At least two-dozen sightings were reported to have been made before June 24th. As far as can be determined, none of them appeared in newspapers before that date. There are six reports in the Air Force files for the period June 1-23. One of these, a foreign report describing objects seen over Budapest on June 10, is not included in this report. The first official case for June describes an air-to-air observation by pilot Forrest Wenyon on June 2nd, near Lewes, Delaware (AF files have his name as Horace P. Wenyon). Wenyon reported seeing an object shaped like a mayonnaise jar as it flew across the nose of his plane (see Section III, p. 9, for details). Another pilot's report was made by stunt pilot Richard Rankin, who saw two flights of a group of objects at Bakersfield, California, on June 23rd (see II-3). (The Air Force lists the date of this sighting as June 14th, although the press accounts, published on July 1st, give it as June 23rd.) None of the official sightings for this period are classified as “unknowns.”
Of twenty-nine sightings occurring between June 1st and June 23rd, nearly two-thirds were made in the west, and nine in the northeast; about half the sightings were of a single object, while the rest describe two or more objects. Thirteen of these reports involved a single witness.
On June 24th, the day that Arnold saw his formation of nine discs, there was a sharp increase in the number of UFO sightings, from six on the previous day, to twenty. Of these reports, all but two occurred in the Pacific Northwest. Over half these reports appeared in the papers within several days of Arnold's account and one (Case 40) may be a ground confirmation of his sighting, although the reported directions are at odds with Arnold's. Most of the June 24th sightings are daylight reports; five occurred at night. About half of the reports are, like Arnold's, of multiple objects. The Air Force files list three sightings for that day: besides the Arnold report, one describes objects seen in the Oregon Cascades by a prospector, who noted electromagnetic effects on his compass while the objects were overhead (see IV-3); it is considered unidentified by the Air Force. The other, by the Lt. Governor of Idaho, was made in Boise, Idaho, and is considered to be "astronomical," although the sighting was made at three thirty in the afternoon (see III-16).
Published records have referred to a total of forty-nine UFO reports for the period June 1st through June 24th, by more than seventy-five witnesses, two thirds of whom have been fully identified. These figures raise an interesting question: why did none of these seventy-five witnesses report their unusual observations until after Arnolds story had been published? In a number of those reports, the witnesses tried to account for their initial silence. Richard L. Bitters, editor of the Wapakoneta (Ohio) Daily News, reportedly felt that his sighting of June 23rd was simply not a news story, and did not publish it until two weeks later when he changed his mind at the height of the wave (III-6); on the same night, two other Ohio residents made a similar sighting but delayed reporting it "until others had told of seeing them" (Case 28); E. B. Parks, of Hazel Green, Alabama, felt that the phenomenon he observed about the same time was "so unusual that it was not reported for fear others would disbelieve the account of it" (Case 29). Richard Rankin, who had not attached any "otherworldly" significance to his sighting of June 23rd (or 14th) at Bakersfield, California, assumed that he was observing the Navy’s experimental "Flying Flapjack," the XF5U-1, even though "I couldn’t make out the number or location of the propellers, and I couldn’t distinguish any wings or tail" (II-3) so he hesitated to describe what he had seen "until others were reporting the same thing." And so it went: if the reason for not reporting these earlier sightings at the time they occurred is not exactly stated in every case, it is at least implicitly apparent the witnesses were afraid to report them because they were so unusual.