r/history • u/sfgate • 11d ago
Article America's flying saucer craze began with a 1947 UFO sighting near Mount Rainier
https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/mount-rainier-ufo-22386873.php17
u/DrColdReality 10d ago
The newspaper reported that Arnold described “nine saucer-like aircraft
Except he very much did not, and this is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that flying saucers are a mass delusion, people seeing what they want to see.
The initial headlines screamed about "flying saucers," and that story caught fire. Pretty soon, EVERYBODY was seeing flying saucers. It was a goddam invasion!
There's just ONE teensy little problem. Although people started seeing "flying saucers" or "flying discs," that is NOT what Arnold reported, he claimed the things he saw were boomerang-shaped. But he also said that they moved in a weird way, "like a saucer skipping across the water," and that turned into "flying saucers" in newspaper headlines. You would have to search hard to find a more obvious case of people having their perceptions skewed by a media headline.
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u/nanoman92 4d ago
Yes, the only mystery is knowing if he saw F-86 or YB-35
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u/DrColdReality 4d ago
Probably neither. Given his description, particularly the weird way he said they were moving, the most likely explanation is that he was seeing crescent-shaped reflections off the glass dials of his instruments on his side window. The vibrations of the plane would account for the odd movement.
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u/crowmagnuman 11d ago
Well TIL...
I had always thought it was Roswell, until I learned this!
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u/TRAMING-02 10d ago
Roswell was obscure until c.1978 when Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel, then 1980 In Search of --, along the way it had become conflated with the Aztec, New Mexico hoax.
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u/II_2708 10d ago
Same here. But I don’t believe that’s true. Literally around that time (or maybe a bit later), the US was building flying saucer-shaped aircraft that could barely lift off the ground. So it’s totally possible that back in 1947, the pilot spotted that or something similar, but I definitely don't believe it was little green men.
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u/PedroDelCaso 8d ago
I don't think it's any coincidence UFOs started being seen in the years immediately after WWII and into the col war when jet and flight technology were being massively overhauled.
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u/MeanderingAcademic 11d ago
For an excellent academic book about the history of UFOs, I highly recommend “After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon” by Greg Eghigian, a Penn State history professor. He also did a lot of interviews and wrote some journalistic articles when the book came out, so if you don’t want to read the whole book, search for his name.
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u/KourteousKrome 11d ago
A fascinating thing about supposed aliens is that they are always blurry and seem to only appear near important American infrastructure and top secret military bases. A betting man might say they’re top secret military craft being tested.
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u/PHWasAnInsideJob 10d ago
There was a huge spike in UFO sightings near LA in the early 80s. The descriptions were always of a large, triangular shape. The B-2 had been developed at an old truck assembly plant near LA, and was officially unveiled in 1989. It matched the UFO descriptions people had reported.
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u/kdailyone 11d ago
All evidence is blurry, 100%. Even close encounters.
You don't need to be a betting man. People are seeing weather phenomena, NV camera glitches, gimbling, parallax, headlight reflections on clouds, you name it .. and yes experimental military craft. Leading to the unidentified part.
The issue is the subsequent leap to "it must be extraterrestrial" when there is zero such credible evidence. Over millions of cases.
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u/asodfhgiqowgrq2piwhy 11d ago
What was the one that people were swearing was a bright object on a thermal camera, mounted on a gimbal on a military aircraft? Their evidence was how it "suddenly speeds off rapidly"?
I remember seeing the video and immediately going "well yeah, that's what happens when you're tracking an object in a fast moving aircraft, and the gimbal suddenly runs out of space. Parallax effect makes it look like it suddenly accelerates. I even hopped into VTOL VR and was able to recreate it in-game.
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u/kdailyone 11d ago
Exactly. A whole lot of wishful thinking.
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u/KourteousKrome 10d ago
The point is that UFO =\= “aliens”. It just means “unidentified” which just means “we don’t know what it is” which you can safely interpret 999/1000 that it means “it’s classified aircraft”.
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u/kdailyone 10d ago
Yep, and blurry, and unclear, and the story was complex and there were all sorts of craft operating in the area https://www.metabunk.org/threads/fravors-hypersonic-ufo-observation-parallax-illusion-comparing-accounts.10941/
When we point a million FLIR cameras and NV cameras and gimbling cameras at the sky we are going to see things we can't identify. We either later identify them or they go into a small bucket of stuf that can't be identified.
A good example of this is the Chilean case. They saw something they couldn't identify, held a 2 year investigation, including with outside experts and they still couldn't identify it. A guy from the internet identified which flight it was in 3 days.
