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.
Maury Island and the First Hoax
In June 1947, days before Kenneth Arnold's flight, a harbour patrolman named Harold Dahl claimed that six doughnut-shaped objects over this island in Puget Sound had dropped a mass of hot slag, killing his dog and injuring his son. He also described a man in black who advised him to say nothing. Arnold was hired to investigate; two Air Force officers collected samples of the slag and died when their bomber crashed on the way back. The story acquired a reputation as the first dark one in the subject. A few weeks later Dahl and his partner admitted to the FBI that they had invented the whole thing to sell a magazine article, and that the slag was ordinary smelter waste. The confession is far less well known than the story.
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