The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age

The overture to the Flying Saucer opera took place in the summer of 1947, presenting the main themes that were to develop with fantastic variations during the fifteen-year-long drama that followed: mysterious apparitions in the sky, alleged interplanetary visitors, government investigators, growing public excitement, civilians who zealously encouraged the hysteria, and, as a climax, an elaborate hoax that produced material “evidence” to prove the existence of spaceships.

Arnold’s Nine Disks

The first man to report a flying saucer was a veteran pilot named Kenneth Arnold, representative of a fire-control equipment firm in Boise, Idaho. On the afternoon of June 24 Arnold was flying a private plane on his way from Chehalis to Yakima, Washington. Above the Cascade Mountains at about 9200 feet, he noticed a series of bright flashes in the sky off to his left. Looking for the cause, he saw what appeared to be a formation of peculiar aircraft approaching Mount Rainier at fantastic speed. There were nine very bright, disk-shaped objects which he estimated to be twenty to twenty-five miles away, forty-five to fifty feet long, and traveling at a speed of almost 1700 miles an hour. Talking with a reporter that evening, Arnold said that the objects “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” In a later report to Air Force Intelligence he stated: “They flew very close to the mountaintops, directly south to southeast down the hogback of the range, flying like geese in a diagonal, chainlike line, as if they were linked together.... They were flat like a piepan and so shiny they reflected the sun like a mirror.”[II-1]

Newspapers all over the country picked up the story and printed it under headlines describing flying pies, flying piepans, and flying saucers. Alert to the possibility that the objects might have been a new type of aircraft of Russian origin, investigators from Military Intelligence interviewed Arnold and officials from Air Technical Intelligence requested a report.

No one doubted Arnold’s word. He was an experienced pilot, a respected citizen, and a careful observer. Nevertheless his description showed some inconsistencies that made it difficult to decide what the nine disks really were. If they had actually been forty-five or fifty feet long, they must have been much closer than he thought; objects that size would not have been visible at a distance of twenty to twenty-five miles. However, if the estimated distance was correct, then in order to be visible the objects must have been much larger, at least 210 feet long. One of the estimates must be wrong—but which one? Until that question was settled, the computed speed was meaningless, since to estimate the velocity of a moving object an observer must know either its true distance or its true size. Even after a careful study, Air Force investigators could not identify the disks; they might have been clouds, a mirage, or some kind of aircraft, but no definite answer was possible from the evidence available.

Predictably, after so much publicity, a rash of similar sightings broke out all over the country and continued for the rest of the summer. During the hot months of the “silly season,” newspapers are traditionally hospitable to tales of barnyard freaks, sea serpents, and man-bitten dogs. Such stories were now shoved aside as people in every state began to report unorthodox objects sailing through the sky—flying disks, flying dimes, flying ice-cream cones, flying shoe heels, and flying hubcaps. Seeing saucers became a national pastime, but Arnold, who had reported the strange objects in all good faith, resented the implied ridicule. Deluged with telephone calls and mail, he resolved to keep silent in the future even if he should happen to see a ten-story building flying through the air.

In spite of the publicity, the flying-saucer scare would probably have died with the first frost of autumn but for the efforts of a talented writer, editor, and publisher of science fiction, Raymond A. Palmer. Among the many letters Arnold received was one from Palmer, then editor of Amazing Stories. Tired of being laughed at, Arnold found the tone of “sincere interest” so appealing that he answered the letter[II-2]. After a second letter a week later, he changed his mind about keeping silent and agreed to sell his story for publication.

