Aliens On Earth.com Resources for those who are stranded here Our Bookstore is OPEN Over 5000 new & used titles, competitively priced! Topics: UFOs - Paranormal - Area 51 - Ghosts - Forteana - Conspiracy - History - Biography - Psychology - Religion - Crime - Health - Geography - Maps - Science - Money - Language - Recreation - Technology - Fiction - Other - New Search... for keyword(s)   in Page Titles in Book Title/Author in Contents of Pages ---other searches--- Metacrawler Yahoo FAST Search Google Altavista Dogpile Inference Find Northern Light IWon.com MSN Search Las Vegas Sun Location: Mothership -> UFO -> Updates -> 1997 -> May -> How We Were Saved From Flying Speedboats

UFO UpDates Mailing List

From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
Date: Sat, 17 May 1997 12:35:35 -0400
Fwd Date: Sat, 17 May 1997 12:35:35 -0400
Subject: How We Were Saved From Flying Speedboats




The Toronto Star
Saturday, May 17, 1997

Arts Section
Page N3

How we were saved from flying speedboats

Late afternoon, June 24, 1947. At the airport in Pendleton,
Oregon, Kenneth Arnold was struggling to find the words to
describe to reporters what he'd seen flying "very rapidly" in the
direction of Mount Rainier in Washington a couple  of hours
earlier.

The 32-year-old rescue pilot and businessman had been using his
single-engine plane in an effort to find a downed U.S. Marine
transport plane when he saw what he described as a "chain of nine
peculiar looking aircraft."

Striking out after what he first assumed were jests, he quickly
lost the crescent-shaped objects as they zoomed away in formation
at a speed the pilot calculated at 1,656 mph.

Whatever they were, he decided they weren't airplanes.

The reporters, who'd been alerted to the incident after Arnold had
refueled a couple of hours earlier in Yakima, Washington, traded
furtive glances. They pressed the young man, by all accounts a
community pillar, to describe exactly what he'd seen.

Struggling for an image, Arnold first likened the objects to
speedboats on water, then to the swooping tail of a Chinese kite.
The scribes still weren't getting the picture. Then Arnold said
it: "They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the
water."

Bingo. Before running out to file, Bill Bequette scribbled two
words that would effectively launch (so to speak) one of the more
persistent and perplexing pop culture phenomena of the postwar
century. According to the reporter, Arnold had seen "flying
saucers".

Nothing new about people seeing high strangeness in the wild blue
yonder, of course. In the anxiously atomic year of 1946,
unsettling reports began appearing in Scandinavian newspapers
about an outbreak of sightings of rocket-like objects "spook
bombs" -- flaming across the sky, occasionally crashing
spectacularly in lakes.

During the war, pilots from all sides had reported mysterious
balls of light -- nicknamed 'Foo Fighters' after a comic-strip
gag --- that would pursue and dart around planes in  flight.

 In the last years of the 19th century, when the science-fiction
writings of Jules Verne trigged a worldwide explosion of
interplanetary-themed dime novels, people reported seeing giant
illuminated, cigar-shaped airships in the skies.

As one travels across time and cultures, the objects reported my
change, but their airborne status remains: the 'floating cities'
of the early 19th century, the flying dragons of the Middle Ages,
the swooping 'silver shields' that attacked Alexander the Great
in 329 B.C., the deadly flying 'Vimanas' described in an Indian
text written in 5th century B.C.

For the Romans, they were 'flying chariots' and for the ancient
Chinese 'flying carts'. For Ezekiel, the Kenneth Arnold of the
Old Testament, it was a "wheel in the middle of a wheel" that
fired lightning bolts during ascent.

Since 1947, thanks to Bequette's economical turn of phrase, it
has been flying saucers. Within months after the Arnold affair,
UFO sightings (ahem) skyrocketed across the continent, but people
weren't seeing missiles, cigars or luminous gremlins much any
more. They saw saucers.

Indeed, less than a month after Arnold landed in Pendleton, when
the single-most controversial incident in UFO lore happened --
the allegedly hushed-up crash-landing of an extraterrestrial
craft near the airbase at Roswell, N.M. -- the banner headline in
The Roswell Daily Record confirmed the entry of a new fixture to
to the popular lexicon. It read: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On
Ranch Near Roswell Region."

By the early 1950s, flying saucers were, like cars and teenagers,
everywhere -- if not hovering silently above the desert highway
somewhere, then on magazine and paperback covers, in comic books
and cartoons and, of course, at the movies: 'It Came From Outer
Space', 'Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers', 'It Conquered The World',
'The Day The Earth Stood Still', 'I Married A Monster From Outer
Space', 'Invaders From Mars'.

By the time Eisenhower became president, aliens were plummeting
from the heavens like prairie hailstones, their favoured method
of conveyance being the flying saucer.

Fifty years after the Arnold incident, it still is and it makes
one marvel at the pure, sublime serendipity of the thing.

Had those reporters not pressed the poor pilot for a more
evocative image, we might have endured a half-century of attack
by flying speedboats.