We must be cautious of the hubris of the present. When UFOs first appeared in numbers during the great flying saucer wave of 1947, few people made the jump to an extraterrestrial hypothesis.

For the best part of the summer of 1947 most serious minds studying the flying disc mystery considered that a domestic secret project might account for the sightings. After eliminating that possibility, the "foreign origin" option was exhaustively explored. By 1948 foreign origin became a catch word for visitors from outer space, but in 1947 it meant only one thing—Russians In fact, worries that the Soviet Union may have gleaned a Nazi super weapon at the end of the Second World War remained in the minds of Air Force officials up through 1952. But by late 1947 some aeronautical engineers began to consider that "flying saucers" may represent intelligently controlled machines from another world. Why? What was the mind set in 1947 that could rationalize such a conclusion? What was the perspective? Where was the proof?

Extensive media coverage of the first so-called "flying saucers" observed, on Jun. 24, 1947, near Mount Rainier by businessman Kenneth Arnold opened the floodgates to a deluge of similar sightings. Within three weeks of the Arnold incident, the U.S. military had logged 850 reports from around the nation. Most of these were readily accounted for in terms of astronomical objects, aircraft, hoaxes, and the like. However, inevitably, a few cases proved more difficult to resolve and these provided fertile ground for speculation. Several factors conspired to see the United States, in the summer of 1947, firmly in the grip of saucer fever. It was only a decade since the mass panic instigated by the The War of the Worlds radio play. That broadcast had gone out on the eve of war in Europe, at a time when the sight and sound of Hitler's fanatical storm-troopers in Berlin was bringing home to people everywhere the very real possibility of invasion by a powerful, single-minded enemy. Now the War was over, Germany and Japan had been defeated, but a general nervousness pervaded America about the new threat of communism. The public and military alike were alive to the possibility of preemptive aerial attack by the Soviets, perhaps using weapons of advanced design smuggled out of Nazi Germany. It is not difficult to understand, following the media hype surrounding Arnold's sighting, people's preoccupation with what might be going on in the skies overhead, nor the ease with which, in all the excitement, it was possible for even commonplace phenomena to be misinterpreted. Those who believed the saucers (or "flying disks," as they were also known) were both real and artificial, could choose between the theory that they were man-made and the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

It is very difficult with our modern view of popular culture to consider a time when there was no extensive set of preconceptions on extraterrestrial life. Without a Steven Spielberg to help us dream, or a Star Wars trilogy and a thousand other such productions dating back to 1949, we would not have the present-day mind set that we do. Yet, that is not to say there was not already some basis for the consideration of alien visitation.

The best way for us to understand one early perspective is to look at Halloween night 1938. During that famous evening the dramatic actor Orson Welles produced and narrated a radio drama based on H.G. Wells' book, The War of the Worlds. Like the famous account of a Martian invasion, the radio play was a frightening success. Unfortunately for many East Coast listeners, it seemed so real that thousands flew into a panicked frenzy—actually believing aliens were landing in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The nation was certainly in a vulnerable state of paranoia due to the brewing storm clouds in Europe. The Second World War would begin just one year later on September 1st and Americans knew that they would soon be impacted by Hitler's madness.

Many authors have used the panic caused by Orson Welles' radio drama as a foretelling explanation for later UFO sightings. In other words, a belief has arisen that the radio drama planted a seed in the public's mind—a self-fulfilling prophecy for extraterrestrial visitation. The historian, however, will realize the concept of extraterrestrial life had already been firmly ingrained in the public's mind since 1894 when Percival Lowell founded the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona.

Lowell believed he saw signs through his huge telescope of canals on the Martian landscape -- proving to him the existence of intelligent life there. Some scientists agreed while others were skeptical, but until the first Mars probes of the 1960s and 1970s showed just how lifeless the planet's surface actually was, many people kept an open mind about the possibility. UFOs, never the less, continued to be seen after we realized the near planets were uninhabited. Why?

UFOs are just that, unidentified objects in the atmosphere. Most of these turn out to be identified or IFOs—always representing something of physical reality regardless of what they turn out to be. For years debunkers have tried to use science fiction stories as an impetus behind UFO reports. But the stimulus for the sightings is real, not imagined. Orson Welles had no more responsibility than Percival Lowell for UFOs because whatever they represent, they are a real phenomena. True, no proof has surfaced to tell us what the UFO phenomenon represents. In the case of UFOs it seems the truth may be very extraordinary. And for that reason it is perhaps best to remember the words of the late Dr. Carl Sagan who stressed that finding such extraordinary truths always requires extraordinary evidence.