Under the title, “I Did See the Flying Disks,” the article appeared in the first issue of a new magazine, Fate, which published “true stories of the strange, the unusual, the unknown.”[II-3] Although Arnold was not a professional writer, he had the assistance of an expert and produced a vivid, clearly written story—Palmer had had unusual experience in helping fledgling authors tell their tales. Interesting differences between Arnold’s original statements and those in the magazine version demonstrate how much he must have owed to editorial help. Without it, he might not have included certain colorful details that he had apparently overlooked earlier. In his original reports, for example, he said that he had at first supposed the disks to be some type of experimental aircraft; in the magazine version he added that, even at the time, the objects had given him “an eerie feeling.” In the intervening months he had also remembered more about their shape (see Figure 2). He no longer described them as saucerlike, flat and shiny like piepans. Instead, a drawing based on his revised account shows an object like the crescent moon with a sharp protrusion on the inner, concave side and a dark, mottled circle marking the center of the top surface. Furthermore, he told the readers of Fate, one object had been darker than the others and of a slightly different form—a detail he had forgotten to mention to reporters, to military officials, to his friends, or even to his wife.

Arnold had never been much of a reader and was not a science-fiction fan, but his interests were obviously widening. The next two issues of Fate carried other articles under his name. Palmer’s growing influence is suggested by the titles: “Are Space Visitors Here?”[II-4] and “Phantom Lights of Nevada.”[II-5]

The Great Shaver Mystery

Ray Palmer lays claim to being “the first flying saucer investigator”[II-6], although he frankly admits his debt to the writings of Charles Fort. Any full account of the saucer era must include the names of other enthusiasts such as Adamski, Bethurum, Scully, Cramp, Keyhoe, Jessup, Michel, and Wilkins, but none merits so much credit for keeping the saucers flying as does Palmer. He not only opened the pages of his magazines to the first saucer reports but also, in the beginning, paid the witnesses for their stories.

In 1947 Palmer was the editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, two of the great magazines of science fiction in which stories of spaceships and interplanetary travel have long been commonplace. For several years he had been hinting to readers of these magazines that alien spaceships might actually be cruising in our skies, but Fate was the first magazine that seriously promoted the idea. No man was better qualified to glimpse the dramatic possibilities of flying saucers. Born in Wisconsin in 1910, Palmer had begun reading Amazing Stories soon after it started publication in 1926. Turning to writing, he showed the remarkable persistence that has characterized his life. Although he received 100 rejections before he sold his second story, he stubbornly kept on until he not only achieved success as an author but also, in 1938, became managing editor of Amazing Stories for the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. Under Palmer’s guidance, “... the entertainment side of science fiction took over.... Gone were the ponderous styles, the verbiage, the highly technical explanations of what mattered little in the first place. The stories took on pace and excitement, the characters in them were faced with human problems, the dialogue was realistic....”[II-7]

Alert to the tastes of his readers, Palmer carried the magazine to new heights. Many science-fiction fans (including the present authors) still remember that golden age around 1940 when Amazing came out every month with 146 pages full of startling, fantastic, wonderful stories of how life might be on other worlds and in other galaxies.

In January 1944 began the publishing drama that for a time changed the direction of Amazing and heralded the advent of flying saucers. The “Discussions” department that month included a letter captioned “An Ancient Language?” which introduced what came to be known both as the Great Shaver Mystery and the Great Shaver Hoax. Signed “S. Shaver,” the letter began:

“Sirs: Am sending you this in hopes you will insert in an issue to keep it from dying with me. It would arouse a lot of discussion.”[II-8]

It did indeed. The letter announced the discovery that words and syllables of the ancient Atlantean language still exist in English today; hence the legends of Atlantis must be true and a “wiser race than modern man” must once have existed on the earth.

Richard Sharpe Shaver was then living in Barto, Pennsylvania, and operated a welding machine in a war plant. In writing to thank the editor for publishing his letter, he enclosed a manuscript called “Warning to Future Man” which purported to give his memories of life in the fabled continent of Lemuria. The information had been preserved in “thought records” hidden in secret caves. By “telaug,” a kind of audio-visual telepathy, he had begun to remember his forgotten past when, through the noise of his welding machine, he heard voices. After visiting Shaver and probing his “memories,” Palmer bought the story. He didn’t like the way it was written, however, so he rewrote it, added material that expanded it to three times its original length[II-9], changed the title to “I Remember Lemuria,” and started advertising it well in advance of publication as a true story:

“Twelve thousand years ago the Lemurians and the Atlanteans disappeared from the Earth. Where and why did they go?”[II-10] This story would show that Newton and Einstein were all wrong, Palmer promised, and would reveal new concepts of gravity, the nature of matter, and the foundation for physical mathematics.

