The article below was published in the newspaper The Post-Register, Denver, Colorado, USA, on page 1, on June 23, 1948.
|
BOISE, june 23 (UP) -- Remember the flying discs?
It was just a year ago on June 24 that Kenneth Arnold, Boise businessman and pilot, reported that between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams in Washington he had seen nine objects flying at an incredible speed.
Arnold wasn't the only one.
A man whose identity the air force has not revealed (at that man's request) told military intelligence officers that from Mt. Baker in he same vicinity, he watched nine objects through field glasses.
A sketch which accompanied his report was almost identical with a rough drawing by Arnold.
Then, a day or two after Arnold's report, the deluge began.
Newspaper, police, FBI, army air forces and others were flooded with reports from persons who had seen strange things in the sky.
All the stories had the same general tenor. The objects were disc shaped, some tailed vapor. All flew at terrific speeds.
Within a week the disc stories had come from 26 states and a dozen foreign nations.
One of the most convincing stories came from a United Airlines pilot, Capt. E. J. Smith.
Smith, his copilot and the stewardess on a plane bound from Boise to Seattle saw nine of the objects near Emmet.
Smith said the objects were sighted in flights of four and five. He said they flew close to his plane, then withdrew. Later they crossed the path of his plane and disappeared in the darkness.
He said the objects were not other airplanes. They were flat and they were flying in a loose formation, sometimes drawing together and then spreading out.
Later other airline pilots saw discs.
"If these objects are experimental craft I wish they'd keep the damned things off the civil airways," one pilot said.
It was on july 4 thatr hundreds of people in Portland, Ore., including policemen, saw about 20 silvery objects flashing though the sky. National guard planes went up to investigate, but nothing was learned.
Practical jokers had their day, too.
Some youngesters ar Twin falls built a strange looking contraption and planted it in y yard "to see the exitement."
Agents of the federal bureau of investigations and army intelligence were called. A censorship was clamped on all pictures. The city was in considerable of an uproar. Then the youngsters confessed it was a hoax.
One was reported to have crashed in New Mexico. It turned out to be a weather balloon.
Meanwhile, three explanations have been advanced:
1. Hallucinations, pure and simple.
2. Secret weapons, this country's or a device from a foreign power.
3. Inhabitants of another planet have been looking this one over.
As to the first, a fourth air force intelligence officer said too many people have said they saw the same things to have been hallucination.
Before he retired as chief of the air force, General Carl Spaatz said the possibility of the discs being experiments by other nations couldn't be elimiated.
If the discs were involved in American experiments, no one has seen fit to say so.
As to number three - what's your answer?
To: Kenneth Arnold or Newspapers 1940-1949.