No one can say if popular culture tainted the history of man's modern interpretation of UFO sightings. The point for the sake of objectivity has to be presented.

Since June 24th 1947 there had been a small number of unique stories in the press concerning sightings unidentifiable flying objects. At the time these were coined "flying discs" or "saucers" after private pilot Kenneth Arnold likened the nine objects he saw over the Cascade Mountains to "saucers skipping across the water." No one then used the phrase UFO so "saucers and discs" became the catch words. But it was not until that Independence Day weekend that the sightings dramatically increased in intensity and started to dominate news headlines. West Coast newspapers were the first to detail the stories, although, by Sunday of that weekend even the New York Times had a page-one feature on the discs and would do so for the next three days.

On July 6th the Sunday New York Times published an exclusive on the recent deployment of two reactivated B-29 bomber groups to the West Coast—and how their appearance coincided in place and time with many of the disc sightings. Up to this time the military had only issued a few and very contradictory statements on the incidents. On July 3rd, for example, Army Major Paul Gaynor stated that a preliminary investigation had been dropped for lack of evidence. Then that same day Boise Evening Statesman reporter Dave Johnson got a different slant from the commander of the Air Materiel Command, Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining. Twining, who had the T-2 Army Air Force Intelligence group under his command, commented that officials were indeed looking into the matter of flying discs. He stated that even the top secret research conducted at the aviation labs at Wright Field had not produced technology comparable to that being observed. Continuing, he added that a "reputable scientist" had seen one of the discs and that his report is being studied.

Shortly following that weekend other units of the Army Air Force were becoming interested in the sightings and in particular the Kenneth Arnold account. Fourth Army Air Force Intelligence officers, Captain William Lee Davidson and First Lieutenant Frank Mercer Brown, would even go so far as to interview Arnold for six hours, taking a lengthy detailed statement from him.

The Independence holiday accounted for a huge number of sightings. The term "flying saucers" had arrived and was here to stay.

*****

In the summer of 1947 the phrase "flying saucer" entered the vocabulary of popular American culture. Before this period there were some rare and unverifiable stories of disc-shaped aircraft seen around the world, but only a few significant reports of any kind came to light after a series of so-called "phantom" airship" sightings in America around 1886 and 1887. The truly notable incidents, although not really describing saucers, centered around the "foo-fighters" of World War II and mysterious "ghost rockets" over Sweden in 1946. By 1947, the famous saucers had arrived and were here to stay.

When the sightings hit the headlines, they almost exclusively described flying objects in the shape of discs. Actually, when the primary accounts of many of these reports are studied, the researcher reads stories more descriptive of flying wings or delta and swept-wing shaped aircraft. Such aerodynamic forms did emerge at the end of World War II and without doubt generated numerous flying saucer reports.

Jets, of course, were still fairly new and posed a possible solution to the mystery. The German jet and rocket planes that came into service at the tail end of the war startled even experienced pilots not only for their swept-wing design but also for the absence of a propeller. Those German aircraft along with the British Meteor and American P-80 jet fighters had speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour. Such speeds, even two years after the war, still attracted great attention. But jets could account for only a few of the many saucer sightings that summer—which often involved velocities accurately calculated by qualified observers at greater than 1,000 miles per hour.

