Kenneth J. Arnold

On June 24, 1947, thirty—two—year—old Kenneth J. Arnold, pilot and businessman, saw something he would never forget. While on a flight over the Cascade Mountains between Chehalis to Yakima, Washington, he saw nine flying objects that didn't resemble any aircraft he knew, and Arnold was very familiar with the aircraft that flew the 1947 skies. But these objects were different. He wondered if they could be experimental aircraft, but none of the objects had a tail as he would have expected any aircraft to have.

The next day he told newspaper reporters at an airshow in Pendleton, Oregon, that the objects had flown incredibly fast and moved "like speedboats on rough water," or "like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water." The latter phrase led reporter William C. Burquette to coin the term...