"They flew close to the mountaintops, in a diagonal chainlike line,"
he said later. "It was as if they were linked together."

The disks appeared to be twenty to twenty-five miles

{p. 24}

away, he said, and moving at fantastic speed. Arnold's estimate was
twelve hundred miles an hour.

"I watched them about three minutes," he said. "They were swerving in
and out around the high mountain peaks. They were flat, like a pie
pan, and so shiny they reflected the sun like a mirror. I never saw
anything so fast."

The date was June 24, 1947.

On this same day there was another saucer report. which received very
little notice. A Portland prospector named Fred Johnson, who was
working up in the Cascade Mountains, spotted five or six disks banking
in the sun. He watched them through his telescope several seconds.
then he suddenly noticed that the compass hand on his special watch
was weaving wildly from side to side. Johnson insisted he had not
heard of the Arnold report, which was not broadcast until early
evening.

Kenneth Arnold's story was generally received with amusement. Most
Americans were unaware that the Pentagon had been receiving disk
reports as early as January. The news and radio comments on Arnold's
report brought several other incidents to light, which observers had