Seventy-seven years ago tomorrow [June 24, 2024], Kenneth Arnold, an experienced private pilot from Idaho, saw nine objects moving through the sky in formation over Mount Rainier, unlike anything he’d ever observed, at speeds he couldn’t explain. Subsequent media reports prompted untold Americans to expect visitors from outer space—yet the reports got basic facts wrong, left out key details the pilot had kept to himself, and eventually caused Arnold to wish he had kept his historic observations to himself.Within a few hours of his sighting, Kenneth Arnold’s story—trumpeted by the evocative phrase “flying saucers,” a creation of anonymous headline writers—became front-page news throughout the nation. In fact, the pilot and businessman told reporters the objects actually resembled stingrays, adding that they had only “moved like” saucers skipping over water.The Associated Press said the pilot witnessed “nine bright saucer-like objects flying at ‘incredible speed’ at 10,000 feet altitude.”[1] Curious people began scouring the skies to glimpse what they were told he saw, not knowing he’d seen something strikingly different. Soon, extraordinary craft shaped like saucers were being reported throughout the U.S. A cheeky writer named Martin Kottmeyer wondered why aliens from outer space would redesign their craft to fit a journalist's reporting error.
[2]Twenty-eight years after Kenneth Arnold’s death, his daughter Kim Arnold, keeper of the family archives, publicly disclosed significant new details of her father’s sighting. She said Kenneth Arnold was “perplexed and confused about everybody’s concept of aliens visiting from other planets—that type of thing. . . . [The objects] pulsated with blue/white light from the center of their surfaces similar to the rhythm and beating of our own human hearts. . . . My father believed they were alive, absolutely. . . . capable of changing their density . . . rather than anything made out of nuts and bolts. . . . He felt they were not mechanical in any sense at all.” [3] Kim Arnold said her dad felt UFOs come from a larger-dimensional world, “the world where we go when we die.” She reported that when her father returned from his fateful flight, inexplicable orbs of light began appearing in their house. She also spoke of her mother’s telepathic gifts and reincarnation beliefs and how greatly stressed her parents were by the way her father’s experiences were contorted by the media and skeptics, and by constant phone calls and the several thousand letters that her dad received.[4]For nearly eight decades, inveterate UFO/UAP trackers have expected our skies to yield views of extraordinary machines of the sort that Close Encounters of the Third Kind etched in our collective imagination. I can’t help but wonder: how would the modern flying saucer epic have played out if pundits in the summer of ’47 had known that Arnold’s so-called flying saucer vision pointed not to technology but eschatology—themes related to immortality, rebirth, resurrection, migration of the soul, and the end of time? In one sense the answer is obvious. If Arnold had climbed out of his cockpit declaring the objects seemed to be some form of living, pulsating, density-changing energy somehow connected to what we call death, his future flight privileges probably would have hinged on passing a psychiatric exam. “If I saw a ten-story building flying through the air I would never say a word about it,”[5] Arnold declared when numerous skeptics challenged his competence as an observer. Though traditional myths tend to be Gibraltar-like, mythology is also self-renewing. The unexpected update of the Arnold story shows even established “creation myths” can sprout new branches, cut unexpected tributaries. As a partisan for historical accuracy, an enthusiast of magical realism fiction where the uncanny is considered part of everyday life, and the son of an aviator who introduced me early to the wonders of big vistas, I’m delighted Kenneth Arnold’s daughter stepped up with significant new details. It’s a marvelous plot—with perhaps more still to be told?
By Keith Thompson
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Keith Thompson is author of The UFO Paradox: The Celestial and Symbolic World of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (Inner Traditions/Bear & Co., July 16, 2024). He can be reached at www.thompsonatlarge.com.
Sources:
[1] Strentz, Herbert. “An Analysis of Press Coverage of Unidentified Flying Objects, 1957–1966.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1970, p. 24.
[2] Kottmeyer, Martin. “Entirely Unpredisposed.” Magonia 35 (January 1990): 3-10.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Jacobs, David M. The UFO Controversy in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975, p. 38.
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