and
Bonus Episode 9.2B: "SPACE TRIANGLE LOVE BOMB",
feat. journalist and amateur astronomer Tony Ortega
* * *
“It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Flying Saucer! Oh no, Wait, it’s a Bird.”
(Paranoid Planet, Episode 9.2, Chapter 2)
Kenneth Arnold poses for the Associated Press. 1947.
At 2:15pm on June 24, 1947, a 32 year-old businessman and private pilot named Kenneth Arnold—a resident of Boise, Idaho—took to the skies in his Call-Air A-2 single-engine propeller plane from Chehalis, Washington, near the Pacific west coast, in the direction of Yakima, Washington, some 130 miles (200km) east, on the other side of the Cascade mountain range. Arnold’s ultimate destination was Pendleton, Oregon, where he intended to attend an air show. But history had another usage for Mr. Arnold cross-mountain solo voyage: to give birth to the modern flying saucer mythology.
Having learned that a U.S. Marine Corps C-46 Commando transport plane had recently crashed in the vicinity of Mount Rainier, with 32 U.S. Marines on board, and that a hefty $5,000 reward (worth about $70,000 today) was being offered to whoever could locate the downed aircraft, Arnold decided to deviate from his flight plan and make a detour northwards towards Mount Rainer, to look for the missing plane and hopefully cash in his prize. The summer sky was clear and bright, ideal conditions to spot a distant object from up above.
A view of Mount Rainier
But after circling the area several times and finding nothing, Arnold gave up the search and decided to head back southeast towards Yakima, when, after performing a 180-degree turn, his attention was caught by a bright flash. This occurred, he later reported, around 3:00 p.m. whilst flying at an altitude of 9,000 feet in the vicinity of Mineral, Washington, a hamlet located some 20 miles (32 km) south-west of Mount Rainer. Worried that he was in danger of colliding with another aircraft, Arnold scanned the skies and radioed to a ground radar station to find out if he was in another plane’s flight path. He thereby discovered that a DC-4 passenger plane was present in the area, but being almost 15 miles out (24 km), it was too distant, and in the wrong direction, to account for the bright flash that had caught Arnold’s attention.
Then Arnold saw another flash, and then another, and then witnessed what appeared to be nine bright objects flying westward in a diagonal, stepped-down echelon formation, weaving through valleys and between mountains, and banking from side to side in unison. This made him believe they were a squadron of jets—except that these jets didn’t appear to have any tails, nor typical aircraft wings, nor any visible engines, propellers, or vapor trail. As he would later explained in a 1952 book titled, The Coming of the Saucers, which he co-wrote with science fiction magazine editor Ray Palmer, Their outlines:
…flipped and flashed against the snow [and] against the sky. […] They didn’t fly like any aircraft I had ever seen before. […] The elevation of the first craft was greater than that of the last. […] They flew in definite formation, but erratically. […] Their flight was like speed boats on rough water, or similar to the tail of a Chinese kite that I once saw blowing in the wind. […] Very similar to a formation of geese in a rather diagonal chain-like line, as if they were linked together.[1]
They were like shiny crescents, he added, “flat like a pie-pan and somewhat bat-shaped” […] “They did not appear to whirl or spin, but seemed in fixed position.”[2] Initially, Arnold estimated their size to be approximately 60 feet in diameter. He would later increase his estimate to 100 feet, and concluded that they were flying in a five mile-long formation at a mind-boggling speed of 1,200 miles per hour (1,900 km/hr)—twice as fast as any known jet, and much faster than the speed of sound, which would not be accomplished by a human pilot for another four months.[3] It is noteworthy to point out that Arnold would later increase this estimate to 1,700 miles per hour. According to the Project Bluebook report (which classified Arnold’s sighting as a probable mirage) the entire experience lasted less than three minutes.[4]
A still from a History Channel "documentary" on Arnold's sighting
Kenneth Arnold would share his incredible experience with others when he arrived in Yakima, and again in Pendleton the next day, first to the East Oregonian newspaper, and then to the Associated Press, for whom he described the objects as moving “like a saucer if you skipped it across water.”[5] He would also file a report with the Air Force a couple weeks later, with handmade drawings of these objects that looked like the heel of a shoe or a tailless horseshoe crab seen from above, and a glass telescope lens from the side, fatter in the middle and tapered on its sides.