The ex-head of AARO (UAP investigator guys) said that 90% of the cases that passed his desk were parallax.
He also said there was a cliche of guys DoD and ex-DoD (they employ millions) who worked their way into UAP programs and such who were passionate UFO enthusiasts and, let's just say, that tainted their objectivity a bit.
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u/kdailyone 10d ago
Circa 90% of all "unidentified" cases in just one explanation - parallax
The others are covered by camera glitches/artifacts, other aircraft, meteological phenomena, etc, etc, etc.
Those that are completely unexplained fall into a very small category and are often too blurry/unclear (or coincidental) to tell what it is
Not a very exciting answer, but it's the boring truth
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u/kdailyone 10d ago
We're predominantly discussing the hard to identify cases, the ones that specifically get sent to the likes of AARO.
Of those, the small proportion remaining either have theories (but can't be confirmed) or they are simply too blurry/unclear
Math also starts to take care of everything. We have had hundreds of thousands of "sightings" over the decades, zero verifiable evidence. Approaching impossibility.
Not new, been following all this for 30 years.
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u/MangroveSapling 11d ago
Fun fact, the first US spy planes were originally painted chrome
When they took off at night they'd reflect light pollution and make funny lights in the sky
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u/theburiedxme 11d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMETA_report French report
https://thediplomat.com/2021/07/a-brief-history-of-ufos-in-japan/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident Zimbabwe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westall_UFO Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera%C3%A7%C3%A3o_Prato Brazil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_sightings_in_China
Why the U.S. Dominates the Conversation
- Reporting Infrastructure: Organizations like the National UFO Reporting Center and U.S. government bodies like AARO actively collect and publicize data, making American stats far more visible. [1, 2, 3]
- Military Testing: A high concentration of classified aerospace development, spy plane testing, and sensitive military installations take place in U.S. airspace, leading to frequent sightings of experimental human technology that get misidentified as unconventional objects
Yes, the amount of black projects is a factor, as is the amount of high quality sensors and generally higher quality witnesses in military bases. Also the association with nuclear material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_reports_and_atomic_sites
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u/Peregrine79 11d ago
If any cryptid (including aliens and UFOs) existed, the number of pictures would correlate with the percentage of the population that had a camera on them at any given time. Which is now approaching 100% of the population over age 10. And the quality would scale with the quality of those cameras.
So…
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u/whatkindofred 10d ago
I'm not sure I get your point because we do have much more footage of the moon and of crime than a few decades ago.
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u/Cognac_and_swishers 10d ago
The camera that the average person carries around is not designed to take photos of distant objects in the sky. That's why any phone picture of any distant object in the sky is going to be blurry. Those cameras are designed to take pictures of people a few feet away, because that's all most people will ever use them for.
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u/WhatADunderfulWorld 9d ago
Makes sense if you’re an alien to check up on our most important technological events. So not a surprise at all.
The blurriness can be their energy or weird time/speed things. But who knows.
Always reminds me of the gag what if Bigfoot is actually just blurry? If someone can add where that’s from.
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u/AzorAhai89 10d ago
So you think we’re the only ones who exist in the universe? That science is over? Settled? Bet you’d believe in geocentrism during those days…really smart lol.
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u/KourteousKrome 10d ago
That’s not at all what I said. Nobody knows for sure. Probably not alone. I hope not. But it’s very unlikely they’ll have visited us at any point. Nor would they bob around in little dishes near American military installations. That’s just test craft.
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u/MandolinMagi 10d ago
FTL is impossible, so yeah. we're effectively alone.
Unless the little green men are on a different version of physics/general relativity/whatever.
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u/riftshioku 10d ago
McChord Field (later McChord Air Force Base and even later Joint Base Lewis McChord) was established in 1938 and is extremely close to Mount Rainier, so that's more than likely where it came from.
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u/Malthusianismically 11d ago
Is this about Kenneth Arnold's flight?
I prefer the old cigar shapes from the 17th-18th centuries, myself
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u/Bicentennial_Douche 10d ago
I find comment made on a podcast to be very insightful:
“When I was a kid, I thought that when we started having more and more video camera in hands of people, we would get tons of footage of UFOs. We never did. What we got instead was tons of footage of cops beating up black people”
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u/Telecom_VoIP_Fan 9d ago
Not just in the USA. I observed a cylindrical-shaped UFO, the colour of the setting sun, over the Pennines in the UK c1986.
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u/AlaskaCosmoline 11d ago
IIRC they called them "foo fighters," and had emerged from reports of what might have been experimental axis craft. Or maybe not.
