Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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A woman named Ethel Wheelhouse likewise reported sighting several flying discs moving at fantastic speeds at around the same time as Arnold's sighting.

 

 

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On July 4th a United Airlines crew over Idaho en route to Seattle spotted five to nine disk-like objects that paced their plane for 10 to 15 minutes before suddenly disappearing.

 

 

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On July 12th, Enlo Gilmore saw eight bright objects over Tulsa, Oklahoma. He took a photograph,which was published in the Tulsa Daily World the following day.

 

 

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Hundreds of similar reports flooded in from around the world in the weeks that followed. Most described saucer-shaped objects.

 

 

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In June or July 1947 an airborne object crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico.

 

 

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The U.S. government attributed the crash to a secret U.S. military Air Force surveillance balloon.

 

 

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It was not until many years later that claims were made of an alleged cover-up.

 

 

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In February 1980, the National Enquirer ran an interview with Major Jesse Marcel, who had expressed his belief that the military covered up the recovery of an alien spacecraft. The article brought the Roswell incident to world wide attention.

 

 

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Fred Crisman and Harold Dahl were harbor patrolmen on a workboat who saw six doughnut shaped objects in the sky near Maury Island in Puget Sound in June 1947. According to Crisman and Dahl, one of the objects dropped a substance that resembled lava or "white metal" onto their boat, breaking a worker's arm and killing a dog.

 

 

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Dahl claimed he was later approached by a man in a dark suit and told not to talk about the incident. The story was later retold in Gray Barker's book "They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers," which helped to popularize the image of "men in black" in mainstream culture.

 

 

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Ted Bloecher collected reports of 853 flying disc sightings that year from 140 newspapers from Canada and every U.S. state save Montana.

 

 

Edited May 26, 2014 by Flex Mentallo

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On July 9th Army Airforce Intelligence began an investigation of the sightings - mostly from pilots and military personnel - with the help of the FBI.

 

 

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Three weeks later they came to the conclusion that the saucer reports were not imaginary or adequately explained by natural phenomena.

 

 

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This resulted in the formation of Project Sign at the end of 1947, the first publicly acknowledged USAF UFO investigation.

 

 

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Project Sign eventually evolved into Project Grudge, and then the better-known Project Blue Book. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, coined the acronym “UFO”.

 

 

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UFO'S have been reported throughout history. They were seen as omens, angels, or miracles.

 

 

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In April 1897 thousands of people reported seeing "airships" in various parts of the United States. Many signed affidavits. Scores of people even reported talking to the pilots.

 

 

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On February 28, 1904, there was a sighting by three crewmembers on the USS Supply 300 miles (483 km) west of San Francisco, reported by Lieutenant Frank Schofield, later to become Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Battle Fleet. Schofield wrote of three bright red egg-shaped and circular objects flying in echelon formation that approached beneath the cloud layer, then changed course and "soared" above the clouds, departing directly away from the earth after two to three minutes. The largest had an apparent size of about six Suns, he said.

 

 

 

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According to records released on August 5, 2010, British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill banned the reporting for 50 years of an alleged UFO incident because of fears it could create mass panic. Reports given to Churchill asserted that the incident involved an Royal Air Force (RAF) reconnaissance plane returning from a mission in France or Germany toward the end of the Second World War. It was over or near the English coastline when a strange metallic object that matched the aircraft’s course and speed for a time before accelerating away allegedly intercepted it before disappearing. The plane's crew were reported to have photographed the object, which they said had "hovered noiselessly" near the aircraft, before moving off.

 

 

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On August 5, 1926, while travelling in the Humboldt Mountains of Tibet's Kokonor region, Russian explorer and artist Nicholas Roerich (whose work is mentioned by Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness) reported, members of his expedition saw "something big and shiny reflecting the sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed. Crossing our camp the thing changed in its direction from south to southwest. And we saw how it disappeared in the intense blue sky. We even had time to take our field glasses and saw quite distinctly an oval form with shiny surface, one side of which was brilliant from the sun." Another description by Roerich was of a "shiny body flying from north to south. Field glasses are at hand. It is a huge body. One side glows in the sun. It is oval in shape. Then it somehow turns in another direction and disappears in the southwest."