Thus began the controversy that rocked the world of science fiction. Since Palmer has affirmed that “Flying saucers are a part of the Shaver Mystery—integrally so”[II-11], we turn to the old files of Amazing Stories to trace their development.

The first of the Shaver series, “I Remember Lemuria” appeared in March 1945[II-12], along with “Mantong, The Language of Lemuria,” an article signed by both Shaver and Palmer, and other stories followed quickly in succeeding issues of Amazing. The basic themes were shopworn—a jumble of Fortean ideas, Plato’s fables, and mystic science—but when brightened by Palmer’s magic pencil, they seemed fresh and exciting: The earth had an ancient past, now forgotten. The lost continents of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu had been colonized many thousands of years ago by superior beings from another planet who could travel through space by utilizing forces unknown to present-day earthmen. Eventually these noble aliens had been forced to abandon the earth to escape evil radiations coming from our sun, but they had left descendants who still lived on earth in concealment in great subterranean cities that could be entered through certain caves. The underground dwellers in the hidden world had retained all the secret powers of their ancestors. They could communicate by thought transference, could speak to earthmen by mental “voices,” and could travel on beams of light because they understood the true nature of gravity and magnetism. These creatures were divided into two opposing groups, one good and one evil. The dero (detrimental robots) were the bad guys and they caused all the unexplained accidents and misfortunes that happen to human beings. The tero (integrative robots) were the good guys; they warned earthmen of danger and tried to protect them from the destructive forces of the dero.

Reader response to these fantasies was phenomenal. Fan mail zoomed from 40 or 50 to 2500 letters a month[II-13], and the magazine’s circulation increased by some 50,000. As the records of “racial memory” continued to appear, connoisseurs of good science fiction began to cry “Hoax!” but their protests had no effect. Thousands of new readers were buying the magazine and many of them were beginning to recall and report “memories” of their own. Since the “Discussions” columns could not take care of so many letters, Palmer opened a new department, “Report from the Forgotten Past”[II-14], and urged the readers to send in their personal experiences with the hidden world. Did they ever hear strange voices? Receive mysterious messages through the air? Suspect that they were being affected by strange rays? Feel that they had been put on earth for some special mission? Have dreams that they could not explain? Have a strong urge to explore caves? Have memories of other lives? The editor was eager to learn of all such incidents. Through the Shaver stories, Palmer was already promoting the idea that interplanetary craft do visit the earth:

“There are many mysteries of the past that have intrigued investigators to an almost unbearable point.... What were the glories of Babylon? What truth is there in the Chinese legend of being the people of the Moon, and of coming to Earth in rocket ships? What was the mystery metal of the Lemurians, orichalcum? What was the secret of their airships that walked on beams of light?”[II-12]

When one correspondent informed him that space travel was possible “if one travels through curves but not through angles,” Palmer replied, “Your editor is sincere—and he’d like to know everything you know.... For instance, please explain this space-travel business—about curves and not angles.”[II-15]

For more than three years the columns of Amazing continued to assert, not as fiction but as fact, that interplanetary travel is a present reality and that the laws of physics are not valid. In a mystic mumbo jumbo the readers were told that the velocity of light, for example, was not the ultimate speed:

“Light speed is due to ‘escape velocity’ on the sun, which is not large. This speed is a constant to our measurement because the friction of exd, which fills all space, holds down any increase unless there is more impetus. The escape velocity of light from a vaster sun than ours is higher, but once again exd slows the light speed down to its constant by friction, so that when it reaches the vicinity of our sun, no appreciable difference is to be noted. A body can travel at many times the exd constant, under additional impetus, such as rocket explosions. A ship whose weight is reduced to a very little by reverse gravity beam can attain a great speed with a very small rocket.”[II-12]

Devotees of reasonable science fiction (who include many leading scientists) were writing angrily to Palmer, protesting that the Shaver hoax had gone too far, but their letters seemed only to amuse him:

