Kenneth Arnold and the first UFOs, with Arnold's 1947 radio interview (Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, 2019)

0:00 Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World is brought to you by the StarQuest Production Network and is made possible by our many generous patrons. If you'd like to support the podcast, please visit sqpn.com slash give. You're listening to episode 46 of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, where we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. In this episode, we're talking about Kenneth Arnold and the first UFOs. I'm Dom Bettinelli, and joining me today is Jimmy Akin. Hi, Jimmy. Howdy, Dom. On June 22, 1947, 72 years ago this week, businessman Kenneth Arnold was piloting his plane over the skies of Washington State when he saw something strange. It was a convoy of nine unusual objects moving in the sky at a fantastic

1:02 speed. When he landed, he reported what he saw, and it touched off the modern era of UFO sightings. And that's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. So Jimmy, let's start by having you tell us how you became aware of this particular case. I don't remember when I first became aware of it, but I've known about it for a long time. It's the classic case kicking off the modern UFO era. So it's mentioned in all the literature. I'd been aware of the basic facts of the case, like the ones you just mentioned, and some others for some time, but I'd never really taken a hard look at the details of this case until I started researching this episode. In approaching UFO reports, I try to have healthy skepticism, even by people who support the extraterrestrial hypothesis. They'll admit 90, 95, 98% of all UFO sightings are either misidentifications of something that's not exotic or they're outright hoaxes. And so when I was thinking

2:06 about this episode before starting the research process, I assumed when one of the first things that I assumed was that when he saw these things out his window, moving at fantastic speeds, they could be reflections, you know, and depending on shifting your perspective and the way your head moves, it could look like they're going really fast. Or if it wasn't that, it could be some kind of conventional, but experimental aircraft that he saw, you know, purely terrestrial origin. And then I read Arnold's own account and there's more to it than I thought. Hmm. Well, let's set the context for this event then. You mentioned that the Kenneth Arnold sighting touched off the modern era of UFO sightings. Were there previous eras of UFO sightings? There have been claims of, hey, I saw something strange in the sky, you know, as old as human history, because sometimes there are strange things in the sky, like eclipses. But there are allegations that there have been previous

3:09 encounters with UFOs that are mentioned in various historical writings, including the Bible. You'll hear a lot of people in the UFO community say, oh, yeah, Ezekiel's wheels, those were UFOs. Well, not. We know what those were, and they're not UFOs. But we'll be devoting an episode in the future to UFOs in the Bible. Also, they'll say, oh, it's in this art from some ancient people or from the Middle Ages or things like that. And we'll be doing episodes on that, too. In fact, I know we have a weird question show where I talk specifically about the medieval art claim that it has UFOs in it. In the 1890s, there was a series of sightings of what were known as mystery airships, which basically seemed to be terrestrial aircraft that were ahead of their time, that it was powered flight ahead of the Wright brothers. And we'll be talking about the mystery airships. In World War II, so 1939 to 1945, both sides

4:14 saw something in the sky that they referred to in English as Foo Fighters. Don't know exactly what they were. Both sides assumed it was something that the other side had developed. So we assumed the Germans developed this, the Germans assumed we developed it. And we'll be doing future episodes on all of those. But it was really with Kenneth Arnold, and this sighting in 1947, two years after the war, that the modern UFO era began. And it's from this that we get the term Flying Saucer. Now, I should point out, there were previous sightings in 1947, before Arnold's. His was towards the beginning of the 1947 UFO flap, or wave of sightings. That's what it's called in the UFO literature. A wave of sightings is called a UFO flap. And there were in January,

5:15 there was a sighting in January, there was another in April, and there were three in May, just the month before. Then, relying on statistics compiled from newspapers by the researcher Ted Blucher, a guy we'll be talking about later in this episode named Bruce McAbee, who is an optical physicist that is researched the Kenneth Arnold sighting. According to Maccabee, based on these Blucher statistics from newspapers, there was approximately one sighting every other day for the first half of June. These were scattered over the Midwest and Western United States. Then the sighting rate doubled to about two per day until June 20. Blucher found three sightings for June 20, two for June 21, three on June 22, six on June 23, and then the explosion. Blucher found 20 reports on June 24. That's the day Kenneth Arnold saw. These were mostly in the far northwestern states of Washington,

6:16 Oregon, and Idaho. sightings were scattered throughout the day from morning to night. After the 24th, the sighting rate stayed at about 10 per day or higher, with sightings occurring not just in the west, but throughout the country. In early July, the sighting rate climbed to over 20 per day to 88 sightings on July 4th, 75th on July 5th, 156 on July 6th, 159 on July 7th, and a whopping 189 on July 8th. After that, it dropped quickly back to 20 per day and then only a few per day. By the end of July, the sighting rate was about one per day, and by August, it was down to several per week. So that's the shape of the UFO flap of 1947. And in fact, you know, there's, in addition to, to Arnold, there were 19 other sightings on July 24th that

