Flying Saucers The first well-known UFO sighting occurred in 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane. Arnold estimated the speed of the crescent-shaped objects as several thousand miles per hour and said they moved “like saucers skipping on water.” In the newspaper report that followed, it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped, hence the term flying saucer.
The Roswell UFO Incident
The same year that Arnold saw the flying objects, rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel came across a mysterious 200-yard long wreckage near an Army airfield in Roswell, New Mexico. Local papers reported it was the remains of a flying saucer. The U.S. military issued a statement saying that it was just a weather balloon, though the newspaper photograph suggested otherwise The flames of conspiracy were further fanned in the 1950s, when dummies with latex “skin” and aluminum “bones” that looked eerily like aliens fell from the sky across New Mexico and were hurriedly picked up by military vehicles. To those who believed in the earlier Roswell sightings, this seemed like a government cover-up. For the Air Force, these “dummy drops” were a way to test new ways for pilots to survive falls.
Fifty years later, the military issued a subsequent statement admitting that the Roswell wreckage was part of Project Mogul, a top-secret atomic espionage project.