“There have been some odd reactions, one of them being a promise by a fan group to ‘expose’ our ‘hoax’ (which was a compliment, by the way, because it was termed the ‘biggest ever attempted in modern science fiction history’). We are waiting for this expose, [sic] with interest—because we are curious to know how a hoax which is not a hoax can be exposed as a hoax. We realize that a lot of our readers find it difficult to believe that we ourselves believe one single word of what Mr. Shaver tells us in his stories, but we’ll keep on presenting the evidence as it comes in, and you can judge for yourself.”[II-14]

Readers continued to object and many stopped buying the magazine, but Palmer persisted with ambiguous hints that spaceships were really here. A full year before the first flying-saucer report he wrote:

“If you don’t think space ships visit the earth regularly, as in this story [‘Cult of the Witch Queen’], then the files of Charles Fort and your editor’s own files are something you should see.... And if you think responsible parties in world governments are ignorant of the fact of space ships visiting earth, you just don’t think the way we do.”[II-16]

In succeeding months he became more and more explicit. In September 1946 he told one correspondent, “As for space ships, ... personally we believe these ships do visit the earth. You, or any observer, would be inclined to call it something else if you did see one.”[II-15] In the spring of 1947 he replied to a reader who asked for concrete evidence that Shaver’s stories were true: “... the mystery is not just ‘are there caves with dero and tero in them?’ but it has to do with space ships, other inhabited worlds, and so on.”[II-17]

In June 1947, the month the first flying saucers were reported, the issue of Amazing Stories was an addict’s dream[II-18]. The cover featured “The Shaver Mystery, the Most Sensational True Story Ever Told”; the four stories, 90,000 words, were all under the byline of Richard S. Shaver. The entire magazine—editorial comments, discussion columns, and most of the feature articles—was devoted to the supernatural world of Shaver.

But the end was near. Amazing published its last Shaver story, “Gods of Venus,” in the summer of 1948; as far as the magazine was concerned, the mystery was dead.

Who or what killed it? One version says that the publisher, William B. Ziff, ordered the series stopped because so many fans had quit buying the magazine. Palmer himself has given various explanations. He stopped the stories, he said at first, when he realized that such material did not really belong in a fiction magazine. Later he explained that he killed the mystery because he intended to go into publishing for himself and didn’t want to leave his successor to handle “this hot potato.”[II-19] Later still, he implied that publishing the stories was dangerous; that he had learned too much about the “hidden world,” the sinister forces responsible for the plane crash that followed the Tacoma hoax. Said Palmer, “I wanted no more dead men on my hands.”[II-11]

The Maury Island Fragments

The Maury Island Mystery, a complex and eventually tragic affair, occurred near Tacoma, Washington, less than 100 miles from the place where Arnold had sighted the nine disks. In this mystery, too, Palmer was involved. According to their story, two harbor patrolmen named Harold A. Dahl and Fred L. Crisman on June 31 had observed a group of six flying disks that hovered over their boat near Maury Island and jammed their radio when they tried to notify the authorities. One of the disks had seemed to be disabled, had showered down lavalike metallic fragments that damaged the boat and killed the dog on board; the disks had then disappeared but the fragments remained as proof of the visit. The men also claimed to have taken some pictures that showed the six objects but were fogged as though by radiation. Back on shore, they had not telephoned the newspapers nor had they notified any government officials. Instead, they had mailed a box of the fragments to Ray Palmer, to prove that they had actually seen an accident to a flying saucer[II-20].

Crisman was no stranger to Amazing Stories. A science-fiction fan, he apparently had accepted the Shaver stories as literal truth. More than a year before the Maury Island episode he had written to Palmer, warning him that the knowledge contained in the Shaver stories was too dangerous to print. Identifying himself as an ex-Air Force pilot who had flown the Hump, Crisman explained that when he was in Burma, he had been exploring a cave when a dero attacked him with a mysterious ray that made a hole the size of a dime in his arm. Palmer had kept up the correspondence[II-21] and, some months later, received a telephone call from Crisman, then in Texas: for $250, said Crisman, he would descend into a cave and take some actual pictures of the mysterious underground machines that Shaver had described. The result of this offer is not known, but in July 1947 Palmer received another letter from Crisman; he had witnessed an accident to a flying saucer and was sending a box of the fragments as proof[II-22].

