Saturday, June 17, 2017
East Oregonian
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UFO: Arnold’s sighting launched the UFO wave of 1947
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UFO Sightings
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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
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Twin Falls
Medford
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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.
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