7:17 got reported in newspapers. So all of these are what got reported in newspapers, who knows how many didn't get reported in newspapers. So that's how Arnold's sighting fits into the context of what was going on at the time. So tell me, who is Kenneth Arnold? Well, he was born in Minnesota in 1915. He was a businessman. He started the Great Western Fire Control Supply Company in Boise, Idaho, and it sold and installed fire suppression systems. He was also an aviator. He flew a Call Air A2 airplane, and he used it to make business trips around the Pacific Northwest. He apparently did believe in God, but he wasn't really religious, and he praised independent thinking. In 1952, he wrote a book about his experience. And in 1962, he ran unsuccessfully for the post of Lieutenant Governor of Idaho, where he lived. He then died in Washington

8:17 State in 1984 at age 68. Well, let's start with our theories about this. What are the theories about what Kenneth Arnold saw? Well, the big one is he saw extraterrestrial aircraft in this, you know, that's kind of the one that people want to know about. The alternatives are he may have seen terrestrial aircraft, such as experimental Army Air Force rockets. And I have to say Army Air Force at this time, or at least mention it that way because the Air Force was not an independent branch of the service until September of 1947. At this time, the Air Force was still part of the Army. It could have also been an experimental Army Air Force plane, could have been a captured German plane. And in fact, some have noted that the lead craft in the convoy he sighted looks kind of like a German aircraft known as the Horton Ho 229, which was a sort of experimental German airplane. It was a

9:18 flying wing. In addition to aircraft, there have been proposals that he saw meteors, he saw clouds, he saw geese or other birds like pelicans, he saw snow being blown from mountaintops, he saw a mirage, he saw spots of water on his window, he saw reflections in his window, that was the first one that occurred to me. Or then that there was no actual phenomenon at all, that he was just hallucinating maybe because of the low oxygen environment in his unpressurized airplane, or he was just hoaxing it all. So let's cover what we know about what happened here. What did Kenneth Arnold say about his encounter? He gave several interviews about it almost immediately, and we'll refer to them as we go along. But by way of an overview, I was really fortunate. I found a radio interview he did on June 25th. So the day after his sighting, he was interviewed by a local radio station and a recording of it has survived. And it's a few

10:20 minutes long, but we're going to go ahead because it's such a nice overview and play that for you now. Well, at about 2:15, I took off from Chehalis, Washington, en route to Yakima. And of course, every time that any of us fly over the country near Mount Veneer, we spend an hour or two in search of the marine plane that's never been found that they believe is in the snow someplace southwest of that particular area. That area is located at about, or where its elevation is about 10,000 foot. And I had made one sweep in close to Mount Veneer and down one of the canyons and was dragging it for any types of objects that might prove to be the marine ship. And as I come out of the canyon there, it was about 15 minutes. I was approximately 25 to 28 miles from Mount Veneer. I climbed back up to 9,200 feet, and I noticed to the left of me a chain which looked to me like the tail of a Chinese kite, kind of weaving and going at a terrific speed across the face of Mount Veneer. I, at first,

11:20 thought they were geese because it flew like geese, but it was going so fast that I immediately changed my mind and decided it was a bunch of new jet planes in formation. Well, as the planes come to the edge of Mount Veneer, flying at about 160 degrees south, I thought I would clock them because it was such a clear day, and I didn't know where their destination was, but due to the fact that I had Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams to clock them by, I just thought I'd see just how fast they were going, since among pilots we argue about speed so much. And they seemed to flip and flash in the sun, just like a mirror. And in fact, I happened to be at an angle from the sun that seemed to hit the top of these peculiar looking things in such a way that it almost blinded you when you when you looked at them through your plexiglass windshield. Well, it was about one minute to three when I started clocking them on my sweet secondhand

12:21 clock. And as I kept looking at them, I kept looking for their tails. They didn't have any tails. I thought, well, maybe something's wrong with my eyes. And I turned the plane around and opens the window and looks out the window. And sure enough, I couldn't find any tails on them. And the whole observation of my eyes, didn't last more than about two and a half minutes. And I could see them only plainly when they seemed to tip their wing or whatever it was. And the whole observation of these particular ships didn't last more than about two and a half minutes, and I could see them only plainly when they seemed to tip their wing or whatever it was, and the sun flashed on them. They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear. Now, I thought, well, that maybe their jet planes with the tail painted green or brown or something, and didn't think too much more than what they were. But kept on watching them. Now, they didn't fly in a conventional formation that's taught in our army. They seemed to kind of weave in and out right above the mountain tops. And I would say that they even went down into the canyons and sat in the front and the sun flashed on them. They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear. Now, I thought, well, that maybe their jet planes with just the tails painted green or brown or something, and didn't think too much of it, but kept on watching them. They looked down into the canyons in several

13:22 instances, oh, probably 100 feet, but I could see them against the snow, of course, on Mount Rainier, and against the snow on Mount Adams as they were flashing, and against a high ridge that happened to lay in between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. But when I observed the tail end of the last one passing Mount Adams, and I was at an angle near Mount Rainier from it, but I looked at my watch, and it showed 1 minute and 42 seconds. Well, I still thought, well, that's pretty fast, and I didn't stop to think what the distance was between the two mountains. Well, I landed at Yakima, Washington, and Al Baxter was there to greet me and saw up here, and he told me, I guess I better change my brand. But he kind of gave me a mysterious sort of a look that maybe I had seen some. He didn't know, and well, I just kind of forgot it then until I got down at Pendleton, and I began looking at my map and taking measurements on it, and the best calculation I could figure out, now, even in spite of error, would be around 1,200 miles an hour,

