The Oregonian
28 juin 1947
| Home |
|---|
See story on page 1.
Kenneth Arnold, the Boise businessman who touched off nation-wide conjecture with his story of the flying saucers, Friday armed himself with a C150 movie camera in case he should ever again meet up with the missiles he saw putting through the skies over Western Washington.
Next time, he vowed, I'll get proof to back up my story. At the same time, the one time North Dakota football star fired a telegram at the Oregonian whose roundup story of opinion on Arnold’s elusive sky travelers reported views of observers who intimated with tongue in cheek levity that the pilot was seeing spots before his eyes.
The telegram, sent just before he took off in Pendelton in his single engine three seater plane for Boise, said:
I am certainly on your side of the fence and I did not believe it either but I have never suffered from snow blindness, mirages, or spots before my eyes of any kind.
Arnold said he, made certain the objects were not the result of reflections from his own airplane, as suggested by a veteran United Airlines pilot. His story, he reiterated, is positively true.
Arnold told Pendelton newsmen he was not a pilot who did crazy things or who did screwy flying. He said he had never been charged with a flying violation during his three years as a licensed pilot.
He recalled that wartime stories of the Japanese balloons sitting over the Pacific Northwest were treated with skepticism and he suggested that’s the way it might be with my story.
But Arnold’s story had its backers. By Friday noon several residents of Oregon and Washington stepped forward with tales of the eerie saucer-like objects which the Boise flyer said he spotted flying in formation over the Cascades.
E. H. Sprinkle of Eugene said enlargements of a snapshot he took with a $3.50 camera showed seven dots shaped like an “X” or “V” lined across the sky. Laboratory reports, however, suggested the dots were only dust spots on the negative.
In the northerly city of Bellingham, Wash., George Clover said he looked up into the sky about 10 A. M. Tuesday and saw three shiny objects like kites heading south toward Seattle. He insisted they had no wings or pontoons and were traveling real fast.
At first I thought they were army jet jobs, he said, because the engines didn’t sound like gas engines.
A Kansas City carpenter said he saw nine such discs, too. So did a pilot in Oklahoma City. Still another version, this time of a night flight, was told by Archie Eden of Wenatchee, who saw what he described as a speeding object descending in a long slant while he was driving on the Moses Lake highway.
“As we watched, it neared the ground and when it was about 200 feet high it exploded. There was no blinding flash, but there were great showers of sparks, and piles of flame seemed to hurtle to the ground, “ he said.
A Yakima, Wash., woman Mrs. Ethel Wheelhouse, reported sighting the “whatzits,” Tuesday afternoon. They sped so fast she could not count them and they abruptly disappeared, she said. In Portland, Mrs. Jerry Nuels, 6510 S. E. Foster St., said she saw some flying discs south of Kelso last Friday. She said that they were bright and shiny.
From New York, the Associated Press attempted a scientific explanation of Arnold’s story and the other scattered reports.
The reports from five areas west of the Mississippi river centering about the mysterious disc-like objects roughly agree with the way light is occasionally reflected from a distant airplane, the news service pointed out.
In clear air, the flash of sunlight from airplanes can easily be seen 50 miles. The flash, the news service reported, is round, the shape of the sun. Any other reflection at a great distance is also likely to be round, coming only from a small area on the plane.
As for Arnold — he flew to Boise to spend the weekend with his wife and children and try, if he could, to forget the hullabaloo provoked by his story of 1200 mile-an-hour speedsters. All I wanted was an explanation of what I saw, he said ruefully brushing the spots from his eyes.
| Home |
|---|