The Birth of the
Skeptical Inquirer May/June 2000
First Flying Saucer Wave, 1947
On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold was piloting his private plane near the Cascade mountains
in Washington state when he saw what appeared to be nine glittering objects flying in
echelonlike formation near Mount Rainier. He kept the objects in sight for about three
minutes before they traveled south over Mount Adams and were lost to view (Arnold 1950;
Arnold and Palmer 1952; Gardner 1988; Clark 1998, 139-143).
Worried that he may have observed guided missiles from a foreign power, Arnold eventually
flew to Pendleton, Oregon, where he tried reporting what he saw to the FBI office there.
But the office was closed, so he went to the offices of The East Oregonian newspaper. After
listening to Arnold's story, journalist Bill Bequette produced a report for the Associated
Press. It is notable that at this point, Arnold had described the objects as
crescent-shaped, referring only to their movement as "like a saucer would if you skipped it
across the water" (Gardner 1957, 56; Story 1980, 25; Sachs 1980, 207-208). However, the
Associated Press account describing Arnold's "saucers" appeared in over 150 newspapers.
The AP report filed by Bequette was the proto-article from which the term "flying saucer"
was created by headline writers on June 25 and 26, 1947 (Strentz 1970). of key import was
Bequette's use of the term "saucer-like" in describing Arnold's sighting. Bequette's use of
the word "saucer" provided a motif for the worldwide wave of flying saucer sightings during
the summer of 1947, and other waves since. There are a few scattered historical references
to disc-shaped objects, but no consistent pattern emerges until 1947, with Arnold's
sighting. There have only been a handful of occasions prior to 1947 that a witness has
actually used the word "saucer" to describe mysterious aerial objects. Hence, the global
1947 flying saucer wave can be regarded as a media-generated collective delusion unique to
the twentieth century.
Source: Skeptical Inquirer Volume 24, No. 3 May/June 2000