Excellent book:


Kevin Randle:
Scientific Ufology
Avon Books, New York 1999
p.14-17
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  Portland, Oregon
  July 4, 1947


A most impressive series of sightings came from Portland,
Oregon, where police officers and civilians in widely separated
locations watched as a variety of disks flashed through the sky.
The first was reported by C.J. Bogne and a carload of witnesses
north of Redmond, Oregon, when they saw four disk-shaped objects
flash past Mount Jefferson. According to the witnesses, the
objects made no noise and performed no maneuvers.

  At 1:00 P.M., an Oaks Park employee, Don Metcalfe, saw a lone
disk fly overhead. A KOIN news reporter in Portland saw twelve
shiny disks as they danced in the sky high above him.

  A few minutes after 1:00, Kenneth A. McDowell, a police
officer who was near the Portland police station, noticed that
the pigeons began fluttering as if frightened. Overhead he saw
five large disks east of the city. According to the report he
gave to military officers, three disks were flying east and the
other two toward the south. All were moving at high speed and
appeared to be oscillating. McDowell alerted the police, and
they immediately broadcast the information.

  After hearing the broadcast, two other police officers, Walter
A. Lissy and Robert Ellis, stopped near a park. They saw three
disks high overhead, moving at high speed. Neither heard any
engine noises, but both did see flashes of brightness that could
have been sunlight reflecting from shiny surfaces. According to
the police officers, the objects moved erratically and changed
their direction of flight. Both men were veterans of the Second
World War, and both were civilian pilots.

  Also hearing the broadcast was Patrolman Earl Patterson, who
stopped to search for the disks. The broadcast suggested that
the saucers were "coming out of the sun," meaning they were
coming from the direction of the sun. At first Patterson saw
nothing, but a few seconds later he saw one object coming out of
the west and heading toward the southwest. He said the craft
seemed to be aluminum or eggshell white and didn't flash or
reflect the light.

  Just across the Columbia River, in nearby Vancouver,
Washington, sheriff's deputies Sergeant John Sullivan, Clarence
McKay, and Fred Krives also heard the radio broadcast and ran
outside. Over Portland, three to five miles away, they saw
twenty to thirty disks that looked to them like a flight of
geese. They also said they heard a low humming sound.

  Not long after that, three harbor patrolmen who also heard the
radio report stepped outside. Captain K.A. Prehn, A.T. Austed,
and Patrolman K.C. Hoff saw three to six disks traveling at high
speed, but they couldn't tell the number because of the bright
flashes from them. According to the witnesses, the objects
looked like chrome hubcaps and oscillated as they flew.
Sometimes the witnesses would see a full disk, then a half-moon
shape, and then nothing at all.

  They did see a plane in the sky at the time, but all the
witnesses said that what they were watching was not an aircraft.
Air Force investigators would later wonder if the airplane might
have had something to do with the sightings.

  Air Force files also report that "A former aircorps [sic]
veteran ... said the object [he saw] was unlike any plane he'd
ever seen. He thought it appeared radio-controlled because the
disk could change direction at a 90 degree angle without
difficulty."

  Another witness suggested that he had seen three objects fly
east across the Williamette River. The objects did not appear to
be very high, but they were traveling very fast. He said that
they looked like a metallic disk glinting in the sun. He also
said that he and a neighbor saw a single disk later that
afternoon.

  About 4:00 P.M., more civilians saw the disks. A woman called
the police, telling them she'd watched a single object as "shiny
as a new dime, flipping around." An unidentified man called to
say that he'd seen three disks, one flying to the east and the
other two heading north. They were shiny, shaped like flattened
saucers, and were traveling at high speed.

  About an hour later a man said that he spotted two white or
silver objects flying southeast over Portland. Half an hour
later he sighted a single disk heading to the northeast.

  Finally, in Milwaukie, Oregon, not far from Portland, Sergeant
Claude Cross reported three objects flying to the north. All
were disk-shaped and were moving at high speed.

  In what could be important information, a few of the witnesses
reported real objects falling from the sky. Near Eugene, Oregon,
a railroad cashier said he saw silvered disks being dropped out
of a light airplane flying over the city.

  A man in Portland recovered a large piece of paper he had seen
fall from a great height. According to the reports, the time
that the paper fell coincided with some of the flying sauce
sightings.

  Naturally, Air Force officers investigated the sightings. As
part of the Project Grudge final report, written in 1949, one of
the officers reported, "This investigator can offer no definite
hypothesis, but in passing would like to note these incidents
occurred on the Fourth of July, and that if relatively small
pieces of aluminum foil had been dropped from a plane over the
area, then any one object would become visible at relatively
short distance. Even moderate wind velocities could give the
illusion that fluttering, gyrating discs had gone by at great
velocities. Various observers would not, of course, in this case
have seen the same objects."

  The officer also noted, "The above is not to be regarded as a
very likely explanation but only as a possibility: the
occurrence of these incidents on July 4 may have been more than
a coincidence. Some prankster might have tossed such objects out
of an airplane as part of an Independence Day celebration."

  Ed Ruppelt, former chief of Rlue Book, reported on the series
of sightings in his book, 'The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects', without commentary about them. Blue Book files label
all the sightings as insufficient data for a scientific analysis
with the exception of one that they suggested was radar chaff:
They were explaining one of the sightings as small bits of
aluminum foil having been dropped from an aircraft.

  The thing that is most interesting about these sightings is
the number of law enforcement officers who reported seeing the
objects after the radio broadcast. There is very little
likelihood that the police officers would have invented the
tales just to climb on the bandwagon. They would not have
jeopardized their careers for some kind of prctical joke.

  Air Force investigation, which took the reports seriously in
1947, failed to find a satisfactory explanation for these
sightings. It must be remembered that in this case there was
nothing other than witnesses, separated by distance, who claimed
to have seen the same thing. The sightings are interesting but
certainly not indicative of anything more important.