.....the Army was losing patience with the development problems at Northrop and Consolidated. Development of the B-36 was behind schedule, and the XB-35, which was even more of an engineering challenge, had yet to fly. So the production contract was canceled, leaving only two X (experimental) and 13 Y (service test) B-35s on order. The XB-35 finally took to the air in June 1946, almost a year after Japan had surrendered. Company pilot Max Stanley flew it to Muroc Army Air Base. "No trouble," he reported. The same couldn't be said of the XB-35 thereafter: Its engines overheated, its propeller shafts vibrated, its propeller gearbox broke down, and its auxiliary power unit (a gasoline-powered electrical generator) failed." Note the similarities to the Horten brothers' projects and note that they (the Americans, and Hortens?) were testing the YB-49 in 1947 - being very much like the Ho 229. Jet powered versions of these Northrop craft could thus also be realistic alternatives to the Arnold sightings; i.e., N-9M or YB/XB-35. The Arnold sightings were most likely: 1 Guided missiles, and/or, 2.Some early experimental planes, possibly captured from Germany just after the war, or possibly developed by Northrop or some other American company - and not extra terrestrial (ET) aircraft, and the reason being: It is fairly unlikely that an ET tech. observed - e.g. by Arnold in those days, should be nearly identical to an existing, well known (however not yet really well-proven) and already developed American/German aircraft technology. (At least, the theory was well known.) What is left here is to check unclassified US military records of possible flying tests which took place in those days. There is also a possibility that the sightings could be some Soviet developed aircraft or missiles/drones, having shapes to be nearly invisible on the radar screens, i.e., being fast-flying, flat, tail-less and oval/saucer/crescent-shaped, etc. The USAF logged 853 reports of unidentified disc-shaped 'flying saucers' within three weeks of Kenneth Arnold's sighting being reported in American newspapers and on American radio programs. Presumably these witnesses believed that they were seeing the same kind of object that Arnold saw. Ironically, though, Arnold never described his objects as discs or saucers. Indeed, the diagrams that he drew for the FBI looked more like the Focke-Wulf 'Schnellflugzeug' and the Horten Ho 229 - German terrestrial aircraft powered by conventional means. I was fascinated by this formation of aircraft. They didn't fly like any aircraft I had ever seen before. In the first place, their echelon formation was backward from that practiced by our Air Force. The elevation of the first craft was greater than that of the last. They flew in a definite formation, but erratically. As I described them at the time, 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. Or maybe it would be best to describe their flight characteristics as very similar to a formation of geese, in a rather diagonal chain-like line, as if they were linked together. As I put it to newsmen in Pendleton, Oregon, they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water. ~Kenneth Arnold Not only was this later remark misconstrued by the media and responsible for the mythology of 'saucer shaped' objects, as opposed to the 'bat-like' shape Arnold actually described, there's also been a misunderstanding that this simile related to each individual object. It is pretty clear, in retrospect, that Kenneth Arnold actually saw was a formation of recently U.S.-acquired Horten flying wings, designs that lay somewhere between models HO IX and HO XVIII. This specially equipped flight of Horten "boomerang-shaped" ships was described as like a "saucer skipping over the water." From this description the term "flying saucer" was coined. And this is ironic, as these ships were NOT the traditional "saucer" shape at all. The erratic (non-conventional) movement would have been induced by the gravity-field suppression coils surrounding the pilot's cockpit enclosures. Subsequent flying wing designs tended to crash a lot because the center of gravity in flying wings needs to be far forward to be stabile. Perhaps the lightening of the front end of these ships by the effect of these coils made them rather unstable in turbulent air. However, at 1200 mph these ships outstripped anything that the United States or its allies had conceived of, let alone built. Certainly no American civilian had ever seen anything so fast. Hence, Ken and a lot of other uninformed Americans latched onto the next best theory....ships from "outer space." And the government let them go on believing it, this was a perfect way to cover-up the truth. This "alien" cover-up proved to be so successful that it became the next best ploy; the best after the weather balloon and meteor and Venus excuses, that is.

Neither could other new aircraft designs answer all the questions raised by the disc mystery despite the fact that both the Germans and Allies had experimented with the flying wing concept. The Northrop company, for example, tested large flying wing bomber designs in 1947 known as the XB-35 and YB-49 prototypes, but their flights were always documented. Despite many sensational stories on the subject, the well known Horten brothers who designed flying wing aircraft in wartime Germany never saw their machines attain practical use. Nor did the Soviet Union ever utilize the radical Horten airfoil concept.

Balloons, although a much lower level of technology, generated other reports as scientists began using this old invention by the thousands to conduct weather and cosmic ray studies of the stratosphere in the 1940's. The early balloons were made from neoprene which would turn smoky gray or black in the sunlight—just as some witnesses of suspected flying saucer events described seeing. The military and their civilian contractors also used balloons for a whole host of research and intelligence gathering duties. By July of 1947 many of these were no longer small gas bags, but huge silver (and sometimes clear) plastic envelopes made from polyethylene. These  would appear cone-shaped before their helium gas expanded and rounded out their internal volume at high altitude. Many times these and the older, neoprene balloons were tied together in clusters which could resemble formations of discs. Some of these larger polyethylene balloons could be seen by the naked eye at altitudes as high as 60,000 feet. Many saucer sightings, especially after a lot of news play on the subject, were undoubtedly the result of balloon launches. Perhaps as many as seventy percent of all early UFO sightings are attributed to balloons. Yet, balloons cannot explain away, accounts of flying-wings or discs with extraordinary flight characteristics. Balloon experts had disc sightings themselves.

