Which would mean that they were traveling around three times faster than any aircraft was capable of at the time. Which was a rough approximation-but which would also mean that the objects were traveling at a rate, rough-approximation-wise, of 1,700 miles per hour. He calculated the time it took the objects to travel between Mount Rainer and Mount Adams, a distance of about 50 miles: a minute and 42 seconds. Arnold, still trying to figure out what he was looking at as he flew over Mount Rainier, decided to focus on the vehicles’ speed. If so, though, the objects would be very advanced aircraft. Once Arnold realized the objects were not, in fact, commercial jets-or, as he’d also thought for a moment, a skein of geese-he figured he was witnessing the testing of military aircraft. What did Arnold see that day? Or, more to the point, what would he say that he’d seen? As Ted Bloecher writes in his Report on the UFO Wave of 1947, released in 1967, Arnold would later describe the airborne objects as flying in 'a diagonally stepped-down, echelon formation ,' the entire assemblage 'stretched out over a distance that he later calculated to be five miles.' The objects seemed to be flying on a single, horizontal plane, but they also weaved from side to side, occasionally flipping and banking-darting around, Arnold would say, like “the tail of a Chinese kite.” They moved in unison, Arnold said. It was not flashing.Īnd then the lights came again-this time, in a series. It seemed to be flying about 15 miles away from him. At first, he thought the light must have been coming from another plane when he looked around, though, all he could see was a DC-4. Suddenly, as Arnold would later recall, he saw a bright light-just a flash, like a glint of sun as it hits a mirror when the glass is angled just so. Arnold, who was en route to an air show in Oregon, was doing a little exploring on the side, near Mount Rainer: A Marine Corps C-46 transport airplane had gone down in the area recently, and there was a $5,000 reward for the person who found the wreckage. The skies were clear there was a light breeze. That was the day that Kenneth Arnold, an amateur pilot from Idaho, was flying his little plane, a CallAir A-2, over Mineral, Washington. If you wanted to put a precise date on the origins of our obsession with saucers, the most-cited contender is June 24, 1947. Why, if saucers are relatively rare in science, have they been such a long-standing element of science fiction? So what, then, accounts for their ubiquity-in our imagination, if not in our airspace? Why are the spaceships of Star Trek and Star Wars and Independence Day shaped the way they are? That the LDSD would be so subject to environmental vagaries explains in large part why its broader category of craft-the flying saucer-has figured relatively rarely in NASA's engineering repertoire. The experimental craft was meant to launch last week this weekend, that launch was postponed because of a very earthly impediment: uncooperative winds. Payloads, the thinking went, that could include humans.

NASA's supersonic braking device-technically known as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, less technically an enormous inflatable disk-was designed to deliver heavy payloads to the surface of Mars.

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