14:24 because making the distance from Mount Rainier to Mount Adams, and we'll say approximately two minutes, it's almost, well, it'd be around 25 miles per minute. Now, allowing for error, we can give them three minutes or four minutes to make it, and they're still going more than 800 miles an hour, and to my knowledge, there isn't anything that I read about outside of some of the German rockets that would go that fast. These were flying in more or less a level, constant altitude. They weren't going up, and they weren't going down. They were just simply flying straight and level, and I laughed, and I told the powers that film, I said, they sure must have had a tailwind, but it didn't seem to help me much. But to the best of my knowledge and the best of my description, that is what I actually saw, and like I told the Associated Press, I'd be glad to confirm it with my hands on a Bible, because I did see it, and whether it has anything to do with our army or our intelligence or whether it has to do with some foreign country, I don't know. But I did see it, and I did clock it, and I just happened to be in a beautiful position

15:25 to do it, and it's just as much a mystery to me as it is to everyone else who's been calling me the last 24 hours wondering what it was. Well, Kenneth, thank you very much. I know that you've certainly been busy the last 24 hours, because I've spent some of the time with you myself, and I know that the press associations, both Associated Press and our press, the United Press, has been right after you every minute. The Associated and United Press all over the nation have been after this story. It's been on every newscast over the air and in every newspaper I know of. The United Press in Portland has made several telephone calls here to Pendleton to me and to you this morning, and from New York, I understand they're after this story. And we may have an answer for it before night, because if it is some new type of Army or Navy secret missile, there will probably a story come out on it from the Army or Navy asking, saying that it is a new secret plane, and that will be all there is to it. And they will hush up the story, or perhaps that we will finally get a definite answer I love how they say in the radio interview that they hope to have a solution for this

16:25 mystery by evening, and that was 72 years ago. Such optimism. So a couple of things to note about the experience. He said that he saw the objects weaving in and out of the mountains, and he could see them silhouetted against the mountains. So that means they were lower than the peaks. So we can estimate how high these things were. And he doesn't say this in the radio interview, but he says that the flashes that he saw lit up his airplane. So they weren't just like flashes in his eye, like if you see a mirror reflecting the sunlight. This was something bright enough to illuminate the cabin in his airplane. And that's significant because he later, in thinking about it, he thought, well, even though his first thought was they were just reflecting the sun at him, he later thought maybe they were making that light. Maybe they weren't just reflecting the sun. And Bruce McAbee, an optical physicist, ran the calculations and says, yep, that's right.

17:28 In order to illuminate his plane, the objects would have had to have been generating that light. Just reflecting sunlight wouldn't have done it. So one interesting thing to note is that Kenneth Arnold didn't use the term flying saucer in this interview. When did this term come about? How did this get applied here? It's disputed. Arnold later said that he described the motion of the objects as being like what you'd see if you skipped a saucer across water. So kind of bobbing and weaving. He said then that he'd been misquoted by the press in saying they were shaped like saucers. And since they were flying and he was understood to have said they were shaped like saucers, most likely a newspaper editor coined the term flying saucers in a headline. Because that's actually newspaper writers, reporters don't typically write headlines. The editors do that. In a 1950 interview with Edward R. Murrow, Arnold said this. He said these objects more or less fluttered

18:29 like they were, oh, I'd say, boats on very rough water or very rough air of some type. And when I described how they flew, I said that they flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the water. Most of the newspapers misunderstood and misquoted that, too. They said that I said that they were saucer-like. I said that they flew in a saucer-like fashion. So what did he say their shape looked like? Well, he said they weren't all the same shape. He said that most of them looked like a pie plate cut in half with a kind of point on the back. And he drew a diagram of that for the military. And if you look on the Wikipedia page that we'll link, you can see the drawing. It actually is almost a circle. It's just got a couple of edges to the back of it. Then he said this other one that was, I believe, the leader of the convoy was crescent-shaped, kind of like a boomerang or a crescent roll.

19:29 If he was misquoted, what implications does that have for the fact people have reported seeing saucer-shaped craft? It could suggest that a press misquote misled a bunch of people into thinking they were seeing saucers when they weren't. Either they weren't seeing anything at all and they were just misidentifying them as saucers, or they were seeing a natural thing and imposing a saucer-like shape on it. Or they were seeing, you know, maybe these things Arnold saw that look almost circular but not quite because of those two angles on the back. And maybe they just kind of mentally omitted seeing the angles. On the other hand, UFOs reportedly come in a bunch of different shapes. They're not all reported to be saucers. And so if they come in a variety of shapes, maybe some of them are saucer-shaped, just not the ones Arnold saw. And frankly, identification of aircraft is a very tricky thing, even for professionals, like in the military. And that could have come for some of it, too.

