1,200-M.P.H. Objects 'Seen' From Canada to Texas
PORTLAND, Ore., June 29 (AP)?Westerners were seeing "flying saucers" almost everywhere today from Canada to Texas, and a red-hot controversy raged about it all.
Kenneth Arnold, of Boise, Idaho, started it by reporting he saw nine mysterious objects zipping over western Washington last Tuesday at what he estimated was 1,200-mile-an-hour speed.
Experts dismissed his report with statements that no known aircraft could go that fast and that no guided missile tests were being made in that part of the West.
Then others began reporting "flying saucers" and the controversy was on. There was a similarity in all reports?the objects were round like saucers, traveling south at a high rate of speed with little or no noise, and of such brightness, that reflections from the rim were "almost blinding."
Three persons in El Paso, Tex., said they had seen them recently, as did two persons in Vancouver, B. C. The latest of a score of reports in the Pacific Northwest came from a seaside, Ore., woman who said she saw one before sunset last night.
There were two popular theories that the objects were experimental airplanes or guided missiles to which the armed forces will not admit, or that they were guided missiles from foreign soil.
An Army spokesman expressed interest in anything that could go to 1,200 miles an hour, but no responsible official or air expert came to the defense of the reports or of the theories behind them.