The disc reports came from all over North America and around the world in 1947. Many were seen traveling at tremendous speeds, flying extremely high, sometimes hovering, and on numerous occasions making controlled changes in their flight path. These cases remain a mystery because missiles of the day were only being tested in specific designated areas and had little endurance or range. The next generation of rockets like Sputnik, that were capable of intercontinental flight or earth orbit, were still a decade away. Aircraft, on the other hand, had not yet attained reliable means of reaching supersonic speeds, altitudes above 40,000 feet, or developed methods to hover. Because a large percentage of the first disc sightings occurred during daylight hours, astronomical events are difficult to associate with any but a few of the reports. Thus, 1947 has become a very important period to study. Accounts from reputable witnesses during the time are also significant because they had not yet had the opportunity to have their observations tainted by a vast body of previously published UFO lore.

The military started a formal UFO investigation by the end of 1947, although, as early as July Army Air Force and Naval Intelligence as well as the FBI had studied some of the more well publicized reports. As in later waves, however, only a small percentage of the total number of sightings were reported to authorities. Less than five percent of the 1947 incidents were even indexed in military files. Many of those can be found in the National Archives' holdings of USAF Project Blue Book files. (Although a later effort, Blue Book included what records survived from the 1947 period in its files). Some paperwork dealing with UFOs are also located at the Air Force Historical Center at Maxwell Air Force Base near Montgomery, Alabama, which primarily deal with records of the Fourth Air Force. Nine hundred and ten pages of lost Air Force documents from the late 1940s have also come to light from the National Records Center in St. Louis Missouri—via Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Microfilms of early intelligence files have surfaced as well but are now held in private hands although are becoming available for sale to researchers. Recently released FBI files provide a very good insight into some of the early investigations too. Despite dedicated efforts to locate Naval records containing UFO cases by historian and researcher Jan Aldrich, these files are in large part still missing.

Another very good source dealing with 1947 comes from a book by Ted Bloecher entitled Report on the UFO Wave of 1947. In his work Bloecher surveyed 853 North American newspaper accounts of flying saucer sightings. Regrettably, many of those stories were not taken seriously by the newspapers themselves and lack details. In fact, after some news play on the subject a great deal of silliness arose in the press. Often it becomes hard to weed out the serious stories from that madness. Because most accounts were not followed up on at the time, the articles remain as the only documentation to many of the early UFO sightings. Mr. Aldrich is engaged in a compilation known as Project 1947 that significantly expands on Bloecher's work. Aldrich has screened over 3,200 North American newspapers and others from all over the world for UFO reports. Aldrich's recent book, Project 1947: A Preliminary Report On The 1947 UFO Sighting Wave, is by far the most extensively researched publication available on the period. Today his work continues, searching out UFO accounts long lost in over 11,000 newspapers that were in print in the United States alone in 1947. When reading those accounts it is important to realize that UFOs were still not yet called unidentified flying objects. As stated, the term UFO simply did not yet exist. The media dubbed the strange objects "flying saucers" and "discs" following the Kenneth Arnold sighting. Those terms would predominate in the popular press until well into the 1950s.

The most important historical hindsight a reader can possess concerns the nature of what flying saucers then represented. Very few made the assumption that these discs represented extraterrestrial intelligence. Belief in so-called "alien visitation" did not mature until 1949 and then mainly in the cinema and tabloid-like magazines printed on pulpwood paper—"the pulp fiction." In 1947 flying saucers were assumed to mean scientific balloons or most likely classified military test craft. What else could a rational individual who had just lived through the wartime environment of secret weapons development think? Most people just hoped they were American and not Soviet—especially the military.

Colonel Howard M. McCoy, said that November:

The possibility that the reported objects are vehicles from another planet has not been ignored.

[FOIA request I-NAIC-97-053, Project Sign and Grudge documents 1948-1949, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio]

But that was not a topic of discussion in the summer of 1947.

