It's Friday, August 11, the day of the week when I pass along quotations intended to be inspiring or elucidating. Today's pithy observation comes from President Harry Truman on the subject of "unidentified flying objects," which are back in the news this summer.
In July and August 76 years ago, they were in the news, too, as a rash of supposed sightings made local newspapers, usually in the form of three or four paragraph items reporting that so-and-so saw something suspicious in the skies over a given city.
Here is an example from the Aug. 7, 1947, Philadelphia Inquirer, and another a few days later in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Seattle headline suggests some skepticism by the PI's editors. ("Blue Triangle Latest Thing Seen in Disks.") But what had happened that prompted Americans to scan the skies for evidence of extraterrestrial space crafts and feel the necessity to report what they had observed -- or thought they'd observed – to local authorities or news outlets?
It's a story I've told before, but it seems worthwhile relating again, given the fantastic story related at a July 25 congressional hearing by a former U.S. Air Force officer.
On June 24, 1947, an amateur pilot named Kenneth Albert Arnold was flying his small plane from his home in Boise, Idaho, to an air show in Oregon. He had taken a slight detour en route, one necessitating that he look out of his cockpit window with acute attentiveness: A U.S. Marine Corps transport plane had crashed recently in that area, and there was a $5,000 reward offered to anyone who found the wreckage.
Although Arnold did not spot the Curtiss C-46, he did see something else interesting that afternoon, not on the ground but in the air. When he discussed it during a refueling stop at a small airstrip in Yakima, Wash., Kenneth Arnold launched a new movie genre, a coast-to-coast craze, and a national fascination -- with the idea of UFOs.
Let me set the stage for this obsession. By 1947, Americans were attuned to the awesome, and sometimes frightening, power of technology. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had taught everyone that lesson. Even before the Second World War, Orson Welles'1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast wasn't merely viewed as a metaphor for the destruction beginning to erupt around the globe. It was also a frightening campfire story about unknown threats from the skies.
This was the milieu in which Kenneth Arnold flew his small plane over Mount Rainier when something caught his eye. He said he saw the flash of a bright light with a bluish tinge, which he initially thought came from another airplane.
Looking around, he saw a DC-4, which he estimated to be 15 miles away, heading in the opposite direction. Then he saw another series of flashing lights, nine in succession, and, even stranger, a series of airborne objects that he estimated were stretched over a distance of five miles. Moving in unison, they weaved from side to side, he said, darting like "the tail of a Chinese kite."
Attempting to calculate their speed, the pilot clocked how long it took the mysterious fleet to travel between Mount Rainer and Mount Adams, and concluded that they were traveling 1,700 miles an hour. This assessment is what convinced some people -- and convinces UFO enthusiasts to this day -- that Kenneth Arnold was witnessing extraterrestrial avionics at work. That airspeed is more than twice the speed of sound, and Chuck Yeager wouldn't go supersonic for another four months.
Personally, I think Arnold was looking at a flock of geese, and he miscalculated their speed because he misjudged how far away they were. But his imagination was off and running and when he told the ground crews and hangers-on at the Yakima airstrip what he thought he'd seen, they tended to believe him. Or, at least, they passed it along.
By the time Arnold arrived at the air show in Pendleton, Oregon, his tale had preceded him. A local reporter interviewed him, and the story went out on the wires and made newspapers all over the country.
Arnold didn't actually call the mysterious objects "flying saucers." What he said was that "they flew like … a saucer being tossed across the water." Famed CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow would later call this a "historic misquote," but it seems to me that the paraphrase is pretty close and that if there's a fault in all this, it lies with Arnold.
In any event, reports of "flying saucers" spiked in this country, and by the time a military weather balloon crashed outside Roswell, New Mexico, on July 8, 1947, witnesses immediately thought of flying saucers and spacemen. Two days later, Harry Truman was asked about this phenomenon at a White House press conference.
"Mr. President," he was asked, "have you seen any flying saucers?"
"Only in the newspapers," Truman replied with a laugh.
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