20:31 So is there more to this story? It's hard to say. We know what Arnold said later on. It's a little harder. If you look at the different accounts of what he was reported in the press as having said, it does seem like he definitely used the word saucer, but it's a little, it's like, why did all these people get it wrong in terms of understanding him? Also, his claim in 1950 that he was talking about skipping a saucer across water. Who does that? I mean, when I was growing up, when I was growing up, I know men who would, I mean, I've never actually tried to do it as an adult, but I knew men, my father and other men who would like skip stones across water. I do that with my kids. Yeah. But I wouldn't throw away a saucer to do that. You know, rocks are easy to do that with because they're cheap. They're laying on the ground right there. Nobody owns them. You can just pitch one across the water, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't try to skim a saucer

21:33 across the water. I'd lose the saucer. So I've always thought that was kind of weird. And it's not like one newspaper misquoted him. A bunch of them did. Wire services had him describing the shape as being like saucers or other similar terms like disc or pie plate. And even in the interview we heard, you'll note he said one looked like a pie plate cut in half or with some, you know, modifications of it. So maybe that's part of the origin. It's also possible that some or all of what he saw were round, but his viewing angle was such because of the brightness and the flashing. It made him hard for him to see the shape clearly. Even by his own diagram, most of the things were either circular or almost circular. So we always approach things from a faith and reason perspective. Does this have any significance from the faith perspective? Not really. Obviously, the existence of aliens, if the extraterrestrial hypothesis turned out to be true, that would raise theological questions. But there aren't really questions of a

22:35 theological nature raised by what did this guy see on this date. And we've talked about that a little bit in previous episodes. And we'll have a whole episode in the future on the theological aspects of aliens. So from the reason perspective, what are we to make of the claims that there was no real phenomena he saw, that it was a hoax or hallucination? Well, anytime someone says they saw something extraordinary, you have to take seriously the possibility that they're hoaxing. People do hoax stuff. And so we have to can't just dismiss that option. But we have to look at the evidence and the people who spoke with Arnold, including the military investigators, found him to be very credible and didn't think he was hoaxing. One of the things that's come to light is the report of the FBI, also the FBI talked to him. And we have the report of the FBI agent who interviewed him. And I'll just quote it. He says, It is the personal opinion of the interviewer that Mr. Arnold actually saw what he stated

23:37 he saw. It is difficult to believe that a man of Mr. Arnold's character and apparent integrity would state that he saw objects and write up a report to the extent that he did, if he did not see them. To go further, if Mr. Arnold can write a report of the character he did while not having seen the objects that he claimed he saw, it is the opinion of the interviewer that Mr. Arnold is in the wrong business, that he should be writing Buck Rogers fiction. So the FBI agent, like other people who talked to him, thought he was sincere, telling the truth, didn't think he would bother writing up such a detailed report if he didn't see something. Arnold also stuck by his story even after he concluded that he was never again going to talk about anything he saw in the sky. And that's actually mentioned here. The fact that he reached that conclusion is actually mentioned in the FBI agent's report. According to the FBI agent, Mr. Arnold says

24:37 his business has suffered greatly since his report on July 25th due to the fact that at every stop on his business routes, large crowds of people were waiting to question him as to just what he had seen. Mr. Arnold stated further that if he, at any time in the future, saw anything in the sky, to quote Mr. Arnold directly, quote, if I saw a 10-story building flying through the air, I would never say a word about it, close quote, due to the fact that he has been ridiculed by the press to such an extent that he is practically a moron in the eyes of the majority of the population of the United States. Is this Fox Mulder writing this? So even after Arnold had a bad taste in his mouth by this whole thing and said, I'm never talking about anything again like that, he still stuck by this story and said, yeah, no, I really did see these things, even though it damaged his reputation and

25:38 his business prospects. He didn't say, oh, guess what, guys? I was just fun and y'all. So at this point, where did the ET hypothesis come from? Yeah, well, initially, Arnold didn't propose it. He thought that what he was seeing was some government project. And it was only after the government said, nope, that's not us, that he was led to envision what Fox Mulder might call extreme possibilities. So he didn't think he didn't come down from flying his plane and say, guess what, guys? I saw aliens. He came down and said, I saw something that looked like an interesting classified government project. And so that's why in the radio interview, they're checking, like, we've called the Army Air Force to see if this was one of theirs, and we hope to have a reply by evening. Well, when the reply came, it was, nope, that's not one of ours. And that's what led to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Also, in terms of hoaxing, notice Arnold didn't call the press.

26:40 He landed at the airport at Yakima and told a friend of his what he had seen, and his friend didn't really believe him. In the interview, you know, he says his friend kind of suggested maybe you need to change your brand. And that's a reference to the fact that in 1947, basically everybody smoked. But then either his friend or someone else at the airport called ahead to the airport at Pendleton, where he was going. And so when he got to Pendleton, the press was waiting there for him. He didn't seek press attention on his own. And basically, in part of the radio interview that we cut for reasons of time, they're talking about how there's all these different news agencies that have been mobbing him trying to get his story. So he didn't bring that on himself. He just landed and told his friend, I think I saw this government aircraft project thing. Now, in addition to the hoax proposal, there's the hallucination hypothesis. And it's true that oxygen deprivation can lead to hallucinations.

