Flying Saucer Day marks the anniversary when in 1947, an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying a small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington state when he spotted not one, but nine circular, high-speed objects in the sky.
Arnold gauged the objects to be about 45 to 50 feet wide. They flew between two mountains spaced 50 miles apart in just 1 minute, 42 seconds. Which was implying an astonishing speed of 1,700 miles per hour or three times faster than any manned aircraft of the era. They seemed as if they were controlled and the flying objects seemed to dip and swerve around obstacles in the terrain. He watched the metallic like objects that were dipping and swerving and “flying like a saucer would” for about two minutes before they simply disappeared.
When the objects faded into the distance, Arnold flew to Yakima, Washington and then landed and immediately told the airport staff of the unidentified flying objects he had spotted. The next following day he was then interviewed by reporters. The story spread like wildfire across the nation.
He was misquoted by the press, though, as having said that he saw "flying saucers." Arnold tried to correct the impression, saying that he didn’t say that the craft were saucer shaped but that they moved like a someone skipping a saucer on the water.
His actual description was: "They were half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear. …they looked like a big flat disk." What he thus described as more like a "flying wing" aircraft design (something we puny humans had actually already built). Nertheless, the term (and the shape) stuck.
The phrase 'flying saucers' provided the mold which shaped the UFO myth at its beginning. UFOs took the form of flying saucers, he noted, in artist's renderings, hoax photos, sci-fi films, TV shows and even the vast majority of alien abduction and sighting reports for the rest of modern history and up until the present day.
This forever changed history in our world and has inspired millions of believers to term UFOs the term flying saucers.
Folks have been talking about it ever since.
Thus leading up to this incredible holiday now known as Flying Saucer Day on June 24th. Whether you are a skeptic, conspiracy theorist or unidentified flying objects (UFOs) enthusiast, extra-terrestrials, aliens, and flying saucers have been a subject of debate for decades.