Although a formal project for ufo investigation wasn’t set up until September 1947, the Air Force had been vitally interested in ufo reports ever since June 24, 1947, the day Kenneth Arnold made the original ufo report.

As Arnold’s story of what he saw that day has been handed down by the bards of saucerism, the true facts have been warped, twisted, and changed.  Even some points in Arnold’s own account of his sighting as published in his book, The Coming of the Saucers, do not jibe with what the official files say he told the Air Force in 1947.  Since this incident was the original UFO sighting, I used to get many inquiries about it from the press and at briefings.  To get the true and accurate story of what did happen to Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947, I had to go back through old newspaper files, official reports, and talk to people who had worked on Project Sign.  By cross-checking these data and talking to people who had heard Arnold tell about his UFO sighting soon after it happened, I finally came up with what I believe is the accurate story.

Arnold had taken off from Chehalis, Washington, intending to fly to Yakima, Washington.  About 3:00P.M. he arrived in the vicinity of Mount Rainier.  There was a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane lost in the Mount Rainier area, so Arnold decided to fly around awhile and look for it.  He was looking down at the ground when suddenly he noticed a series of bright flashes off to his left.  He looked for the source of the flashes and saw a string of nine very bright disk-shaped objects, which he estimated to be 45 to 50 feet in length.  They were traveling from north to south across the nose of his airplane.  They were flying in a reversed echelon (i.e., lead object high with the rest stepped down), and as they flew along they weaved in and out between the mountain peaks, once passing behind one of the peaks.  Each individual object had a skipping motion described by Arnold as a “saucer skipping across water.”

During the time that the objects were in sight, Arnold had clocked their speed.  He had marked his position and their position on the map and again noted the time.  When he landed he sketched in the flight path that the objects had flown and computed their speed, almost 1,700 miles per hour.  He estimated that they had been 20 to 25 miles away and had traveled 47 miles in 102 seconds.

I found that there was a lot of speculation on this report.  Two factions at ATIC had joined up behind two lines of reasoning.  One side said that Arnold had seen plain, everyday jet airplanes flying in formation.  This side’s argument was based on the physical limitations of the human eye, visual acuity, the eye’s ability to see a small, distant object.  Tests, they showed, had proved that a person with normal vision can’t “see” an object that subtends an angle of less than 0.2 second of arc.  For example, a basketball can’t be seen at a