Arnold's "shoe heel" drawings of the UFOs, recorded on his 1947 Air Force report.
(National Archives and Records Administration)
Although the media would soon almost exclusive describe these objects as saucers or discs, Arnold said he never actually described them as looking like “saucers” but rather as batwings or crescents. Indeed, he would later pose for an Associated Press photo with a drawing of the object he claimed to have seen, which looked less like a saucer and more like a silvery boomerang—the sort you might imagine Batman throwing around. But the toothpaste was out of the tube, as they say, and, within days, not only did hundreds of newspapers and thousands of people talk about these objects as “saucers” and “discs”—including in Roswell, New Mexico less than two weeks later—they also began to see them in the sky everywhere, as if this confirmed that what Arnold had seen was genuine, despite the fact that he never reported seeing saucers at all. As British journalist, mythologist, and UFO skeptic David Clarke whimsically remarked in his book How UFOs Conquered the World, “Why would aliens redesign the appearance of their craft to conform to a mistake made by a journalist?”[6]
Arnold poses with a drawing of his "batwing" UFO.
(Associated Press)
According to historian Greg Eghigian, Arnold’s narrative, which would be widely promoted and exaggerated by his soon-to-be co-author Ray Palmer, “provided the blueprint for […] what would become the recurring melodrama of ufology.”[7] Once the “flying saucer” story was in print, it would have been very hard for Kenneth Arnold to walk his claims back, even if he had wanted to. Instead, he himself began using the term “flying saucers” in future interviews.[8] Not only that, Arnold also became an ardent—and credulous—ufologist, sharing his experiences with several publications, doing some of his own UFO research, writing his own books about extraterrestrial spaceships, trying to take pictures of more alien batwings while piloting his plane—he never did spot more of them—and getting taken-in by a UFO hoax (i.e., the Maury Island UFO) concocted by his enterprising co-author Ray Palmer.[9] And there were few journalists who would have wanted him to walk that story back anyways, because it was just so compelling, attention-grabbing, and, to be a tad cynical, lucrative!
Did Kenneth Arnold really see, as he would go on to claim, craft that behaved like no human vehicle could, and could only be extraterrestrial in origin? Many ufologists, such as Jenny Randles, believe that Arnold’s reputation and perceptive abilities were unimpeachable:
As an experienced pilot who had flown the Cascades many times, we must respect his opinion. […] How would you feel to be told that what you know you saw with your own two eyes cannot have been there, because scientists (who have probably never met you and were certainly not with you at the time of the events) have decreed that what you claim is impossible. […] For years we had dreamt of life on other worlds. Science-fiction writers and Flash Gordon movies had used this to enthrall us. Now the reality stared our planet in the face.[10]
In extolling Arnold‘s character, Randles betrays her strong will to believe everything he said (and also additions that emerged later) without the strength of any evidence. She also does not seem to realise that smart, sane, and honest people—including experienced pilots—misidentify things in the sky all the time, especially where a lack of visual context leads them to make arbitrary assumptions about the distance, speed, direction, and size of such objects. Even astronomer J. Allen Hynek, a willing believer in the extra-terrestrial hypothesis, did not put much weight in Arnold’s ability to make accurate judgments about the size, distance, and speed of his nine shiny objects, which if his observations were consistent would have had to be the size of mountains flying around in the sky. This is perhaps why, as an advisor of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Bluebook, Hynek would conclude that Arnold had merely misidentified planes, or simply seen a mirage.[11]
Whether or not Arnold was a smart man, an honest man, or had 20/20 vision, critical thinkers should be careful before jumping on the extraterrestrial bandwagon and ask themselves whether the reported evidence—assuming Arnold wasn’t lying or deluded—might not better fit a simpler explanation. And it seems to me that it does.
While most of the people who knew Arnold thought he was not the type of person to willfully perpetrate a hoax, we should legitimately question whether a misidentification of these craft as something extraterrestrial may have been in Arnold’s best interest not to reconsider. After all, he had just wasted an hour’s worth of jet fuel trying (and failing) to cash in on a $5,000 reward, and was likely ending his search of the elusive C-46 wreckage bummed out at his bad luck. The fact that he took it upon himself to visit the offices of the East Oregonian newspaper, rather than wait to be sought out by the media, suggests he was not averse to receiving attention, and perhaps also some financial returns, for his mysterious sighting of supersonic flying machines.