Palmer considered buying the story for Fate, but first he asked Arnold, living close to the scene, to investigate the tale. Arnold agreed. Thus the first man to report flying saucers became also a victim of the first flying-saucer hoax.

With an advance of $200 for expenses, Arnold flew to Tacoma and into a nightmare of mystery. The two men were elusive, their story full of discrepancies, their manner evasive. Wondering at first whether the affair was a hoax, Arnold finally attributed the strange behavior of the men to their fear of hostile saucers. Alarmed, he called in the help of Army Intelligence. Two officers arrived from Hamilton Air Force Base, California, and made a careful investigation. They found that Dahl and Crisman were not “harbor patrolmen” but salvagers of floating lumber; their boat was scarcely seaworthy and showed no evidence of major repairs; they couldn’t remember what they had done with the pictures they mentioned; and although the saucer accident was supposed to have occurred nearly six weeks earlier, they had never notified the authorities or even mentioned it to a reporter. The only evidence offered for the truth of their tale was the collection of “strange” fragments which were later found to be slag from a local smelter plant. Similar fragments could be found by the ton on Maury Island[II-20].

The officers concluded that they had wasted their time on a flagrant hoax, but the bewildered Arnold insisted that they take some of the fragments for analysis. Unhappily, on the way back to the base the plane crashed and although two passengers parachuted to safety, both officers were killed. At once fantastic rumors sprang up: that the Tacoma “disks” had been spaceships, and that the beings who operated the craft had been forced to arrange the plane crash so that no one could analyze the fragments of their disabled spaceship. Arnold himself seemed to believe that the crash had resulted from extraplanetary sabotage, but investigation showed a more ordinary cause. A burned exhaust stack had set the left wing afire; the blazing wing had then broken from the fuselage and torn off the plane’s tail.

For a time government officials considered placing a charge of fraud against the two men who had started the unhappy chain of events. After further questioning, both had admitted that their “sighting” had been a hoax, planned merely to make their story more salable, but when first Arnold and then Military Intelligence had entered the picture, the hoax had simply gotten out of hand. Since the men obviously had never intended the tragic outcome and were not directly responsible for it, the idea of prosecution was abandoned[II-1].

Science Fiction Adopts the Saucers

No longer editor of Amazing, Palmer continued to promote the cause of flying saucers in the pages of Fate. During the early nineteen-fifties, the boom years of science fiction, he started other magazines—Search, Mystic Universe, Other Worlds Science Stories. After a time, Fate began to concentrate on tales of the mystic and occult, while Other Worlds eventually took over the flying-saucer theme.

Starting as an orthodox magazine of science fiction, Other Worlds flourished until the general slump in the market caused it to suspend publication. Revived after a time, it has undergone several changes of editorial policy reflected in its changing names: Other Worlds Science Stories, Flying Saucers from OTHER WORLDS, FLYING SAUCERS from Other Worlds, Flying Saucers the Magazine of Space Conquest, and, since the spring of 1961 when the magazine became pocket-size, just Flying Saucers. Classic science fiction long ago vanished from its pages and all articles are “true” accounts of flying saucers and similar Fortean incidents.

Flying Saucers is probably unique in modern publishing history. Issued monthly or bimonthly at a price of thirty-five cents, the magazine does not pay its authors because, as the editor explains, “Flying Saucers is not a commercial project.” Published by Palmer Publications, edited by Palmer, containing liberal amounts of editorial comment and at least one article by Palmer, a typical issue in 1960[II-6] contained sixty-six pages and carried a small number of advertisements for telescopes, binoculars, Rosicrucian and similar mystic publications. The remaining ads featured books and magazines issued by Palmer Publications, Amherst, Wisconsin; books issued by Amherst Press, also of Amherst, Wisconsin; Saucerian Books, published under the aegis of Gray Barker, a contributing editor to Flying Saucers. “Austrogen,” described as a face cream or clay for skin ailments, was obtainable from Palmer at a dollar an ounce. Another ad recommended something (the wording does not specify exactly what, perhaps a powder?) that helps make good chili. Readers could buy this too, from Palmer, for a dollar a pound or $3.50 for five pounds. A combination dandruff remover, itch preventer, and restorer of hair color personally recommended by Palmer sold for $5.00 a bottle, number of ounces not specified.