Although saucers were indeed very hot news by early July, they were not the only focus of the nation by any means. The Cold War had begun to heat up in late 1946 as tensions grew tighter each day. In that year, while responding to an invitation from President Truman to speak in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill brought the phrase Iron Curtain into general use. Although voted out of office by that point, his beloved Britain then had to institute bread rationing in order to export enough grain to keep food riots from erupting in Allied occupied Germany. That was a hardship English citizens had not even had to endure during the darkest days of the war. Subsequent pressure on Parliament led Britain to abandon efforts to check Communist expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. President Truman felt America had to fill that vacuum. To drum up Congressional support for aid to Greece and Turkey as well as aid to Europe, the Truman administration intentionally exploited public anxiety. The battleship Missouri sailed to the Mediterranean. [David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992)]. But as the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan took shape in 1947, real fears over a blockade of Berlin were already in the news.

The Berlin Crisis would only be a year off. President Truman would send a flight of B-29 bombers to England the next summer to dissuade ongoing Soviet threats to close the divided city from the West. The B-29s had no nuclear weapons, but the administration made every effort to suggest that they did. In fact, when the (Army) Air Force officially became involved with UFOs, they did so largely out of fear of foreign, but earthly, intrusions into American air space. The American military, after all, had already started mapping Soviet defenses on the Siberian frontier via the North Pole in converted B-29s. Recently declassified Air Force files even document US efforts to locate land masses in the Polar region that could be used for bomber bases. When the British later flew nighttime radar mapping reconnaissance missions over major Russian cities with American RB-45C jets out of England, it only stood to reason that the Soviets would try to do the same. [Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun, The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); and Paul Lashmar, Spy Flights of the Cold War (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1996)].

The crucial point so often missed, concerns the significance of the 1947 sightings. If the nation believed they were seeing experimental aircraft or spy planes, then they were in fact seeing something. Today we know they were not Soviet—the USSR made no early incursions into continental US air space. But what were they? Undoubtedly many were misidentifications of domestic aircraft, balloons, and astronomical events—probably as many as eighty percent. But even the military came to the conclusion that there was a disturbing number of unexplainable events. By September 1947 Air Materiel Command, Wright Field, commander, Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining, produced a memo. It characterized the discs as "real and not visionary." Future Air Force Intelligence Chief Major General Charles P. Cabell even stated in regard to the discs, "The conclusion appears inescapable that some type of flying object has been observed." Wright Field Intelligence Chief Colonel McCoy then concurred, "it is obvious that some types of flying objects have been sighted." [FOIA request I-NAIC-97-053].

From July 4-11, 1947 UFO reports dominated the newspapers, often featuring flying saucer sightings on their front pages. The stately New York Times ran four continuous days of page-one features starting on July 6th, this at a time when editors jealously coveted space for stories dealing with Berlin, the Marshall Plan, and serious flooding in the Midwest—which was a significant domestic news story. National Guard air units, the Army Air Force, and Navy were sufficiently concerned to send up "saucer patrols" along the Pacific Coast. That is significant alone because the regular military then had what they perceived to be a need to conserve fuel for upcoming Air Force Day celebrations. The sightings attracted such attention because most of them took place in broad daylight. This stood in great contrast to earlier and later UFO cases, many of which occurred at night or generated vague descriptions of objects that appeared so luminous or distant that they did not seem to be of substance. During this period many accounts describe very solid-looking objects maneuvering with the performance that some aircraft lack today. The reports do not all involve flying wing and saucer-shaped craft. The 1947 wave encompassed a great variety of observed phenomena including cigar-shaped rocket-like objects. Other forms include luminous balls, fan blades, boomerangs, triangles, diamonds, and light phenomena.

Sightings suddenly slowed in frequency after July 11th. Several dozen notable sightings would follow to end out the year, but whatever happened took place primarily between June 24th (and in force from July 4th) to July 11th. Granted, after the 11th, the news media did seem to lose interest in the story, but this alone cannot account for the marked decrease in reported activity after that initial onslaught of sightings. Some sort of phenomenon predominated in those very critical days of late June to early July.

Many claim it to be a form of mass hysteria generated by the widely publicized Kenneth Arnold sighting. If so, why did the sightings encompass the entire globe in a matter of only days with too little time for most people in foreign countries to read news accounts of the first American saucers? Why were there sightings before Arnold's? Would Arnold's story have become so publicized if not for actual incidents immediately following his event? Why did the intensity of the phenomenon end so suddenly after the 11th? If people were indeed caught up in a worldwide craze generated by media coverage, would not large numbers of reports still come in on the 12th instead of dozens the day before and only a handful until 1948? Many of the UFO incidents of that year resulted in specific actions taken by the military to formulate an investigation.