27:42 So we need to consider that. But I don't know that Arnold was high enough to suffer that degree of oxygen deprivation. He was only flying at about 9,000 feet. Now, Mount Rainier, one of the mountains he was passing, and these UFOs were, whatever they were, were lower than the peak of Mount Rainier by quite a bit because he saw them silhouetted against it. Mount Rainier is 14,000 feet tall above sea level. And I don't know of people hallucinating on Mount Rainier. I did some checking and reports of mountain climbers and their experiences indicate that they can start hallucinating above 7,000 meters or 23,000 feet. So if you use 23,000 feet as a benchmark and Arnold is flying at only 9,000 feet, he's not at the level to be seeing hallucinations. Most general aviation aircraft without pressurized cabins will fly at 9,000 feet no problem,

28:43 which is what would have been the case here. Exactly, and you don't want, if people did hallucinate at 9,000 feet, you wouldn't want them flying an unpressurized plane. You wouldn't let them if pilots would just go up to 9,000 feet and start seeing pink elephants. Right, and I'm pretty sure that mountain climbing up to 14,000 foot height is non-bottle oxygen climbing. You don't need it below that point. So that's checked out. Yeah, even if you said, well, okay, maybe, I don't know what, maybe he didn't sleep well that night or something, and he was a little more prone to hallucinate. The problem is, with any kind of hallucination or hoax theory, is there seems to be independent corroboration for the Arnold sighting. And not just one person, several people. A number of people claim to see the same thing on the same day. There was a prospector named Fred Johnson who was on Mount Adams.

29:44 That's one of the mountains he was passing. And he said he saw them also and even viewed them through a small telescope that he had. I don't know if it was handheld or what, but he had a small telescope and he looked at them. Another person named L.G. Bernier or Bernier in Richland, Washington, saw them moving towards Mount Rainier about half an hour before Arnold did. A woman named Ethel Wheelhouse in Yakima reported seeing them at the same time Arnold did. And the military interviewed a forestry worker named Robert Hubach who was on duty at a fire watch tower. So he's up there. His job is to look at the horizon for fires. And he reported seeing flashes over Mount Rainier at 3 p.m. the same day when Arnold said he saw these things flashing. So you've got multiple independent corroborations of Arnold seeing something. On the flip side, Arnold had a DC-4 aircraft

30:46 that was about 10 to 15 miles behind him at the time of the sighting. And the pilot of that aircraft didn't notice anything unusual. But he may just not have noticed it. The balance of the evidence points to independent confirmation, which would eliminate the hoax or hallucination hypotheses. Well, what about the theories that say he misidentified a natural phenomenon like reflections or water droplets on his window? So as I mentioned, the reflection theory was the first one that occurred to me, but Arnold eliminated it. He turned his plane to fly south to parallel these things. And so the side of his aircraft was to them, and they remained where he saw them. A reflection probably wouldn't have done that. But then when he rolled down the window, as we heard in the radio interview, well, it can't be reflections or raindrops in or on his window if he rolls down the window and still sees them.

31:46 Also, if it was reflections or water drops on his window, they would have been visible to him, but not all these other people. And so that means that if he misidentified a natural phenomenon, it couldn't have been something close to him. It had to be something in the distance. Okay, then what about the idea that he saw a mirage? Well, this is apparently the Air Force explanation, although that's not entirely clear to me. Bruce McAbee says it's the Air Force explanation, but I haven't seen a quote from their documents that would indicate that clearly. So then the question is, well, how would you explain him seeing a mirage? Well, one theory is that it would be a temperature effect that can cause mountaintops to look doubled or detached. That's known as the Fata Morgana effect. So that's possible. And we'll have a link on Wikipedia for that so you can see what a Fata Morgana image looks like.

32:47 But mirages have to be seen from the same elevation. Like when you look at a road in the desert and you see a mirage, you're looking at eye level for that road. You're not looking at something 1,000 feet above you or more. And as Bruce McAbee points out, Arnold was too low. He was flying at 9,000 feet. The mountaintop for Rainier is at 14,000. So he was too low to see such an effect. Also, he saw the objects silhouetted against Rainier. So it's not just reflected mountaintops, you know, looking detached because of a temperature inversion. Also, mirages don't make bright flashes. And being mountaintops, they don't move. And what Arnold saw was something flying faster than he was because they were overtaking him. He was losing ground to them. And mountaintops don't do that.

33:48 All right. So what about the idea that he saw snow blowing from the mountaintops? Snow cannot reflect the amount of light needed to create the brightness of what Arnold described. Also, there were no fast winds on the surface to carry clouds of snow. There are no winds that would carry snow all the way from Mount Rainier to Mount Adams, where he lost sight of the things. If there had been strong winds, he would have been buffeted by the winds in his tiny little airplane. But he reported smooth skies. Also, the snow would have looked like snow. It wouldn't have looked like aircraft. Right. With such defined shapes. Yeah. So what about the idea that he saw geese or other birds like pelicans? Birds also don't cause flashes bright enough to illuminate an airplane cockpit. They also would have had to have been much too close to him for what he saw. And that would have had implications because we know Arnold was flying over 100 miles an

34:50 hour. And we know he had to be flying something like that because the stall speed on his aircraft was 80 miles an hour. So if he flies slower than 80 miles an hour, he's falling out of the sky. And he wasn't. So, you know, his account of going over 100 miles an hour is plausible. He flew when he flew when he flew when he turned his plane to parallel these objects. If they were birds, they would have had to have been flying at a typical bird speed, which maxes out at 50 miles an hour. If they're just flapping flat out as fast as they can go, they're not going much faster than 50 miles an hour. But he's got to be going over 80 and his account is over 100. And so if when he's flying parallel to them, they had been going at bird speed, he would see himself overtaking them. They would be losing ground to him. And that's the reverse of what he saw. What he was seeing was going faster than he was by quite a bit.

