Area 51

Rainier and Kenneth Arnold's Nine Objects

On 24 June 1947 Kenneth Arnold, a businessman and pilot, was flying along the Cascades when he saw nine objects strung out near the slope of Mount Rainier, moving at enormous speed. On landing he described their motion to a reporter: like a saucer skipped across water. The paper shortened that to "flying saucers", and the phrase has existed ever since. Arnold himself insisted the objects were not round but crescent-shaped, and that the press had described the movement rather than the shape. Nobody heard the correction. The sighting is generally taken as the start of the whole modern subject: before it, reports of strange things in the sky were occasional; after it, they came in floods.