Former East Oregonian reporter Bill Bequette holding up
the 1947 story that made Arnold (and himself) famous.
We may also question whether Mr. Arnold was already predisposed to believing in such crafts. While he is habitually identified as the first modern witness of flying saucers, Dr. Hynek points out that Arnold’s sighting was actually listed by the Air Force’s Project Sign—the precursor to Project Bluebook—as Incident #17, and not even the first widely publicized sighting of 1947. This means that Arnold had likely not experienced his sighting as a blank slate, but that his perception was likely influenced by various expectations, shaped by stories of strange things in the sky he had heard of before in either movies, novels, science fiction magazines, or urban legends. Indeed, his sighting of the nine mysterious objects—and his belief that they were immense and moving incredibly fast—may have merely confirmed a pre-existing belief that humans are not alone in the universe. And if so, he certainly would not have been the first person to see something unusual and assume that it was extraterrestrial, or magical, or miraculous.
Rear cover of Amazing Stories Magazine (edited by Ray Palmer), August 1946.
The ease with which Arnold was later enticed into believing that a spaceship had dumped some space trash on Maury Island in Puget Sound reveals that he was not the most skeptically minded person. We should also ask ourselves why Arnold never reported any kind of sonic boom that should have resulted from the UFOs outlandish speed, which is what supersonic crafts do when they fly through our atmosphere. Nor did anyone else than Arnold seem to have witnessed or heard these same objects whizzing past Mount Rainier—not the radar operators Arnold spoke to, nor any civilians on the ground below, nor the pilots of the DC-4 plane flying just a few miles away. At the end of the day, we are left with the testimony of a single person who was busy controlling his own vehicle, who had an interest in scoring an easy $5,000 bucks, who showed a tendency for being impressionable, and offered a story to the media that evolved over time, with increasingly expanding spaceships flying at increasingly mind-numbing speeds.
Illustration of the conical shockwave behind a supersonic aircraft by CMG Lee, with its hyperbola-shaped ground contact zone in yellow. (Wikipedia).
None of this proves that Kenneth Arnold did not see something. What it was that he saw, however, may be far more mundane than spaceships from outer space. And this is where the evidence leads us to a surprising, and perhaps disappointing, but totally scientific and reasonable conclusion.
Some have speculated that what Arnold saw that day may have been a squadron of flat fighter plane prototypes such as the Vought V-173 "Flying Pancake", which had been featured on the May 1947 cover of Mechanix Illustrated, or possibly the experimental World War II German Horten Ho229 fighter/bomber, which did look very much like a batwing. However, these prototypes were known to be unstable and were therefore only used in testing operations, and very few were ever produced. The Flying Pancake also had tail flaps and two propellers, which doesn’t match the description Arnold made of his crafts as looking like crescents and batwings. Arnold did speculate in the days after his sighting that they might have been experimental missiles, perhaps not unlike the reports of ghost rockets that were concurrently being reported in Sweden,[12] though his descriptions defy anything that we now know were in the American arsenal at the time. This is perhaps why he quickly became convinced that they were not from this world.
Vought V-173 "Flying Pancake"
On the other hand, it is interesting to take note that one of Arnold’s first impressions was that the objects were flying in a formation not unlike migrating geese. This is perhaps closer to the truth than Arnold assumed at the time or was later willing to concede. While migrating geese have visible tails, there is a species of birds with large bat-like wings and very short tails that frequently fly long distances at high altitudes in undulating echelon formations, that also glide on air currents for long periods of time without flapping their wings, and whose feathers, especially on their top side, are highly reflective in the bright afternoon sun. They are American white pelicans, the largest bird on the North American continent, with a wingspan as wide as ten feet, which frequently migrate through Washington State and frequently soar at high altitudes on mountain air currents. While many will find this explanation risible, it does in fact fit the description Arnold gave of his so-called spacecraft: they are sort of shaped like batwings, they soar in formations like saucers or speedboats skipping on water (as well as like kite tails fluttering in the wind), and they can appear to flash brightly and intermittently in the afternoon sun as they glide and bank through the air, alternately exposing their whiter upper side and more yellowish lower side to humans watching below. And there is strong reason to believe that Arnold, who may have frequently seen flying pelicans from the ground-up but rarely or never from up above, would not have been aware of their high reflectivity. And he appears to have seen them from this angle, since he described them as flying against the snows of Mount Rainier and winding through valleys and between mountains.[13]
Click here to watch brown pelicans flying in echelon formation.