35:52 So it couldn't have been birds for that reason. Also, they would have looked like birds. And they would have been so close. They would look like birds. So what about the idea he saw clouds? Clouds are either motionless or don't move anywhere near that fast. Even on a breezy day where you can see clouds moving, they don't overtake you when you're flying 100 miles an hour in, you know, in less than two minutes and go that many miles. Fortunately, the winds are not strong enough to drive clouds at 1,200 or more miles an hour. And also, they would have looked like clouds, especially when he flew past the mountains a few minutes later. He would have seen, oh, it's just clouds. So then there's this other theory that they were meteors that he saw. What about that? Well, he saw their shapes too clearly for them to be meteors. When meteors are traveling through the Earth's lower atmosphere, they're encountering so much friction that the surface of the meteor ionizes and becomes plasma. And that's why they glow. So you're not actually seeing a meteor.

36:53 You're seeing the heated air envelope around it. And so he wouldn't have seen these clearly defined shapes that he did. Also, meteors don't stay in the sky for two or three minutes. They stay in the sky for one or two seconds. That's why we talk about things moving at meteoric speed. And Arnold used a clock so he knew how long they were. He said he saw the sweep hand of the clock and the sweep secondhand marking out the time. And when he measured it, it was much longer than a meteor would have stayed in the sky. And if they had stayed in the sky all that time, they would have gone much further than they did. Also, meteors cool and slow at lower altitudes. And Bruce McAbee brings out this point. He says, the suggestion that one or several meteors could travel many miles horizontally at a speed high enough to glow while at an altitude below 10,000 feet is not supported

37:54 by any known physics of meteors. So just as they could not move this way, if they were moving that slow, they wouldn't glow. This just doesn't work. If they were moving that slow, they'd just fall out of the sky. Yeah, yeah. They wouldn't stay in the sky for that long. Also, Arnold reported seeing some of the objects rise as they passed one of the mountains and meteors don't do that. They don't rise. They fall. So then those are the natural phenomena explanations. What about the idea that he saw some kind of conventional aircraft, whether captured German or American or Russian or experimental or some other kind? So the first point is the Army Air Force denied any responsibility of it being them. They also said it's not possible this is a foreign aircraft. So it's not like the Russians are flying over Washington state. That was their view. They also apparently told this to J. Edgar

38:56 Hoover when he was having it investigated. The head of the FBI. Yep. They told J. Edgar Hoover, this isn't us and it isn't the Russians. A big problem is that we didn't have anything that could move this fast as what Arnold saw. In the radio interview, Arnold estimated that they were going 1,200 miles an hour. But he's actually bringing the number down to make it sound less crazy. What his calculation actually showed is that they were moving 1,700 miles an hour. And at the time, the fastest recorded manned flight was only 647 miles an hour. The sound barrier had not been broken. The sound barrier would be broken later that year by Chuck Yeager. He broke it on October 17th and he was able to achieve a speed of Mach 1.07, which is 814

39:58 miles per hour. So that's 1.07 times the speed of sound at an altitude of 40,000 feet. But that hadn't happened yet. The fastest thing we had was 647 miles per hour for manned flight. And these craft were going three times that. Now, guided missiles could go this fast. The peak speed of a German V2 rocket was 3,600 miles an hour. So they could go twice what these things were going, but these weren't missiles. And if they were, they would have fallen to earth somewhere. I mean, Arnold saw their shape and they're not shaped like missiles. Also, they would have fallen to earth somewhere and the government denied responsibility for them. So that makes it hard to claim this is, you know, that it's just missiles or some other kind of conventional aircraft if he's seeing them at the distance, he said. Now, if you want to challenge that, the logical thing to do is challenge the distance and say maybe they were way closer,

41:01 in which case they could have been going slower. And that's what J. Allen Hynek did. Now, J. Allen Hynek was an astronomer who worked with Project Blue Book, which didn't exist yet, but he eventually worked with Project Blue Book. And he initially was a UFO skeptic. Over the course of time, his views changed and he came to find the extraterrestrial hypothesis much more plausible. But at this early stage, when he looked into the Kenneth Arnold sighting, he proposed that Arnold saw conventional aircraft, but they were much closer to him, like six miles away, in which case they would have only been going 400 miles an hour instead of 1,700 miles an hour, which was consistent with the maximum man flight speed at the time. He based his claim that they were closer on the fact that the human eye can't distinguish details of things smaller than

42:02 three arc minutes of angular sight. So if like if Arnold could see the shape of these things the way he said, then they had to take up at least three arc minutes of angular sight. That's a little sliver, you know, of a degree. He couldn't have done that if they were more than six miles away. Well, J. Allen Hynek was an astronomer, so he knew a good bit about optics, but he wasn't an optical physicist. Bruce McAbee is, and he says that Hynek was flat wrong on the claim, that people can see objects that are less than three arc minutes in length and in angular size, And that Arnold was one of those people because he could identify the DC-4 airplane that was 10 to 15 miles behind him, and its diameter, angularly, would have only been about one arc minute, and yet he could see that's what it was.