The dandruff remover was also recommended by Kenneth Arnold, whose flying disks had started the saucer epidemic. Arnold was advertising his “World Society of Flying Saucer” which would “hold no meetings, no minutes, no by-laws, no restrictions or regulations, no records outside of actual membership, no presidents, no vice-presidents, no secretary, or board of directors.” For only $5.00 those who joined the society would receive twelve issues of Flying Saucers (which if ordered from Palmer Publications would have cost $4.00), plus an official membership card. Arnold also offered for sale a crescent-shaped lapel pin in solid silver, supposedly just like the “original” saucers he had sighted in 1947; and, for the ladies, the saucers in pendant form. The addition of seven-point diamonds was optional.

The magazine has grown smaller, but its main theme is still flying saucers, which until recently have been interpreted as interplanetary vehicles. In December 1959, however,[II-23] Palmer announced in a lead article that flying saucers were not from outer space after all; instead, they came from secret earth bases located under the north and the south poles. The earth is actually shaped like a doughnut, not like a pear, he says, and has openings at both poles where the saucer people reside. Whether they are manned by dero or tero he has not said.

In the autumn of 1962, Arnold entered the arena of politics and was the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Idaho, but lost. Shaver became a dairy farmer, a Wisconsin neighbor of Palmer’s, but in science-fiction circles his name will never die. Recently he has been advertising the sale of alleged pre-Deluge and pre-Ice-Age “art stones” described as rare, voluptuous, exciting, and usable as ornaments for wall or mantel, or simply as book ends.

Palmer has now revived the Shaver Mystery and is reprinting the entire series in book form “with the fiction removed,” under the general title of The Hidden World. In advertising the new project he stated, “This magazine concerns flying saucers. Flying saucers are a part of the Shaver mystery—integrally so.” He abandoned the stories in Amazing, he says, not because an outraged publisher insisted, but because he believed the stories to be true. “That is the true motive. I was convinced that not only was there a ‘hidden world,’ but it was one of immense ramification, and the caves of the dero, flying saucers, military espionage, the political science of the world, and even some phases of religion, specifically those of the ‘cult’ variety, were inextricably linked.” In announcing that he intended to end the secrecy that had existed for so long, and to tell the truth after seventeen years of “sugar-coating” the facts, he did not explain exactly why he feels it is safe to publish the “truth” now, when it was not safe seventeen years ago. He says only, “... there have been good reasons for the delay—had it been done from the beginning, the pitfalls that would have crushed it could not have been avoided.”[II-11]

At the tenth annual World Science Fiction Convention, held in Chicago in September 1952, fans and fellow editors awarded to Palmer a bronze plaque honoring him as a “son of science fiction,”[II-24] a citation he fully merits. As long as flying saucers continue to make good copy and sell magazines, Palmer will probably keep them soaring—whether their home bases are other planets or polar caves. As one of his colleagues once commented:

“... in these times of drab and unconvincing falsehood, there is still something to be thankful for. A Palmer promotion has the touch of genius. It has zing, sparkle, and true showmanship. It can be spotted a mile away by the bright lights. The thing to do is sit back and enjoy it.”[II-19]

Mirage or Wave Clouds?

