Arnold himself seems to be the reason for a lot of the excitement that heralded flying saucers.  Stories of odd incidents that occur in this world are continually being reported by newspapers, but never on the scale of the first UFO report.  Occasional stories of the “Himalayan snowmen,” or the “Malayan monsters,” rate only a few inches or a column on the back pages of newspapers.  Arnold’s story, if it didn’t make the headlines, at least made the front page.  I had the reason for this explained to me one day when I was investigating a series of UFO reports in California in the spring of 1952.

I was making my headquarters at an air base where a fighter-bomber wing was stationed.  Through a mutual friend I met one of the fighter-bomber pilots who had known Arnold.  In civilian life the pilot was a newspaper reporter and had worked on the original Arnold story.  He told me that when the story first broke all the newspaper editors in the area were thoroughly convinced that the incident was a hoax, and that they intended to write the story as such.  The more they dug into the facts, however, and into Arnold’s reputation, the more it appeared that he was telling the truth.  Besides having an unquestionable character, he was an excellent mountain pilot, and mountain pilots are a breed of men who know every nook and cranny of the mountains in their area.  The most fantastic part of Arnold’s story had been the 1,700-miles-per-hour speed computed from Arnold’s timing the objects between two landmarks.  “When Arnold told us how he computed the speed,” my chance acquaintance told me, “we all put a lot of faith in his story.”  He went on to say that when the editors found out that they were wrong about the hoax, they did a complete about-face, and were very much impressed by the story.  This enthusiasm spread, and since the Air Force so quickly denied ownership of the objects, all of the facts built up into a story so unique that papers all over the world gave it front-page space.

There was an old theory that maybe Arnold had seen wind whipping snow along the mountain ridges, so I asked about this.  I got a flat “Impossible.”  My expert on the early Arnold era said, “I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest many years and have flown in the area for hundreds of hours.  It’s impossible to get powder snow low in the mountains in June.  Personally, I believe Arnold saw some kind of aircraft and they weren’t from this earth.”  He went on to tell me about two other very similar sightings that had happened the day after Arnold saw the nine disks.  He knew the people who made these sightings and said that they weren’t the kind to go off “half cocked.”  He offered to get a T-6 and fly me up to Boise to talk to them since they had never made a report to the military, but I had to return to Dayton so I declined.

Within a few days of Arnold’s sighting, others began to come in.  On June 28 an Air Force pilot in an F-51 was flying near Lake Mead, Nevada, when he saw a formation of five or six circular objects off his right wing.  This was about three-fifteen in the afternoon.