distance of several miles but if you move the basketball closer and closer, at some point you will be able to see it.  At this point the angle between the top and bottom of the ball and your eye will be about 0.2 of a second of arc.  This was applied to Arnold’s sighting.  The “Arnold-saw-airplanes” faction maintained that since Arnold said that the objects were 45 to 50 feet long they would have had to be much closer than he had estimated or he couldn’t even have seen them at all.  Since they were much closer than he estimated, Arnold’s timed speed was all wrong and instead of going 1,700 miles per hour the objects were traveling at a speed closer to 400 miles per hour, the speed of a jet.  There was no reason to believe they weren’t jets.  The jets appeared to have a skipping motion because Arnold had looked at them through layers of warm and cold air, like heat waves coming from a hot pavement that cause an object to shimmer.

The other side didn’t buy this idea at all.  They based their argument on the fact that Arnold knew where the objects were when he timed them.

After all, he was an old mountain pilot and was as familiar with the area around the Cascade Mountains as he was with his own living room.  To cinch this point the fact that the objects had passed behind a mountain peak was brought up.  This positively established the distance the objects were from Arnold and confirmed his calculated 1,700-miles-per-hour speed.  Besides, no airplane can weave in and out between mountain peaks in the short time that Arnold was watching them.  The visual acuity factor only strengthened the “Arnold-saw-a-flying-saucer” faction’s theory that what he’d seen was a spaceship.  If he could see the objects 20 to 25 miles away, they must have been about 210 feet long instead of the poorly estimated 45 to 50 feet.

In 1947 this was a fantastic story, but now it is just another UFO report marked “Unknown.”  It is typical in that if the facts are accurate, if Arnold actually did see the UFO’s go behind a mountain peak, and if he knew his exact position at the time, the UFO problem cannot be lightly sloughed off; but there are always “ifs” in UFO reports.  This is the type of report that led Major General John A. Samford, Director of Intelligence for Headquarters, Air Force, to make the following comment during a press conference in July 1952:  “However, there have remained a percentage of this total [of all UFO reports received by the Air Force], about 20 per cent of the reports, that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible things.  We keep on being concerned about them.”

In warping, twisting, and changing the Arnold incident, the writers of saucer lore haven’t been content to confine themselves to the incident itself; they have dragged in the crashed Marine Corps’ C-46.  They intimate that the same flying saucers that Arnold saw shot down the C-46, grabbed up the bodies of the passengers and crew, and now have them pickled at the University of Venus Medical School.  As proof they apply the same illogical reasoning that they apply to most everything.  The military never released photos of the bodies of the dead men, therefore there were no bodies.  There were photographs and there were bodies.  In consideration of the families of air crewmen and passengers, photos of air crashes showing dead bodies are never released.