7. Kenneth Arnold Sighting (1947) – Washington, United States Just before 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot and a fire control equipment salesman from Boise, Idaho, was taking a flight over the Cascade Mountains looking for the remains of a lost C-46, over which there was a $5,000 reward being offered.
Arnold did not find the missing aircraft but he saw a bright flash of light and spotted nine brilliant objects, with the lead object a little higher than the rest, moving south toward Mount Rainer.
He calculated their speed at 1,700 miles per hour which was an impossible speed. The main object looked like a dark crescent; the other eight objects were flat and disc-shaped. Arnold estimated their chain length to be five miles long.
They disappeared soon after. A new era of unidentified flying objects began after this widely publicized sighting in the United States. In fact, it was his descriptions that gave rise to the now common terms “flying disk” and “flying saucer.”