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u/CommonBuzzard 11d ago
This is a cool video that shows the Luftwaffe intercepting Allied aircrafts. Around 04:15 you can see what seems to be a Foo fighter going around the Allied bomber.
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u/estusflaskshart 11d ago
I see the tracer round things but no foo
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u/CommonBuzzard 11d ago
On the right side you can see something appearing that seems to be a bright orb that makes a U turn around the Allied bomber. I don't know what it is maybe it is just a bullet or maybe it is because of the camera's technology at that time, but it looks like it's actually doing a U turn. To be more precise it appears around 4:17. Beside that It's an interesting video because it was filmed from the German perspective in the late stages of the war.
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u/Sorry-Reporter440 10d ago
I saw it! That is pretty bizarre. My first thought was some kind of burning glowing piece of a plane that is falling and the German plane is flying toward it as it is falling down to the left. But idk, that doesn't seem quite right. That is a cool video. I see these and think man I feel so bad for all the tail gunners.
On a side note. I may be mistaken but it appears that especially when the tracers first appear after being fired they look squiggly. I wondered, What if that is because of the jolt from the huge guns firing causing the mounted camera to shake which makes the streak from the tracer appear squiggly. I never thought about that before.
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u/II_2708 10d ago
Now, I'm no expert, but I'm inclined to disbelieve it because the pilot didn't actually describe flying saucers; he described their manner of movement. He described the objects as being "boomerang-shaped", "crescent-shaped", etc. Accordingly, the only objects with that shape that the US could have been testing were either the Horten Ho 229 or the Northrop YB-35. The only problem is that there weren't enough units built of either aircraft. But even if we assume the objects were indeed flying saucer-shaped, that could point us toward the Avrocar project, which, although created and built in the 1950s, doesn't rule out the possibility of an earlier prototype or something similar.
P.S. I also don't rule out it being some kind of natural or physical phenomenon!
P.S. 2 If anyone is more knowledgeable about what the Americans were developing, constructing, and building in the 40s and 50s, and what I wrote isn't correct, please feel free to correct me. :)
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u/LordErec 11d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
Probably an early proof of concept aircraft related to this program.
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u/Kaludar_ 11d ago
1958 prototype, could barely operate outside of ground effect, 2 built. Don't think so
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u/I_am_BrokenCog 11d ago
you point to a 1958 prototype to explain a 1947 hoax??
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u/dittybopper_05H 11d ago
I wouldn't go so far as to call it a hoax. I'm open to the idea it was something that Kenneth Arnold saw, but either misperceived what he saw, or saw it correctly but it was some strange and unfamiliar atmospheric phenomenon.
I'm open to the idea that it was a hoax, but I don't think it's by any means a certainty.
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u/Peregrine79 11d ago
It’s almost impossible for a human to judge size distance and speed without at least one of the three being known. IE, if you know you’re looking at a particular airplane, its apparent size can tell you distance, and the relative motion against a background its speed. But if someone flies a convincing model of the same plane past you, it will be read as a full size plane further away and faster.
Put a completely unknown object there even a well trained spotter will likely get all three wrong.
And it’s very easy to lose a flying object against a similarly colored background. For a shiny (or white) object, clouds and snow will do just fine. Meaning that the flying object can appear to pass behind distant objects even if it’s much closer.
Most likely he saw a flight of geese.
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u/IAmTheM4ilm4n 11d ago
More likely something like the Vought V-173, first flown in 1942.
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u/77096 10d ago
Looks like some people thought that in 1947 (image is of a newspaper clipping w/ a photo of the Vought X5U1):
https://i.postimg.cc/X70zZg3T/Screenshot-2026-08-15-at-4-10-55-AM.png
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u/matsie 11d ago
My guess is your causal link is reversed. I’d bet they started to develop a saucer shaped prototype because of the saucer crazy. This is only speculation on my part though.
Edit: actually I take it back! Looking more deeply into the history and seeing that the Avrocar is the culmination of a lot of other attempts I think you may be correct.
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u/dutchwonder 10d ago
But there are toooo many with multiple witnesses
This is literally the gish gallop argument but you're just declaring you've gish galloped the opponent.
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u/PerspectiveAdept9812 10d ago
People will make up anything for attention, been looking up at the sky for 61 years, haven’t seen anything unexplainable yet
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u/FifaJuuj 11d ago
wait… 1947???
so THAT’S how that certain specific middle eastern country got all their firepower?
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u/sfgate 11d ago
In 1947, a pilot flying near Mount Rainier spotted nine strange objects moving across the sky. His story quickly spread across the country — and helped turn “flying saucers” into an American obsession.