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
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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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Oregon Employment Department increases benefi ts
Th e amount paid to peo-
ple fi ling for unemploy-
ment insurance benefi ts has
increased. Th e maximum
weekly benefi t amount some-
one can receive will increase
from $604 to $624, while the
minimum amount will in-
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change aff ects new unem-
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fi led on or aft er July 1, 2018.
Th ose with existing unem-
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amount they have been re-
ceiving.
Oregon’s Unemployment
Insurance program provides
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placement for workers who
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Unemployment
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program also promotes re-
employment and the pres-
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Th e Unemployment Insur-
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insurance
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programs with partners that
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Under Oregon law, each
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maximum and minimum
amounts of unemployment
insurance benefi ts people
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earned by Oregonians. Th e
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in the maximum weekly ben-
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