On this day, exactly 69 years ago, 32-year-old American businessman Kenneth Arnold flew in a private jet in search of the crashed plane. At about three o'clock near Mount Rainier in Washington state, to his surprise, he noticed 9 flattened disks flying at high speed and glistening in the rays of the sun.
The information was immediately broadcast on the radio, and upon landing at the airport in Yakima, reporters were already waiting for him. Kenneth described to journalists what he saw "unidentified flying objects" and compared them to pebbles bouncing above the surface of the water.
The next day, an article was published in local newspapers detailing what they saw, in which the term "flying saucers" first appeared. And very soon the phrase "flying saucers" came into use among Americans. After some time, the whole world started talking about UFOs, first of all suspecting that these were vehicles and evidence of the existence of alien civilizations.
Thus began an entire era of UFOs, with a single testimony of an American businessman. Kenneth Arnold was a well-known and respected person, which served as a catalyst for talk about "flying saucers" and gave impetus to the development of world ufology.
Soon, talk about UFOs became a state secret. The governments of the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany and the USSR have developed secret UFO projects. In parallel with state commissions, groups of enthusiastic ufologists and public organizations for the study of UFOs have appeared in many countries. They exist all over the world today, celebrating on this day the 69th anniversary of the birth of ufology.
But what did Kenneth Arnold see?
Arnold initially assumed that unknown objects were the new American weapon, but somehow later in one interview he suggested that UFOs are living creatures unknown to science, "something like celestial jellyfish" inhabiting the Earth's atmosphere. And only by the end of the 20th century there appeared some reason to believe that Kenneth Arnold took secret tests of the American military for "unidentified flying objects": it could be F-84 aircraft or a rocket (in 1947, 112 km northeast of Yakima, near Lake Moses, there was a test site for launching air missiles).
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