The Condon report suggested there was no evidence of extraterrestrial visitation and that all UFO reports could be explained if sufficient data had been gathered in the beginning. This is exactly what Hippler wrote in his January 1967 letter to Condon. Yet, even when they selected the sightings they would investigate, they failed to explain almost thirty percent of them. In one case (over Labrador, 30 June 1954), they wrote, "This unusual sighting should therefore be assigned to the category of some almost certainly natural phenomenon, which is so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since."
But even with the holes in the study, even with the contradictory evidence, and even with the proof that something unusual was going on, Condon did what he was paid to do. He ended Project Blue Book. On December 17, 1969, the Air Force announced that it was terminating its study of flying saucers. The twenty-two year old study had come to a close.
June 24, 1947: Kenneth Arnold and Fred Johnson
On June 24, 1947 the modern UFO era was ushered in when Kenneth Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, businessman saw nine objects flash across the sky near Mount Rainer in Washington state. They were flying one behind the other, at about 9,500 feet, at a speed estimated, by Arnold, to be more than 1500 miles an hour.
Although fascinated by the strange craft, Arnold didn't land immediately to inform the press. Instead, he continued flying, searching for a lost aircraft. When he did land, he talked to reporters and started a mystery that has lasted since that day.
Arnold, in relating the tale later, told military investigators that, "The air was so smooth that day that it was a real pleasure flying and, as most pilots do when the air is smooth and they are flying at a higher altitude, I trimmed out my airplane in the direction of Yakima, Washington, which was almost directly east of my position and simply sat in my plane observing the sky and the terrain."
His attention was called to the strange objects when sunlight flashed off the metal surface. "It startled me as I thought I was too close to some other aircraft. I looked every place in the sky and couldn't find where the reflection had come from until I looked to the left… where I observed a chain of nine peculiar looking aircraft."
The string of nine objects were flying in a formation that he estimated to be five miles long. They dodged in and out of the mountain peaks in a fluid motion that tilted them up and revealed their bottoms to him. He noted that they were quite far away.
Arnold had also seen a DC-4 that he estimated to be fifteen miles from him. He compared the objects to that aircraft, believing them to be smaller than the four-engine, propeller-driven airplane.
When he landed in Yakima, Washington, he told the assembled reporters that the objects moved with a motion like that of saucers skipping across the water. The shape, however, according to drawings that Arnold completed for the Army, showed objects that were heel shaped. In later drawings, Arnold elaborated, showing objects that were crescent shaped with a scalloped trailing edge.
Hearing Arnold's description of the motion of the objects, reporter Bill Bequette coined the term "flying saucer." The term, then, didn't refer to the shape of the objects, but to the style of their movement.
Arnold's sighting didn't gain front-page status immediately. Stories about it appeared in newspapers a day or two later. It was, at that time, the story of an oddity. Arnold claimed later that he thought he had seen some sort of new or experimental jet aircraft.
Because this was the first of the flying saucer sightings to gain national attention, it became important for military officers to determine what he had seen. They spent great deal of time and effort investigating it, and eventually wrote it off as mirages. That is, Arnold, because of the atmospheric conditions that afternoon, had seen a mirage in which the tops of the mountains seemed to be separate from the rest of the ground. It looked as if huge bits of land were hovering above the ground and could, under the proper circumstance have appeared to be saucer-shaped objects flying near the tops of the mountains.
In a report prepared for the Army Air Forces, Arnold expressed his displeasure at such suggestions. He wrote, "A number of news men and experts suggested that I might have been seeing reflections or even a mirage. This I know to be absolutely false, as I observed these objects not only through the glass of my airplane but turned my airplane sideways where I could open my window and observe them with a completely unobstructed view."
That, of course, didn't satisfy those who believed that Arnold had made an error. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the onetime consultant to Project Blue Book, studied the case for the military. It was Hynek's opinion that if Arnold's estimate of the distance was correct, then he had to have underestimated the size of the objects. If, on the other hand, he had overestimated the distance, then his timing of their flight was wrong. Hynek believed, according to the documents available in the Blue Book files, that the objects were closer than Arnold thought. Hynek wrote, "In all probability, therefore, objects were much closer than thought and moving at definitely 'sub-sonic' speeds."
My comment to that is, "So?" We still have the sighting of nine objects that are not conventional aircraft. They are flying in a loose formation, and traveling at a fairly high rate of speed. Even if they are subsonic, that doesn't explain what they were, only that the observed speed was within the capability of aircraft being flown in 1947. It doesn't answer the questions of what they were.
Others at AMC, apparently impressed with Hynek's analysis, also wrote off the case. In their summary of the flying saucer reports, that is, the Project Sign analysis, someone wrote, "AMC Opinion: The report cannot bear even superficial examination, therefore, must be disregarded. There are strong indications that this report and its attendant publicity is largely responsible for subsequent reports."
It seemed to indicate to those looking at the Arnold report in the late 1940s believed that Arnold had misidentified some kind of known, subsonic aircraft. But the question remains, what were they? The description of them fits nothing in the inventory at the time with the possible exception of the Northrop Flying Wing. It was a large, four-engine, propeller-driven aircraft that was not flying in that area. And, there weren't nine of them available even if they had been flying at the time and in the area.
There is another aspect of the case that needs to be clarified. In the Air Force file on the Arnold sighting, there are "galley proof" pages from a book written by Donald H. Menzel, the Harvard astronomer who believed that all UFO sightings were misidentifications or outright lies. In the book, Menzel proposes the mirage theory that the Air Force eventually accepted as the answer to the Arnold case.
But Menzel wasn't done with one explanation. He offered many. In his first book about flying saucers, Menzel suggested that Arnold had seen "billowing blasts of snow, ballooning up from the tops of ridges… These rapidly shifting, tilting clouds of snow would reflect the sun like a mirror… and the rocking surfaces would make the chain sweep along something like a wave, with only a momentary reflection from crest to crest."
It is an interesting theory and one that makes sense except longtime residents say that the snow in late June, what there is in the mountains, is wet and heavy and wouldn't be sweep around like the powdery stuff that falls in the winter. In other words, Menzel's explanation does not conform to the weather of the time, nor does it account for Arnold's description of the craft.