During the summer of 1947 a bizarre and inexplicable situation developed in North America for which, up to the time of the writing of this report, twenty years later, no satisfactory explanation has been forthcoming. Beginning in the latter part of June, people in widely separated places and from all walks of life began to report having seen shining, high-speed, strangely maneuvering objects in the sky. In most of these reports the objects were described as round or disc-shaped. For more than a week sightings were made in continuously increasing numbers. On July 4th the reports rose sharply and spontaneously, and for five days there was scarcely any part of the United States that had not been visited by these strangely elusive aerial objects. Reports came from many points in Canada as well. The number of sightings crested on July 7th, and during the next few days reports began to diminish until, about a week later, only a handful were being made from scattered sections of the country. Although the objects themselves had all but vanished, interest and speculation about them continued for some time after. A wave of sightings of unidentified flying objects had occurred. Flying saucers had become part of the language and the subject of fickle interest and ever-increasing confusion.
As most people familiar with the history of the UFO phenomenon are aware, the events of 1947 seemed to begin on June 24th, the date of the sighting made by Kenneth Arnold, while flying a plane over the Cascade Mountains of Washington. The date is partly justified, for it was the report made by this Boise, Idaho pilot and businessman, who sold fire-fighting equipment throughout the northwest, that opened the first chapter in the modern record of UFO activity. But Arnold's was not the first sighting of the period. For weeks before that people had been seeing unidentified objects in the sky and keeping the matter to themselves. An important result of Arnold's report was to elicit from these earlier witnesses their accounts of those previously unreported observations.