have nothing to do with so-called saucers; I'll swear to it on a stack of Bibles, if you like. Second, we don't have any secret new type of aircraft that could have started all this commo- tion. Third, nobody, in our opinion, has spotted space ships from some other planet. Fourth, everything our investi- gators learned has been made available to the public."

THE first saucer incident occurred on the afternoon of June 24, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, on a business trip for a Boise, Idaho, firm that makes fire-control equipment, was flying his private plane from Chehalis, Washing- ton, to Yakima, Washington. The re- flection of a bright flash on one wing caught his eye. He turned and, at a distance he thought was about twenty miles, saw what he took to be nine tail- less aircraft from toward Mount Rainier. "I could see their outlines quite plainly against the snow," Air Force Intelligence quoted him as saying. "They flew very close to the mountain- tops, directly south to southeast, down the hog's-back of the range, flying like geese, in a diagonal, chainlike line, as if they were linked together . . . a chain of something at least five miles long, swerving in and out of the high mountain peaks. They were flat . . . and so shiny that they reflected the sun like a mirror." Ar- nold said he watched the saucers for three minutes and estimated their speed at about twelve hundred miles an hour.

Air Force technicians, consulted by newspaper- men, said that any object moving that fast would be invisible to the naked eye at Arnold's estimated distance. The press scoffed at Ar- nold's story, and he was re- sentful. "Even if I see a ten-story building flying through the air, I won't say a word about it," he de- clared, and when he got back to Boise he wrote a series of ar- ticles about his experience for a mag- azine called Fate.

No sooner were the skeptical news- paper accounts printed than dozens of people turned up with similar re- ports. Another resident of Boise spotted a disc over that city, "a half circle in shape, clinging to a cloud and just as bright and silvery-looking as a mirror caught in the rays of the sun." Lieu-

he had seen a comet-shaped object sailing over the western part of the state. It finally dipped below the horizon, he said. (Later on, the personnel of Proj- ect Saucer decided that the Lieutenant Governor had been looking at either Saturn or Mercury.) Four cops in Port- land, Oregon, saw a group of discs "wobbling, disappearing, and reappear- ing."

Reports of other phenomena having been seen in the skies appeared in the papers almost daily. Two Army officers at Fort Richardson, Alaska, reported seeing a spherical object flying through the air at incredible speed and leav- ing no vapor trail; some fishermen off Newfoundland saw a series of aerial flashes, silver to reddish in color; a lady in Oregon watched a group of saucers spell out "P-E-R-S-I-A" and alerted her neighbors to the presence of foreign agents practicing a secret code in our skies; an Oklahoma City man saw a saucer "the bulk of six B-29s;" and a prospector in the Cascade Moun- tains of Oregon saw six saucers in a group, banking in the sun-"round, silent, and not flying in formation." On the Fourth of July, there were twelve reports of saucers in widely separated parts of the United States. One of these saucers, sighted at Trenton, New Jersey, was traced to a fireworks display. Dr. Paul Pitts, an Ohio State Uni- versity psychologist who was for a time attached to Project Saucer, considered this crowded condition in holiday skies the result of mass suggestibility, the same jumpy trait that caused Americans to see Zeppelins overhead during and after the First World War. "Our graphs show that saucer incidents al- ways increase dramatically after publicity," he has told me. "The sky, you know, has been a source of exciting visions from time immemorial, and its attrac- tion is particularly strong in our jittery moments."

FROM the beginning, the officers in charge of Project Saucer recognized a peculiar difficulty in their assignment. "If you look out the window and see something, how can I prove or disprove what it was if I didn't see it and you can't tell me much about what you

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