This weekend marks the 70th anniversary of Idaho businessman and pilot Kenneth Arnold's historic sighting of mysterious flying ships near Mt. Rainer.
While flying his CallAir Model A on a business trip, and taking a diversion as a volunteer effort to help find a recently crashed military transport, Kenneth Arnold suddenly spotted a flash of light in the sky. Thinking it was a sun reflection from another airplane, Arnold looked around and sighted nine apparently metallic craft winding their way across the mountains. Intrigued, he was able to time their progress and, by estimating their relative size, he calculated their speed to be greater than any known aircraft at that time. He said their flightpath resembled that of the tail of a Chinese kite, with the craft bobbing up and down while flying in a line. He described the motion as 'as if a saucer were skipped across water', which a news reporter later erroneously attributed to the crafts' shape, despite Arnold reporting them as shaped like a crescent. Soon everyone was sighting saucer-shaped objects for at least two decades.
Kenneth Arnold became the first UFO expert, giving interviews on the radio and investigating other flying saucer sightings. While he didn't initially think what he saw was of extraterrestrial origin, he soon became a believer in the extraterrestrial hypothesis and also became a 'repeater' (someone who reports having seen multiple UFO sightings. Flying saucers, whatever they were, were from that time forward permanently planted in the imaginations of Cold War Americans (and beyond).
Radio Lost and Found commemorates the 70th anniversary of this portentious sighting, perhaps ruefully, as saucer sitings have been on the decline since the 1970s, thanks either to a remarkable advancement of alien technology or Hollywood production companies finding the classic saucer shape passe.
- KBOO