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On June 24, 1947, the first American UFO sighting occurred. And it occurred right here, in the northwest, not far from Seattle.
Kenneth Arnold was flying a search route in his single-engine plane on the way to Yakima, Washington. Since it as such a clear sky, Arnold put his plane in cruise control. He sat back and watched the beautiful scenery around him.
Suddenly--out of the corner of his eye--Arnold saw some bright flashes of light. He looked over and saw nine bright objects hovering about 9,500 feet above the ground. The objects were heading north to south at about 1,700 miles an hour.
The saucers were heading toward Mount Rainier, so at first Arnold thought they were search planes. As he kept watching, the objects starting going in between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. This was a distance of 47 miles. Every few seconds the objects would change course, and as they turned, Arnold tried to see tails or wings; there were none. When he drew the objects later on, they looked sort of like boomerangs.
Kenneth Arnold landed and told some of his friends what had happened. Later he found himself surrounded by reporters. He told them that the motion of the strange objects was like that of skimming saucers. A reporter, named Bill Bequette, heard this and put the words "flying saucer" in his article about Arnold.
The next day there were headlines in papers all over the country about what Kenneth Arnold had seen. No one knew what the objects were, not even the United States government. The War Department was looking into what they were because they wanted ships that could travel as fast as these.
After Arnold's sighting, there were hundreds of reports of the strange flying disks every day. There was even one the same day. At the Cascade Mountains, a man named Fred Johnson reported 5 or 6 disks. They had a slight tail, were about thirty feet in diameter, and they reflected the sun when they turned. They weren't flying in any particular formation. As they flew by, Johnson's compass spun. This was the first report of any instrument being affected by the disks.
On June 25th, there were two major sightings. The first was made at Kansas City, Missouri. There were nine objects in loose formation. Another sighting was made by Lloyd Lowry in Pueblo, Colorado. There were two objects close together. It seemed as if one was chasing the other.
On the 26th, there were an incredible number of sightings from Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. There were sightings all over the south-west.
On the 27th, the reports started to change; they became more wide spread. Some came as far north as Canada and Michigan. The reports came from all over the world now.
It started to become a world-wide problem. No one knew what the objects were. Newspapers started to give explanations for what they thought the saucers were. Scientists thought that it was government research.
There are three main lines of speculation about just what had been seen. 1) The hexagon theory. The government was making hexagon shaped aircraft, and at high speeds, it gave the illusion of saucers. 2) They were remote-controlled rockets. 3) They were controlled by some hidden scientific group that was experimenting with different ways of travel.
Shortly thereafter, Roswell occurred and the era of UFOs, crop circles, abductions, cross-breeding, government conspiracies, and cattle mutilations had begun.
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Jeri Kehn
