Kenneth Arnold

Kenneth Arnold

Name(s):	Kenneth Arnold

On 24th June 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold observed nine boomerang-shaped craft flying over the Cascade Mountains in Washington - the sighting which gave BENNEWITZ, PAUL In the late 1970's, an Alberquerque businessman named Paul Bennewitz started to monitor unusual electromagnetic pulses from what he thought were UFOs flying above the nearby Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility near Kirtland Air Force Base. He came to the conclusion that these pulses _may_ be controlling implanted abductees, so he started attempting to decode the pulses, and thought he was on the right path. He contacted APRO about his theory, but they wouldn't believe him, so he contacted AFOSI in October 1980, where he was put in touch with Richard Doty. He filled out a few forms and sent in some tape he had filmed of some UFOs over the Nuclear Storage Facility and Doty started to feed Bennewitz DISINFORMATION about the US government's involvement with the UFO phenomenon, including tales of US/alien pacts, alien bases in various places around the world, and of experiments that the aliens carried out with humans to create hybrids and androids. Bennewitz believed all of it. Doty then got William Moore to pass on more disinformation on to him, and Bennewitz got more and more paranoid and eventually went insane. Bennewitz told JOHN LEAR what he had heard and Lear took this into account when he wrote his DARK SIDE HYPOTHESIS.

The modern phenomena of "flying saucers" began with an incident in Washington state on June 24th, 1947. Former World War II pilot Kenneth Arnold (1915-1984) reported seeing nine unidentified objects flying in formation along the crest of the Cascade Range near Mount Rainier.

Arnold had been flying home from a business trip. The weather was fine and the wind was light. At approximately 3:00pm he saw a bright flash of light which he thought could have been a nearby aircraft, but after scanning the skies he could not see anything except a distant DC-4. About 30 seconds later he saw a series of flashes that appeared to come from a distance, to the north of Mt. Rainier. He ruled out reflections in his own windows by rocking his plane and even winding a window down. He considered other explanations, such as a flock of geese, but ruled these out for various reasons including speed.

The objects continued to fly in a diagonal formation, weaving from side to side "like the tail of a Chinese kite". They eventually faded from sight. Arnold calculated their speed at around 1200MPH.

Arnold described the objects as flat saucers or discs, although he later added that some of them appeared crescent-shaped. The term "flying saucer" was born.

Arnold's account made international headlines and was followed by hundreds of similar UFO reports.

The document below is Kenneth Arnold's written report to Army Air Forces (AAF) intelligence, July 12, 1947. It includes illustrations of the objects.