The skies are alive with . . . what?
It is the time of summer. Since my childhood, the skies of summer have been alive with reports of unidentified flying objects (UFO’s). As a kid, I thought it was a summer news phenomenon. School is out, sports are done, nothing much is happening, reporters are bored, people are bored. Staring off into the distance, people spy strange things in the sky, things they can’t identify, things that are flying. They see UFO’s and make reports. Newspaper columnists get the calls and write the articles, because there is nothing much else to report.
Maybe, I was wrong.
On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold was flying his airplane toward Mount Rainier in the state of Washington. It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon. The skies were clear. Ken put the plane on auto, sat back and gazed out, enjoying the open panorama and the snow-covered peaks of the Cascade Mountains. A flash of light caught his attention. There were nine of them: bright objects, flying objects, in formation, like knots on the tail of a kite, moving from north to south, traveling fast, faster than any plane he knew to exist. The formation banked in unison. Mr. Arnold observed the objects were shaped like saucers, thin on the side and wide across the middle. In minutes, the group disappeared from his site. Ken continued on, landed and related the sighting his friends, who called their reporter friends, sitting at their desks, twiddling their thumbs, wondering what to write about in the middle of summer.
The next day the newspaper stories began. Somewhere in one of the reports, someone coined the phrase “flying saucer.” It was the first time the term was used. Before the year was out, 140 newspapers had reported 853 sightings of flying saucers.
The race was on.
It was fixin’ to be the 4th of July, 1947, just a week or so past Ken Arnold’s sightings at Mount Rainier, W. W. “Mack” Brazel and his son were out early on the range, riding their horses to check that the livestock was safe after a fierce thunderstorm the night before. Their ranch was northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, and that storm the night before had produced a passel of lighting. The electricity of the storm had ignited the countryside. Who knew what damage it had done?
“What’s that shiny stuff on the ground, Paw?”
“Don’t know, Son. Looks like something got blown apart. Maybe that storm last night. There’s pieces everywhere.”
Father and son got off their horses and started to examine the debris.
“This is like tin foil, but I can’t bend it,” Dad Mack commented.
“Paw, look! This little beam is lighter than a feather, and its got colored writing on the sides. Not letters I know from school?”
“Saddle up, Son. We’ve got to get back and tell the authorities. Something crashed here in the storm last night. No telling what may be over that ridge. Probably need the military. This could be one of them flying saucers we read about in the paper.”
On July 8, 1947, the military issued a press release stating that the wreckage of a flying object had been recovered near Roswell, New Mexico. Within hours, The Associated Press reported: “The Army Air Force here today announced a flying disc had been found.” Within days, the site was sealed to visitors. No reporters were allowed to see or examine the remains from the crash.
Curiously, a local mortician related to the reporters that the military had requested some small sealed coffins to preserve bodies exposed to the weather.
Soon after, the military announced the results of its investigations. The objects found near Roswell were the crashed parts of a weather balloon, not a flying saucer or its occupants.
To this day, the military insists the Roswell crash was that of a weather balloon.
For the rest of 1947 and to this day, the reports of UFO’s and flying saucers have continued.
In a 1950 interview with journalist Edward R. Murrow, Kenneth Arnold reported sighting similar flying objects on three other occasions.
In the written report of his first sighting near Mount Rainier, Mr. Arnold added a hand-drawn picture of a saucer-like object. Above the picture in the text, Kenneth Arnold noted that the Army had chosen not to visit with him to investigate the authenticity of his story. Mr. Arnold added, “If our Military intelligence was not aware of what I observed, they would be the very first people that I could expect as visitors.”
Could it be that the unexpected visitors were somehow expected?
Sometimes, silence can speak more loudly than words.
Could UFO’s be more than a summer event?
Could it be that flying saucers exist?
Maybe, I was wrong.
Who knows?
Do you?
Grandpa Jim