On June 24, 1947, a private pilot flying near Mount Rainier saw nine objects moving in formation and later described their motion as like a saucer skipping across water. A reporter turned that into flying saucer and the phrase went around the world in a week. This is Arnold’s own account, written with the pulp publisher Ray Palmer and printed by the two of them in 1952 because nobody else would. It covers the sighting, the press circus, and the Maury Island business in Puget Sound, where Arnold got pulled into a hoax that ended with two Army investigators dead in a plane crash. But legitimately strange stuff happened to him afterward, and the plainspoken midcentury vernacular feels truer and a polished account might.
The Coming of the Saucers