Edward J. Ruppelt's personal papers do vaguely detail two fighter intercepts on a "violently maneuvering" UFO near England on January 16-17, 1947; and an undated post-war account of "disc-shaped aircraft" near Habberbishopshiem, Germany. (Ruppelt's private papers, File R104, courtesy of Professor Michael Swords.)

By the second week in July these reports were being widely talked about in military circles by that point. Intelligence at Wright Field saw this as proof that the disc mystery was real and not simply the result of news play on the Kenneth Arnold story.

To this day these cases are misquoted in virtually every book. They actually represent three separate incidents which took place during a six month period prior to mid-April. They were witnessed by Weather Bureau meteorologist Walter A. Minozewski at the Richmond, Virginia, weather station. In all of these curious events he described seeing a "silver disc" with distinct differences in shape and performance to that of a balloon. At some point after the events he reported the incidents to his superiors.

The last sighting occurred one April morning when Minozewski and his staff caught sight of a very bright metallic elliptical disc while they were tracking a small "Pi Ball" (or wind measuring) meteorological balloon then at 15,000 feet. He checked his observations through a theodolite telescope. (A theodolite is an optical device used for measuring horizontal and vertical angles—in this case used to track weather balloons.) The disc flew just below the balloon and remained in sight for fifteen seconds, appearing much bigger than the balloon with a flat level bottom and a dome on top. It remained on a westward heading at high speed until vanishing off into the distance. [Edward J. Ruppelt, Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1956 and "Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79, Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the US, Air Intelligence Division Study No. 203, 10 December 1948, Directorate of Intelligence and Office of Naval Intelligence," and United States Air Force, "Project Grudge, Final Report No. 102 AC 49/15-100," Appendix B and Appendix I, Final Report by J.A. Hynek, Project Blue Book Files, National Archives, Record Group 341, Microfilm Pub. No. T-1206, Roll No. 85, Administrative Files, Box 1, listed as incident 79 in 1947 era documents.

For some unexplained reason disc sightings often occurred in connection with balloon tests. It is ironic, because if it was not for the presence of highly trained balloon men in those instances, no one would believe the observations to be anything other than misidentifications of their own balloons. For that reason, and the expertise of such men, there was special interest in all investigations involving balloon technicians.

As another side note, it should be mentioned that there is some mystery concerning the Minozewski sightings. In January of 1967 researcher Ted Bloecher reviewed the Minozewski case file at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, thanks to the assistance of Lieutenant Colonel George P. Freeman Jr. who arranged his visit. Bloecher's associate, atmospheric physicist Dr. James McDonald of the University of Arizona, then contacted Minozewski to confirm the details of the report with him. Minozewski recounted the fine points of the case just as they appeared in Air Force files but was baffled because he said he had never reported the incidents to the military. Equally perplexing is the fact that the Minozewski sightings are not now part of the Blue Book index released to the National Archives nor does the case file appear as complete as when Bloecher reviewed it thirty-two years ago. It is apparent that sometime during or after the close of the twenty-two year long Air Force investigation into UFOs that followed 1947, a conscious effort was made to downplay any sighting which occurred prior to the Kenneth Arnold incident. Those after Arnold's sighting were then often claimed to be the result of simple hysteria generated from his highly publicized account.

Only a few very sketchy reports can be found in May in any type of records, most without exact dates or times. Few of these came to the attention of the early investigators because they were not recorded until after the Kenneth Arnold sighting, and only then detailed in obscure newspaper articles. Others were not documented until private researchers started doing investigative work years later. A few were then investigated by local military intelligence officers. In the following case an Army Air Force security officer out of Tinker Field, Oklahoma, made a report and later the incident was reinvestigated by the FBI. This particular sighting impressed the military due to the reliability of the witness, Byron Savage.