43:04 So he clearly, according to McAbee, had had sufficient quality eyesight to accurately see these things at the distance he reported. And McAbee, not only is he an optical physicist, but he's not a dyed-in-the-wool believe-every UFO claim. We've actually mentioned him here on Mysterious World before. If you remember our Phoenix Lights episode, where there are the two events during the course of the same night over Phoenix, there's the earlier event, and then there's the second event that people said might have been flares at the nearby Air Force range. Well, McAbee was the guy we mentioned as the optical physicist who investigated the videotape of the second event and said, that's just flares. So, sorry to disappoint everybody, but the second event, at least, is only flares. And so McAbee is a critical thinker. He doesn't just accept every UFO claim. Also, if these things were that close, then

44:06 Arnold should have seen tails and wings and engines and things like that. He didn't see any of that. All right. So that eliminates that conventional explanation. So where does that leave us? I think I know. Well, it certainly tends to support the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Now, one of the things, so just to tie in a couple of other things that may be connected to that, well, Arnold thought afterwards these things may have been making their own light. And McAbee's calculations, you know, agreed with that, that if it lit up his cockpit at that distance, they had to be making their own light. Arnold described the light as being blue, like a welder's torch. And I can't help but wonder if it might have been connected with Cherenkov radiation. Cherenkov radiation is produced by atomic energy, and it looks bluish. Anytime you see a blue flash, if you read Jim Mahaffey's book, Atomic Accidents, blue flashes are bad. And so since these things are described as

45:08 flashing blue, I can't help but wondering, is that some kind of nuclear thing happening? And they're releasing Cherenkov radiation. Also, the prospector, Frank Johnson, who was up in the mountains and saw this, he not only had a telescope with him, he had a compass. And he looked at his compass and said the needle was affected by these things, and he estimated they were about 1,000 feet above him, at around 5,000 feet in altitude. And to have these objects affecting the needle of his compass at a distance of 1,000 feet would indicate immense magnetic field strength. And so you have possible indications of atomic and magnetic things happening with the propulsion of these craft. So that would also not be what we had available to us at the time. In fact, there was later a project to make nuclear-powered aircraft. We didn't end up finally pulling the trigger

46:08 on that, because in order to make a nuclear reactor, you need to make it, like, really heavy and shielded, and that doesn't go well with putting it in an airplane. I'm going to guess people were opposed to flying nuclear reactors over their homes, too. Yeah, it's kind of like a flying, possibly crashing nuclear power reactor. Bad idea. So in any event, you know, I can't say it was extraterrestrial, but there's evidence pointing in that direction. I've mentioned that meme before. I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens. So, well, what happened after the Kenneth Arnold sighting? Well, the 1947 flap continued, and it even got way stronger in July. You know, there was that one day there were 189 sightings reported in the newspapers. Now, a lot of that's probably exactly because of the Arnold sighting. Once this got reported, people started looking more. And so, of course, for one cause or another, they saw more, and they reported more.

47:08 But Arnold didn't just kick off the whole thing. The flap was already underway and already accelerating before Arnold had his sighting. And then the flap died down by the end of August. But, I mean, who knows? If the ET hypothesis were true, maybe. It's hard for me not to notice. This is two years after 1945. And as we know, in August of 1945, as we heard about in the John Hendricks Tennessee Prophet episode, we dropped a couple of nukes on Japan. And those things make flashes that you could hypothetically see through your telescope probe thing in the outer solar system. And it could say, hey, these people that you've been watching have just developed nukes. Maybe you want to come look at this. Right. And so having a major UFO flap in 1947 is not implausible, given the circumstances that were, you know, that had been going on

48:09 at the time. Also, as part of that same flap, that same summer, we got a number of other major sightings and major UFO-related events, including Roswell, which happened two weeks after this. It's like that close. So that was one of the fallouts of this. And then eventually the Air Force, now that it was split from the Army, started a program called Project Sign, which operated in 1948 and 1949. It looked at UFO sightings. It was then replaced by Project Grudge and then the famous one, Project Blue Book. So, Jimmy, what's your bottom line on Kenneth Arnold's sighting then? Initially, I was quite skeptical. I thought it was just going to be reflections or something conventional. But I concluded there's more to this story than I originally thought. I can't say that it's extraterrestrial, but I don't know what it is. What makes this one significant compared to all the other sightings people had in 1947

