This article was published in the daily newspaper The Washington Villager, Richland, USA, le 3 juillet 1947.
A Richland chapter was added last week to the mystery of the 'flying discs' or 'saucers' puzzling the western states when a village resident, Leo Bernier of 1213 Stevens Drive, reported having seen several of them high in the sky last Tuesday afternoon.
"They were going west by southwest around 2 or 2:30," Bernier said, "and were rather silvery and shaped as though a saucer when seen edgewise."
Bernier didn't say much about them until he read in the paper that they had been seen elsewhere. "I was worried that people might just laugh," he said.
The disks were extremely far away, near the horizon, but high in the sky, he stated, and even at that distance were traveling as fast as a P-38 [two-piston-engines fighter plane] might seem to be going if it were just 600 feet high.
"They appeared something like a reflection from a plane, but were going too fast for any kind of plane," Bernier said.
Various theories have been offered for the phenomum [sic], which has been sighted in at least five areas besides Richland, west of the Mississippi.
In clear air, the flash of sunlight from a plane can easily be seen 50 miles. The flash is round, the shape of the sun. Any other reflection from a great distance is apt to be round too.
Most puzzling factor in the mystery are the great speeds, although it is difficult for the eye to make a correct estimate of speeds, and jet planes travel much faster then regular planes.
Reports of unusual objects in the sky have been numerous since the war. Atomic bomb and rocket rumors have accounted for most of them.
Bernier has his own explanation as good as any.
"I believe it may be a visitor from another planet, more developed than ours," he says. "in my opinion we're just beginning to see things this world never dreamed of."
