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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (July 11, 2018)
6A • COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • JULY 11, 2018 Off beat Oregon: How fl ying saucer BEST stories got their start in Pendleton Your Family Deserves The Finn J.D. John For The Sentinel I f you were getting ready to take a UFO-themed road trip around the western U.S., there are sev- eral places that would natu- rally be at the top of the list. Th ere’s Roswell, New Mexico, of course. And Area 51 in Nevada. And while in Nevada, a trip to the town of Pahrump — from which, since 1984, the great Art Bell and later George Noory have fi lled the small hours aft er every midnight with the four-hour Coast to Coast AM paranormal talk show. Most casual UFO afi cio- nados wouldn’t put any Or- egon destinations on that list unless they happened to be taking their tour in the third weekend of May, in which case a visit to the McMinnville UFO Festival might be on the itinerary. (But, they might not actu- ally know why McMinnville has a UFO festival. Plenty of people don’t.) But, although Oregon is neither the Mecca nor the Medina of UFOlogy, the state’s role in the history of UFO sightings is more sig- nifi cant than most people think. For one thing, the term “fl ying saucer” proba- bly originated in Pendleton. Here’s how that happened: On June 24, 1947, Ken- neth Arnold, owner of Great Western Fire Control Supply in Boise, was fl ying home from a meeting in Wash- ington in his private plane when he decided to take a little detour. A Marine Corps transport plane had disappeared near Mount Rainier, having ap- parently crashed there; and relatives of the victims of the crash had off ered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could fi nd the crash site so that they could retrieve their loved ones’ remains. Arnold fi gured an extra hour or two would be well invested if there was a shot at fi ve grand. He didn’t fi nd the plane. But, he did fi nd something else: “He said he sighted nine saucer-like air craft fl ying in formation at 3 p.m. yester- day, extremely bright — as if they were nickel-plated — and fl ying at an immense rate of speed,” wrote report- ers Nolan Skiff and Bill Be- quette of the Pendleton East Oregonian, in a story on the front page of the next day’s edition. “He estimated they were at an altitude between 9,500 and 10,000 feet and clocked them from Mount Rainier to Mount Adams, arriving at the amazing speed of about 1,200 miles an hour. ‘It seemed impos- sible,’ he said, ‘but there it is — I must believe my eyes.’” Arnold’s fi rst thought — remember, this was 1947 — was that the strange objects might be guided missiles or remote-controlled spy craft from the Soviet Union. So, upon landing at Pend- leton, his fi rst stop was the local FBI offi ce. Finding that closed, he headed for the of- fi ces of the East Oregonian and spilled his story to Be- quette and Skiff . Bequette and Skiff were on deadline, and had just fi ve or 10 minutes in which to talk to Arnold and pound out a story for the next day’s paper. So, although Arnold told them the mysterious craft were shaped with a crescent-shaped leading edge and a triangular tail trailing out behind, they missed that part in their sto- ry, picking up instead on his description of the strange objects fl ying “like a sau- cer would if you skipped it across the water” and went with that. And thus was born the legend of the Flying Saucer. (Th ere is some dispute over whether this was in fact the fi rst time “fl ying saucer” was used in reference to UFOs. But what is unques- tionably true is that it was this story, picked up on the Associated Press wire and run all over the country, that injected the term into wide- spread pop-culture use.) A number of other sight- ings of similar objects, from the same area, were report- ed shortly aft er the story Technology... Value... TV!... Upgrade to the Hopper® 3 Smart HD DVR • Watch and record 16 shows at once • Get built-in Netflix and YouTube • Watch TV on your mobile devices Hopper upgrade fee $5/mo. Add High Speed Internet 14 . 95 $ /mo. Subject to availability. Restrictions apply. Internet not provided by DISH and will be billed separately. 190 Channels CALL TODAY Save 20% * ! 1-866-373-9175 With 2 Year Price Guarantee with AT120 starting at $59.99 compared to everyday price. Prices include Hopper Duo for qualifying customers. Hopper, Hopper w/ Sling or Hopper 3 $5/mo. more. Upfront fees may apply based on cred ualification. Fees apply for additional TVs: Hopper $15/mo., Joey $5/mo., Super Joey $10/mo. Requires credit qualification and commitment. Offer expires 4/9/18. This image from an advertisement for America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies in the April 1957 issue of Newsweek Magazine shows how fl ying-saucer stories were being incorporated into people’s visions of the future. (Im- age: fl ickr.com/hollywoodplace) broke. It’s certainly possible that the UFOs might have been some sort of top-secret project being test-fl own out of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane. But if so, the Air Force has never seen fi t to confi rm or clarify. Oregon’s strongest other connection to UFOlogy is the incident that inspired the annual McMinnville UFO Festival: a sighting, and photographing, of something that looks dis- turbingly like a genuine fl y- ing saucer. McMinnville’s UFO roots are deeper than most people realize. Just before Th anks- giving in 1896, at the start of the “California airship” outbreak of UFO sight- ings, several McMinnville lads provided the fi rst UFO sighting in Oregon history (to the best of my current knowledge). “Tuesday night several of the boys about town saw the Sacramento air ship sail over this city, at least they saw lights in the heav- ens,” the McMinnville Tele- phone-Register reported in the Nov. 24 edition. “Th is they swear to.” But the more well-known McMinnville UFO sighting, and the one that inspired the festival, happened on May 11, 1950, when local farmer Evelyn Trent went out in the evening to feed the chickens and rabbits their evening meal. When she did, she couldn’t help but notice that there was a large metallic disc-shaped object hover- ing silently in the sky to the northeast. She ran back to the house, yelling for her husband Paul to get his camera — an old- school Universal Roamer handheld bellows model shooting 60-mm roll fi lm (probably Kodak 120). Paul rummaged around for a bit trying to track the camera down, but came up with it just in time, and the two of them raced back outside in time to catch one image of the strange craft hovering over their farm, and anoth- er of it whisking away to the northwest, where it disap- peared over the horizon. Th ose two photographs would, for a few months af- terward, put McMinnville on the map nationwide and set records for press runs in the McMinnville Tele- phone-Register that would stand for decades. Th ey would also turn out to be extraordinarily resis- tant to falsifi cation — in other words, either they were the real thing, or they were the product of a phe- nomenally clever (or lucky) hoaxer. We’ll talk about those photographs, and the fu- rore that erupted upon their publication, in next week’s column. 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