Sixty-six years ago, a flying fire extinguisher salesman from Boise, Idaho spotted a bunch of "saucer-shaped" objects ripping across the sky above Mount Rainier, Wash.
When he landed his small plane at Pendleton, Ore., Kenneth Arnold told people the "extremely shiny nickel-plated aircraft" were skimming along at 10,000 feet.
"There were nine of them and they were flying in a screwy formation about 25 miles away from me," Allen said.
"I figure they were moving about 1,200 miles per hour because I clocked them with a stop watch during the time it took them to fly from Mt. Rainier to Mt. Adams. That's 42 miles and they made it in one minute 42 seconds - about 1,205 m.p.h."
The Associated Press report on Allen's sighting set off a worldwide UFO craze.
"Shades of Flash Gordon!" headlined The Vancouver Sun. "'Saucers Speed Over U.S."
The day after Allen's UFO story hit the news, a preacher in Texas tracked Allen down to tell him the flying saucers were "harbingers of doomsday," and that the preacher was preparing his flock "for the end of the world."
The day after that, The Sun reported that two Vancouverites had seen flying saucers, as well. The paper then asked readers to "immediately report any signs of mysterious saucers" to a flying saucer hotline the paper set up at Marine 1161.
"We asked for it, and we got it," reported The Sun's Bill Fletcher. "All afternoon and late into the night the telephone jangled steadily. The silvery discs were everywhere. They sparkled over Kingsway, glistened over Point Grey, dipped over South Vancouver and shot straight up in Kitsilano."
As an "experiment in psychology," The Sun sent a reporter up in a "sleek silver aircraft," with instructions to do rolls, dips and steep turns "designed to catch the rays of the bright sun and send reflections shooting to the ground."
"His wheels had barely touched the tarmac at Vancouver airport when the phone calls started coming in (about a flying saucer)," Fletcher wrote.
In any event, UFOs and flying saucers had become part of the public consciousness. In 1950, "scores of startled citizens" reported seeing a UFO that "looked like a flying ice cream cone" above Vancouver. In 1953, Hal Eaves saw a flying saucer above a lumber camp near Campbell River. And in 1956, Vancouverites Irene Siranni and Irene MacIntosh reported they had seen UFOs that looked like "poached eggs."
Source: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/This+history+June+1947/8568953/story.html
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