Pelicans, geese, swans, plovers, and even pigeons have been mistaken for planes or other flying objects in different types of weather and light conditions, usually by acting as oscillating natural reflectors of sunlight during the day or of ground lights at night. As David Clarke explains, this is what happened in Lubbock Texas in 1951, when a set of popular photographs were taken of a Vee formation of UFOs cause by an optical illusion combining ground lights and migrating birds. He also reports a similar experience described by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who witnessed a strange flying Vee formation while vacationing in Australia in 1958. “The effect of oscillating metallic discs was absolutely realistic,” the elder Clarke told the younger Clarke, “it would have fooled anyone.”[14] It may not be a sexy explanation, but if it’s the one that fits the evidence best while also requiring the fewest unproven assumptions, then we shouldn’t be afraid to believe it is true, even if it is sometimes humbling to admit that something so familiar as a flock of birds could have so utterly fooled our senses simply because we thought we were looking at something much different.
So if Arnold saw birds, how could we explain the apparent great sizes and speeds of the objects he observed? The answer turns out to be quite simple: it is caused by an optical illusion called parallax. Parallax is defined as “the apparent difference in direction of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object.”[15] Stated more simply, it is the way an object—like say, a pencil or finger held up at arm’s length—appears to change places in respect to the more distant background when one repeatedly closes one eye and opens the other. Though the object appears to have moved, it is actually stationary. The movement was caused by the apparent shift of positions of the object in the foreground against the more static background.
But what happens if the distance of the objects in the background are mistaken, of if there is nothing in the background at all—such as a dark night sky or a bright blue sky? Distance and size then become much harder to judge. And if one completely misjudges the size and proximity of the objects in the foreground, they may then completely miscalculate its actual speed.
In sum, the ability to look at a familiar object with two eyes instead of one, against a familiar background, allows us to properly gauge the approximate distance, size, and speed of an object in motion. But if we believe we are seeing an object that’s large and far away (like, say, a spaceship) as opposed to one that is smaller, and closer to us, though not easily identifiable (like a flock of shiny pelicans, soaring, banking, and skipping like saucers in unison), then the mind is left with the choice to interpret the sighting as best it can in accordance to what it believes to be seeing. This explains why bright distant lights moving quickly in the dark sky (like planes at a high altitude) are often perceived as slow-moving low-flying objects, and why slow moving proximate objects (like Chinese lanterns, balloons, and some birds) are often perceived as fast-moving distant objects.[16]
Near or far?
Small Chinese lanterns can be mistaken for larger, more distant flying machines
(including by this author)
Of course, none of this proves without a doubt that Kenneth Arnold did in fact see a flock of white pelicans in 1947, but it is the simplest, most consistent, and hardest theory to dispel once we limit ourselves to what we know and what Arnold initially claimed that he saw. It’s also important to point out that Arnold did not initially think that these objects were breaking the sound barrier until after he landed and tried to calculate their speed based on his memories and what he assumed was the large size and distance of these shiny batwings flying past the mountains and valleys below him. If they were smaller and closer than he assumed, as pelicans would have to be for him to be able to see them, then he could have seen whatever his mind was tricking him to see. And like all sensational “big fish” stories that leave no evidence to be assessed save the memories and feelings of witnesses, these tend to evolve over time, and rarely to they grow less impressive as the years pass.
Is it possible that Kenneth Arnold did at some point recognize how mundane his sighting might be but decided to stick with the alien batwings for fear of ridicule? It’s hard to tell. But my guess is he probably went to his grave believing he saw something out of this world. “When something ordinary become a UFO,” writes David Clarke, “it is perceived by the witness as something extraordinary. However, when a UFO is identified [that is, when its mundane identify is no longer a mystery] the alchemy is not always reversed; the gold sometimes resists being transformed back into base metal.”[17] This is why we would do well to heed the advice of philosopher René Descartes, who wrote almost 400 years ago:
Everything I have thus far accepted as entirely true has been acquired from the senses or by means of the senses. But I have learned by experience that these senses sometimes mislead me, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those things which have once deceived us. […] For I often observed that towers which, viewed from far away, had appeared round to me, seemed at close range to be square, and that colossal statues placed on the highest summits appeared small when viewed from below. And similarly in a multitude of other experiences, I encountered errors in judgement, based on the external senses.[18]
But then again, Descartes might not have been so sober-minded if he had suddenly found himself dangling 9,000 feet in the air!