What did Kenneth Arnold actually see, that June afternoon in 1947? No absolutely certain answer is possible after so long a time. The disks were probably a mirage (see Figure 3) in which the peaks of the mountains seemed to float above the mountain chain[II-25]. An alternative but much less probable explanation is that he observed orographic clouds, a type unique to mountainous country, which often appear to stand more or less motionless and can assume dramatic shapes. “Grindstone” clouds, shaped like thick, solid disks (see Plate Ia), are common phenomena in the valleys just east of the Sierra Nevada in California and in the mountainous regions of Washington, Colorado, and New Mexico—areas where flying-saucer reports have tended to concentrate[II-26]. One of the most spectacular types of mountain cloud, it closely resembles the “pile d’assiettes” or “stack of plates” formation in which the cloud assumes a flat, round shape like a plate or a saucer, and two or more are piled together in a neat stack, as in Plate Ib[II-27]. Another picture of a “stack of plates” (which some observers reported as a hovering flying saucer) was made on May 31, 1953, near Jindabyna, Snowy Mountains, New South Wales, and reproduced in Weather in November 1954 Plate 47. The cloud formed over a tub-shaped depression in the mountains and remained stationary for more than an hour[II-28].

Such clouds reflect the undulations of lee waves formed in the atmosphere when stable currents of air flow over obstacles such as hills or mountains. An up-and-down wave motion may be impressed upon the air, provided that temperature and wind conditions are suitable. As the air describes its wavelike path, it alternately warms and cools, the warming taking place as it sinks into the wave trough and the cooling as it ascends to the wave crest. If the air is very dry, the undulating current will not be visible to the eye, although the updrafts and downdrafts will readily be felt by aircraft that chance to pass through them. On the other hand, if the air before entering the wave is moist enough, the cooling in the wave crest will cause water droplets to condense and a cloud to appear.

In the vicinity of an isolated peak the cloud may assume the form of a cap covering the summit, or it may be displaced slightly downwind and resemble a lens or disk. Not infrequently a series of lenticular clouds will appear, trailing downwind at regular intervals of a few miles. Although these wave clouds are usually stationary, they sometimes move at great speed, especially when the air temperature is changing rapidly.

From a study of a remarkable photograph made in 1956, R. J. Reed of the University of Washington has offered the suggestion that the disks Arnold saw were actually wave clouds in rapid motion.

On the afternoon of December 29, 1956, a photographer for the Seattle Times was on top of Pigtail Peak near White Pass, Washington (not far from the area where Arnold’s nine disks had appeared), taking ski pictures for the rotogravure section of the Sunday Times. The weather was beautiful. Down in the pass temperatures hovered near freezing, but the slopes were warmed by sunlight that filtered down through thin cirrus clouds and raised the temperature to a balmy fifty degrees. Just at sunset a strange object suddenly appeared off toward the northeast horizon. Several skiers urged the photographer to take a picture of the “flying saucer,” but since it was still far away and indistinct, he waited. The first object, now followed by a second one, moved rapidly toward Mount Rainier, began to sharpen in outline, and both were soon so clearly visible that he was able to snap his unusual picture. The photograph shows two apparently solid, disklike objects, flattened, brilliantly white but dark at the bottom, apparently linked together by white streamers, skimming toward the mountain peak (Plate Ia).

Recognizing the close resemblance between the objects in the photograph and those Arnold described, Reed made a full analysis of the weather conditions prevailing at the time the picture was taken. From radiosonde data provided by the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, he obtained measurements of the size of the clouds, their height above the mountains, wind directions, and temperature and humidity at mountain height and cloud height. Obviously the pattern of weather conditions that prevailed that day was suitable for the formation of saucerlike clouds.

To test the hypothesis that Arnold also had seen such clouds, he then obtained records of the weather data for June 24, 1947, to determine whether atmospheric conditions on the two dates were basically similar. “To be comparable, winds would have to be blowing from the north or northwest in Mr. Arnold’s case since the objects were sighted to the south and southeast of the peak. The air would have to be dry at lower elevations and moisture would have to be spreading in at higher levels. An inspection of the historical maps reveals that, indeed, all these conditions were met.”[II-29]

Reed concludes that, although we can never know for certain, the implication that the Times photographer and Kenneth Arnold viewed essentially the same phenomenon seems “inescapable.” This interesting hypothesis, however, requires the presence of undulating air currents and turbulence great enough to endanger a plane in flight. Since Arnold specifically mentioned the smooth, calm flying, the mirage explanation remains the most probable one.