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Promotional poster for the 1950 film 'The Flying Saucer.'
Credit: Colonial Productions
On June 24, 1947, an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying a small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington state when he saw something extraordinarily strange. Directly to his left, about 20 to 25 miles north of him and at the same altitude, a chain of nine objects shot across the sky, glinting in the sun as they traveled.
By comparing their size to that of a distant airplane, Arnold gauged the objects to be about 45 to 50 feet wide. They flew between two mountains spaced 50 miles apart in just 1 minute, 42 seconds, he observed, implying an astonishing speed of 1,700 miles per hour, or three times faster than any manned aircraft of the era. However, as if controlled, the flying objects seemed to dip and swerve around obstacles in the terrain.
When the objects faded into the distance, Arnold flew to Yakima, Wash., landed and immediately told the airport staff of the unidentified flying objects he had spotted. The next day, he was interviewed by reporters, and the story spread like wildfire across the nation.
"At that time there was still some thought that Mars or perhaps Venus might have a habitable surface," Robert Sheaffer, an author of UFO books (and a skeptic), told Life's Little Mysteries. "People thought these UFOs were Martians who had come to keep an eye on us now that we had nuclear weapons."
As time would prove, this was but the first of many outlandish theories behind visits of an extraterrestrial nature. The era of UFO sightings had begun.
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