The article below was published in the newspaper The Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, on page 1, on June 30, 1947.
|
Portland, Oreg., June 29 -- (AP) -- Westerners were seeing "flying saucers" almost everywhere today - from Canada to Texas - and a red-hot controversy raged about it all.
Kenneth Arnold, Boise, Idaho, flying businessman started it by reporting he saw nine mystery objects zipping over western Washington last Tuesday at what he estimated was 1,200-mile-an-hour speed.
Experts dismissed his report with statements that no known aircraft could go that fast and that no guided missiles tests were being made over that part of the west.
Hardly were the words out of their mouths when others began reporting "flying saucers" and the controversy was on.
There was a similarity in all reports - the objects were round like saucers, traveling south at a high rate of speed with little or no noise, and of such brightness that reflections from the sun were "almost blinding."
Three persons in El Paso, Tex., said they had seen them recently, as did two persons in Vancouver, B. C.. The lastest of a score of reports in the Pacific Northwest came from a Seaside, Ore., woman.
A spokesman for the Army expressed interest in anything that could go 1,200 miles an hour, but no responsible official or air expert came to the defense of the reports or of the theories behind them. Some suggested that perhaps imagination had become the better part of the sight.
Everett, Wash., June 29 -- (AP) -- Ray Taro, Everett Iron Works operator, thinks he has the explanation of the "flying saucers." They're nothing but beer bottle caps aluminum inserts, blown right out of his smokestack, he says. For weeks he's been leting down hundreds of thousands of beer bottle caps to recover the metal. The cork burns, the caps melt, and the unfazed aluminum discs go soaring out of the 40-foot stacks, booted by big blowers and 3,000 degrees of heat.
To: Kenneth Arnold or Newspapers 1940-1949.
