Early UFO Disc Reports.

[Karl12]

Just a quick reply here. My memory tells me that Arnold didn't describe discs or saucers. The saucer thing came from how he described their movement...like scipping stones. Then the flying saucer meme took off.

Yes fair point mate and I suppose I should have mentioned that in the write up - it's brought up in the 'UFOs In The Spanish Civil War' article along with erroneous assumptions about the flying disc 'meme'.

Ten years would have to pass before the so-called “modern age” of UFOs would kick off in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting. However, strange flying objects and their crews were already plowing across our skies, even as Spain was embroiled in a civil war.

Nationalist and Republican soldiers at the front wondered what those unidentified flying objects might be.

“Kenneth Arnold did not describe the objects he saw as “flying saucers”, rather he said that the artifacts he had seen moved like saucers skipping off the water’s surface.” It was the press that came up with the equivocal designation. Curiously, from that moment onward, witnesses described objects resembling flying saucers.” this is one of the arguments wielded by pseudo skeptics to deny the reality of the UFO phenomenon. To them, the UFO “myth” was born from a journalistic error. However, the truth is quite different. The “champions” of rationalism forget (whether intentionally or not) that much before Arnold saw those boomerang-shaped objects (for this was the actual description given of the objects), hundreds, if not thousands, of witnesses around the world had already described disk-shaped unidentified flying objects.

And Spain was no exception.

Link

Kenneth does pop up in this vid where he's not too happy about pilot UFO sightings being ignored and apparently he also reckoned UFOs and USOs are one in the same.

When it comes to the sheer number of disc reports from that year then also found these two books to be a good read:

• Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 - by Ted Bloecher, Introduction by Dr James E. Mcdonald.

Link





• Alfred Loedding and the great flying saucer wave of 1947 - by Michael D Hall & Wendy A Conners.

PDF File

Oak Ridge, Hanford etc certainly had a few eyebrow raising 'incidents' and Bruce Maccabee goes into more detail below about Fred Johnson's Mount Adams case and the Snake River Canyon sightings.