Strange sights in the sky have been around forever. But flying saucers start in 1947. Kenneth Arnold, an experienced pilot, was flying over Washington state when he saw a series of objects giving off bright flashes. When he landed he went to the East Oregonian, a newspaper in Pendleton, OR, and talked extensively with reporters. During that interview he described the movement of the the objects, “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” It was the newspaper that shortened that description to “flying saucers.”
Those are the facts, except one thing. I’ve never been able to figure out what flies like a saucer skipping on water. I’ve skipped stones on water so I’ve seen the series of semi-circles that it marks out. But I’ve never seen anything in the air that moves that way.
Is there anything known on earth that flies like a skipping stone? If not, what kind of ship or object could do so? It is even possible to talk about something flying in that manner?
Please try not to hijack this into a discussion of whether aliens are real at least long enough for some aviation mavens to show up first. Unless you are actually an alien. I’m pretty sure we have some at the Dope.
There is a theory that it was some type of bird. I can’t remember what type but I think it was a crane or something native to the area that flies in formations that bob up and down similar to Arnold’s description and I think they have white patches that show as they flap which might have accounted for the flashes. The speed is wrong but if he misjudged size he would have gotten the speed wrong too.
Don’t take any of that as fact but there is a bird theory out there, i’d look if I weren’t posting from my phone.
One of the biggest false props to UFO reports is that all pilots are somehow expert at describing anything they see in the air. Debunkers have shown repeatedly that pilots have a very selective interpretation of visual phenonena, beginning with a very strongly developed “Is it a hazard to me? No? Then it’s unimportant” bias. So assuming that a a pilot, even an experienced military, cargo or commercial one, would be un-fooled by Venus, birds, odd clouds and the many other things reported as oofoes is just wrong.
I’m not claiming that Arnold saw an alien spacecraft. I’m looking at it from a different pov. AFAIK, the discussion of Arnold’s sighting always skips over this weird motion. That strikes me as odd. Personally I would concentrate on it, wondering why anything should fly in that manner and then saying it must be an unknown force. Or else I would use the skipping motion to debunk it, saying that it proves it was just an illusion of some sort.
Either way, I want to talk about skipping movements through air, not aliens. What could work that way, even in theory? And if absolutely nothing could work that way, why hasn’t more been made of this?
And has anybody else since Arnold talked about this kind of skipping motion when they saw a UFO?
I understand that. I wanted to get my comment into the mix because these discussions often start with the false claim that pilots all have eagle vision and perfect perception, therefore…
It’s possible that Arnold saw nothing of the kind; some odd reflection off weather layers or flapping birds or something turned into “skipping” objects in his perception or memory. You’d have to look for similar reports or known atmospheric phenomena resembling this apparent behavior. That said, I can’t think of any, and I was fairly well read on UFOs and their debunking until around 1995.
It could just mean it didn’t have a smooth, level flight. While I don’t think anyone flies that way, the impression could be caused by Arnold’s plan encountering turbulence, or that he was so surprised by what he thought he saw that he jerked the stick* while watching it.
It also possible that whatever he saw was just being buffeted by the wind like a leaf on a breeze.
Has anybody ever seen a saucer skipped over water? I’ve seen stones skipped, but not saucers. I always assumed the newspaper made up the whole description. IIRC the Roswell ‘alien spaceship’ was described as a ‘flying disk’. Is there some point where ‘disk’ became ‘saucer’, or some intermediate ‘flying dish’ description?
The perfect skipping rock is saucer-shaped. There is, or was, a company that made skipping stones out of unbaked clay, based on a carefully designed/refined shape that was basically a perfect flying saucer - imagine two plates face to face with a big dimple in the center to trap air. Art following life, or life following art, or art following Art Bell… you decide.
In any case, even an inexperienced tosser could get an impressively long line of skips from these things. I think a grown man with some practice could get something insane like 50-60 skips across 200 yards on a flat pond.
The orcs always seemed a little shallow to me, but I guess there wasn’t room for much character development in only 14 hours. Oh, wait, never mind…
I think the explanation of large birds, seen edge-on, with the relative movement of them, Arnold’s plane and the mountaintop not properly considered, is a good hypothesis to explain a sighting of 1200MPH bouncing or skipping objects.
I can’t remember what the show was, but I saw some team demonstrate rather convincingly that Arnold probably wasn’t seeing any adtual objects, but sunlight rafracting in his plane’s curved cockpit glass. They got the same model plane and flew it at the same time of day and, lo and behold, there was a series of lights, in formation, bouncing up and down, and it looked like they were outside the glass.
If those were available in 1947 then that may be an explanation. And maybe people go around skipping saucers too, I’ve just never encountered it. I take an flat stone and skip it on the water. I’ll do that a few times before I get bored. So maybe there’s more to the world of stone skipping than I thought.
I do recall some television show that demonstrated the way random reflections of light could decieve people into thinking they see something in motion. One case seemed to make a light jump from place to place, not something I’d describe as a skipping stone or saucer, it was just light entering an airplane from a side window and reflecting on the windshield as it banked and turned. The glint of reflected light would only appear at specific angles that matched the curvature of the windshield. I don’t know if the plane described in the OP would have had a curved windshield back in 1947. But there’s likely some way that the pilot was deceived by optical effects of some kind. Not out of the ordinary considering the number of UFO sighting that have been debunked. These days it’s usually due to shaking in a hand held camera.
This is just a WAG, but maybe 20 years ago there was discussion of an experimental aircraft with an external combustion engine. The idea, IIRC, was that fuel would be injected into an area around the fuselage where air was being compressed and then it would be ignited so as to explode against the aircraft’s skin creating thrust.
Now I don’t know how old this design was, if it was ever tested, or whatever. But I can easily imagine that something like that might fly like a skipping stone.
Arnold’s sighting happened on June 24, 1947. The Roswell Incident occurred almost immediately after Arnold’s sighting became widely known, the term “flying disc” appeared in a July 8th press release from from Roswell Air Force Base… practically co-incident! /cue X-Files music
And there are plenty of cases where people saw rocket shapes, discs, fins, controlled movement, even portholes, flames and “weapon fire”… from what was indisputably a meteor or re-entering booster hulk. Many would swear the object was mere hundreds or thousands of feet away when it was anywhere between thousands of miles, or millions (Venus, etc.) The mind sees patterns and then adds details in retrospect.