M.J. Gagné, November 2024.
[1] Quoted in Greg Eghigian: After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon. Oxford University Press, 2024, p.12-14.
[2] Eghigian, p.13-14.
[3] Russell Lee: “1947: Year of the Flying Saucer,” Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Jun 24, 2022, https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/1947-year-flying-saucer; Bob Van der Linden: “Breaking the Sound Barrier: Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1,” Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Oct 13, 2022, https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/breaking-sound-barrier-75th.
[4] Record Group 341. Records of Headquarters U.S. Air Force (Air Staff) 1934–2004: Sanitized Version of Project Blue Book Case Files on Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects 1947 – 1969, p.1. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). https://catalog.archives.gov/id/28929152.
[5] Phil Wright: “Flying saucers still evasive 70 years after pilot’s report,” Associated Press, June 25, 2017. https://apnews.com/general-news-be32d6d0352a4e64b721f862eaf215f0.
[6] David Clarke: How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. Aurum Press, 2015, p.34.
[7] Eghigian, p.56.
[8] Eghigian, p.14.
[9] Eghigian, p.55.
[10] Jenny Randles: The UFO Conspiracy: The First Forty Years. Javelin Books, 1987, p.16-17. Emphasis in the original.
[11] J. Allan Hynek: The Hynek UFO Report, Dell Publishing, 1977; Randles, p.16.
[12] Eghigian, p.14-19.
[13] See Clarke, p.32-36, 54-62.
[14] Clarke, p.55-56.
[15] Merriam-Webster Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/parallax
[16] That is precisely why the so called “Go Fast” UFO video released by the USAF in 2017 was in fact probably a film of high-flying but slow-moving object (e.g., a balloon) against the fast moving background of the ocean, whose distance and speed were improperly interpreted by the fighter jet pilots watching the scene though a monitor. See Mick West: “Explained: ‘Go Fast’ UFO Video - Not Low and Not Fast - Like a Balloon!” June 23, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M&t=1s.
[17] Clarke, p.54.
[18] René Descartes: The Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, (first and sixth meditations), Macmillan, 1960, p.76, 130.
Documents related to this episode: *
Episode 9.2
Greg Eghigian: After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Jenny Randles: The UFO Conspiracy: The First Forty Years. Javelin Books, 1987.
J. Allan Hynek: The Hynek UFO Report. Dell Publishing, 1977.
David Clarke: How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. Aurum Press, 2015.
Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. University of California Press, 2003.
"Maybe Tomorrow". Theme song to The Littlest Hobo TV series (1979-85), composed by Terry Bush.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Bonus Episode 9.2B
The Phoenix Lights (2005). directed and written by Lynne Kitei. Feat. Lynne Ketei, Jim Dilettoso, and Frances Emma Barwood.
UFOs Over Phoenix (1997). directed by Richard Ross. Discovery Channel.
Tony Ortega: "The Great UFO Cover-Up," Phoenix New Times, June 26, 1997.
Tony Ortega: "The Hack and the Quack," Phoenix New Times, March 5, 1998.
NBC News: "10 close encounters caught on tape (Phoenix Lights)," May 18, 2008.
Tony Ortega: "NBC’s Dateline Airs Misleading UFO Footage," The Village Voice, May 19, 2008.
Tony Ortega: "The Phoenix Lights Explained (Again)," Skeptic, August 5, 2021.
Robert Sheaffer: "The ‘Phoenix Lights’ Become an ‘Incident’," Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 40, No. 4, July/August 2016.
Tony Ortega: "EXCLUSIVE: Lisa Marie Presley on Scientology, its leader David Miscavige, and why she left," The Underground Bunker (Substack). Jan 30, 2023.
Elizabeth Howell & Daisy Dobrijevic: "Comet Hale-Bopp: Facts about the bright and tragic comet," Space.com, April 18, 2022.
* All copyrighted video and audio clips are used for educational purposes only under "fair use" regulations.
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