Documentary Description
A handful of foo fighter sightings could be dismissed as pilot
error, but there were hundreds, if not thousands. Could they really
just be the hallucinations of tired or terrified men? “Call me
Einstein, Flash Gordon or just plain crazy, but I know what I saw!”
declared civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold, referring to the nine strange
aircraft he’d seen flying rapidly in formation over Mount Rainier,
Washington on the afternoon of 24 June 1947.
It was, however, not the shape of the craft
themselves but the way they had moved through the sky that would fix
itself in the popular imagination. ‘They flew like a saucer would if
you skipped it across water,’ Arnold told reporter Bill Bequette of the
East Oregonian who then went on to use the term ‘flying saucer’ for the
first time in the national press.
A few weeks later, when the July 8 edition of the
Roswell Daily Record appeared in New Mexico with the front page
headline ‘Army Air Force Captures Flying Disc in Roswell Region’, the
transformation of motion into archetypal form was complete. Although
both stories originated in local newspapers, they were quickly picked
up all over the world, and the lure of the flying saucer, the promise
implied in its ellipsoid shape, has subsequently pervaded modern
popular culture.
Whatever the truth of these two controversial incidents, they
established flying-saucer science as one part Einstein, one part Flash
Gordon, with just a creative dash of craziness
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