49:11 or other times is the fact that Arnold was in the right position to measure these things. He was up in the air at a similar altitude. He had these landmarks like Mount Rainier and Mount Adams and a clock that he could measure them, and then he decided to do that. And so if you want to propose a conventional aircraft or other conventional explanation, you're going to need to say there's something seriously wrong with his measurements. Now, still can't eliminate hoax, except those independent confirmation seem to support it, seem to support the sighting. But it's harder to dismiss this than I thought it was going to be. So, Jimmy, what further resources can we offer to our listeners about this topic? Well, there's a book by Bruce McAbee called Three Minutes in June, the UFO sighting that changed the world. So we'll have a link to that. Also, I have a picture of Arnold holding an illustration of the lead object, the one that's kind of crescent-shaped. Also, Arnold's diagram of the others that

50:12 were more pie-plate-shaped. Wikipedia's article on Kenneth Arnold and on the sighting. Those are two different articles. His book, The Coming of the Saucers, that he wrote in 1952, is still in print, and we'll have a link to that. Also, we'll have a link to the 1950 interview he gave to Edward R. Murrow, as well as an article on mountain climbing and hallucination. Wikipedia's entry on the Fata Morgana Mirage phenomena, and also Wikipedia's page on the Horton Ho 229 aircraft. And as we like to do, we have some mysterious feedback from our listeners. On the Golden State Killer episode, BWill140 writes on YouTube, the true crime was robbing an aspiring California rapper of an excellent stage name. I don't know that we won't have someone calling themselves the Golden State Killer at some point in the future. We might. I mean, we've got Marilyn Manson.

51:12 Yeah, exactly. It's probably coming. And then from an iTunes review, A Highs says, and thank you, by the way, again, for those iTunes reviews. They're invaluable, and so thank you so much. A Highs writes, I've really enjoyed listening to Jimmy and Dom on the podcast. I've always appreciated Jimmy's knowledgeable and clear answers when he's on Catholic Answers Live, and he's just as accessible and intelligent in Jimmy Akin's mysterious world with Dom. I love the wide variety of mysteries explored by these two hosts and especially enjoyed the Dyatlov Pass episode. Oftentimes, when I listen, it feels like I'm part of a Catholic X-Files episode. And that's exactly what we're going for. Yeah. Because we're both big X-Files fans, so yeah, that's gratifying. And then Lil Zaza writes also on iTunes review, Jimmy has so much knowledge and presents it in an easy, clear style. Long-time listener and will donate to SQPN. Thank you so much, Lil Zaza. We really appreciate your support. It enables us to do this program and all of the other programs that we do here on StarQuest.

52:14 That's right. So, Jimmy, what do you have for our mysterious headlines? Well, so one of the topics we've talked about here on the show is Bigfoot, and Bigfoot is what's sometimes called a cryptid. A cryptid is like an animal that hasn't been discovered by science. And this year, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary added cryptid to its dictionary. And so I've got a link to an article talking about that, as well as additional words they also added, if you click the links. And then also have one on a group called the Jasons. I've been aware of the Jasons for some time. They are a group of high-power scientists that have been advising the government. And they've been doing that since the Cold War. They're somewhat not secretive necessarily, but they keep a low profile. And the Pentagon is ending its contract with the secret scientist group, the Jasons. And one of the theories as to why that is,

53:17 is because the Jasons are a little outspoken and don't always tell the Pentagon what it wants to hear. But they have vowed they're going to continue, and there is another government agency that may be picking up their contract. Interesting. Excellent. So thanks for those headlines. Jimmy, what's our next episode going to be about? It's going to be about the famous and people would say sinister Bilderberg group. This is one of the groups that people have accused of being the secret overlords pulling the strings behind world politics and finance. And they are a real group, and they really meet every May or June. And so we're going to be talking about them. So as we close out, we're going to take a moment to thank our patrons, who make this show possible, including Sam E., Eric E., Brian S., Michael P., and Brian K. Their generous donations at sqpn.com slash give make it possible for us to continue Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World and all the

54:19 shows at StarQuest. You can join them by visiting sqpn.com slash give. And again, thank you so much for your support. Not only does it help us continue the show, it shows us that you enjoy this, you want to hear more of it, and that we're making an impact on folks. And so we do appreciate that. So that's it from us. What did you think about this Kenneth Arnold sighting of the first UFOs, the first flying saucers, which he disputes? Is that what he called it? But let us know by visiting sqpn.com or the Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World Facebook page and leave us some feedback there. Or send us an email to mysterious at sqpn.com. Or send a tweet to at M-Y-S underscore world or use the hashtag of hashtag mysterious feedback. No spaces, no underlines, no nothing, just mysterious feedback. Be sure to check out the Mysterious World bookstore at mysteriousworldstore.com. Like we have the link to Bruce McAbee's book

55:20 three minutes in June from today's episode. We put links to all the books and videos that Jimmy mentions in the show on the bookstore. And if you click the link when you want to buy it, if you click the link there, that also helps support the show. And again, we really do appreciate that. You can find those links to Jimmy's resources from our discussion and links to those mysterious headlines on our show notes at sqpn.com slash mysterious. Until next time, Jimmy Akin, thank you for exploring with us our mysterious world. Thanks, Dom. And once again, I'm Dom Bethanelli. Thank you for listening to Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World on Starquest. you