A businessman and private pilot from Oklahoma City, Savage observed sometime on or about May 17th to the 21st a shiny disc-like object flying over the city. It was dusk, at the time of the sighting as Savage and his wife had just started to walk out to their car. At first he commented to his wife that a big white plane was coming over. He continued to watch the craft because it soon became evident that this thing was no ordinary aircraft. The object was as big as six B-29 bombers! It flew between 10,000 and 18,000 feet toward the northwest at a speed estimated at more than three times that of a jet, which in those days flew about 500 miles per hour. The disc reportedly made no noise except for a very faint "swishing sound." It passed over in a matter of fifteen to twenty seconds and had the appearance of a "perfectly round and flat" frosty white elliptical object. ["Fast Flying Disks Reported in West," Associated Press news service, 27 June 1947]. Savage stated to FBI investigators that "he was sure this object was not a meteor and in his opinion it must be radically built and powered, probably atomic." [Documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dated 24 July 1947]. This was one of the first reports that ended up in Wright Field's (later the Blue Book) records.

Similar objects appeared over Manitou Springs, Colorado, on the 19th when witnessed by Pike's Peak Railway mechanics Dean A. Hauser (a navy veteran), Ted Weigand, Marion Hisshouse, T.J. Smith, and L.D. Jamison. They were on their lunch break around 12:15 P.M. MST as the men noticed some sort of shiny metal-like craft overhead. It flew around the area for over twenty minutes making erratic aerial maneuvers that no aircraft they knew of could undertake. [Bloecher, Report on the UFO Wave of 1947]

While the news accounts on this incident are brief, a very interesting remark in one of the stories indicates that representatives of the 15th Air Force, then part of the Army Air Force, interviewed the rail workers on June 29th and sent their findings to Washington. This would certainly be one of the first indications of military interest in a UFO sighting. In fact, those who had the opportunity to view the Air Force files before they were released to the public in 1976 speak of this as one of its cases. Today, however, the file along with a notable number of other early cases is officially "missing." The National Archives lists them in the Air Force index but do not have them in their collection of declassified files turned over to them by the military in late 1975. Unfortunately, further details of this case are lost with many others.

Other early accounts come from overseas. According to the Times of India, flying discs were seen over Bombay as early as June 7th with other saucer-like accounts coming from South America. [Fortean Society's Doubt, 19 (Spring-Summer 1947] Disc reports outside the United States are very rare prior to July of 1947, but at 3:30 P.M. local time on June 10th, Hungarian citizen Gyorik Ference saw four "yellow-red platter-like objects" fly over Budapest. They were sphere-shaped and silver in color, traveling at high speeds. ["Project Sign, Report No. F-TR-2274-IA," Project Blue Book Files, Roll No. 85, Administrative Files, Box 1].

Although it was in the United States that pilot Richard Rankin, a veteran flyer with more than 7,000 hours in the air, had the most notable flying saucer sighting prior to Arnold's. As with other early witnesses, he did not report it until others like Arnold had admitted to seeing such strange objects. Contrary to later accounts of the Rankin Case, his observation did not happen on the 23rd, but on the 14th, and did not occur at 2:15 P.M. but at 12:00 noon PST. Nor was Rankin in flight at the time, but saw the objects while watching a boy mow the lawn outside his friend's home in Bakersfield, California.

At the time of the sighting it was a clear and sunny day when both he and the boy saw ten round objects or "saucers" fly over in a loose "V" formation with one straggling in the rear." They were heading north, but seven of the discs then reversed direction and came back over them toward the south. Their diameters appeared to be from 30 to 35 feet, and they were traveling at an estimated speed of 350 miles per hour around 8,500 feet. At the time of the sighting Rankin thought the craft must be some sort of new Army or Navy test vehicle much like the oval-shaped XF5U-1 "flying flapjack" and even commented as much to the lad mowing the lawn. Yet, military intelligence concluded Rankin's sighting represented no known aircraft type. [ Project Blue Book Files, Roll No. 1, Case 7, listed as Incident 29 in 1947 era documents; and "Pilot Recalls Seeing Discs," The (Portland) Oregonian, 3 July 1947, p. 11; and "Pilot Vet Reports Seeing 'Flying Saucers' June 23," Denver Post, 2 July 1947; and documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dated 3 July 1947]. No XF5U-1 were airworthy at that time.) [

USAF Museum Files, Wright-Patterson USAFB].

The Fourth Army Air Force in connection with the FBI first investigated the case, surely struck by the similarities of the incident to others. The hallmarks of these included shiny saucer or wing-like objects flying fast and silently, often in groups or in special formations.