The sky was crystal clear that afternoon as Kenneth Arnold, an experienced private pilot and businessman, lifted his small CallAir A-2 off the ground. He was flying from Chehalis to Yakima, scanning the rugged peaks of the Cascade Mountains below.
Arnold wasn’t sightseeing he was on the lookout for a missing Marine transport plane rumored to have crashed near Mount Rainier. A reward had been offered, and Arnold knew the mountains well.
As he approached Rainier around 2:59 p.m., something caught his eye.
A sudden flash of light, like the reflection of a mirror, flickered near the snow-covered peaks. Then another. And another.
Arnold squinted, thinking at first it might be military aircraft perhaps jets on maneuvers. But what he saw next made his stomach tighten.
Nine objects.
They appeared in a loose formation, moving south to north, darting between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. They weren’t shaped like airplanes. They weren’t balloons. They were flat, crescent-like, and metallic silvery objects that seemed to skip across the sky, banking and weaving at impossible speeds.
Arnold checked his instruments. Everything was normal.
Then he timed them.
Using the distance between the two mountains about 50 miles Arnold calculated how long it took the objects to cross the span. The answer stunned him. Based on his measurements, they were traveling at over 1,200 miles per hour far faster than any known aircraft in 1947.
As the objects moved, they didn’t fly smoothly like planes. Arnold later said they moved “like a saucer skipping across water.”
That description would change everything.
After landing in Yakima, Arnold couldn’t shake what he’d seen. He reported the incident to airport officials and later spoke with reporters. He was careful with his words, but the press seized on one phrase and ran with it.
“Flying saucers.”
Within days, newspapers across the country carried the story. And almost immediately, similar sightings began pouring in from farmers, pilots, police officers, and everyday citizens. The United States had entered the UFO era.
Arnold never claimed the objects were extraterrestrial. He only insisted on one thing:
“They were real. I know what I saw.”
Skeptics proposed explanations optical illusions, meteors, secret military craft but none fully matched the behavior Arnold described. The Air Force quietly took interest. Just weeks later, something crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, and the mystery deepened.
Kenneth Arnold would spend the rest of his life tied to that day over Mount Rainier the day nine unknown objects flashed through the sky and rewrote modern history.
To this day, many consider it the first modern UFO sighting.
And it all began with a clear sky…and a pilot who happened to look in the right direction.”
