UFO Info: Why the Government Denies the Truth

The first widely reported sighting of unidentified flying objects unfortunately played right into the hands of the government, setting a precedent that enabled the Feds to relegate people who said they saw UFOs to the ranks of lunatics. Kenneth Arnold, a highly experienced pilot was flying near Mount Rainier, Washington on June 24, 1947 when he saw a group of nine objects flying in the distance. Because of his wide knowledge of aircraft and ability to gauge the speed of another aircraft compared to his, he was able to estimate their speed as they careened off at about 1200 miles per hour.

The reported speed alone would have drawn everyone's attention to his report, which was apparently undesired by our government, so a local reporter, who may have been in the Feds' employ, distorted the wording of Arnold's story. Mr. Arnold reported the aircraft were boomerang shaped, and that they flew a bit erratically, "like a saucer would while skipping over the water". The reporter wrote that Arnold claimed he saw "flying saucers", and our government ran with that and made sure that the term became a phrase of ridicule to make people who saw UFOs and reported them seem like they were mentally unstable.

The Feds jumped on the saucer angle because it fit their plan to keep the existence of UFOs secret, and they went out of their way to make sure the term stuck. It did, and soon many people who saw odd lights, planes reflecting sunlight, or even birds in flight claimed to have seen a flying saucer. This was just what the Air Force, which was in charge of anything flying around in those days, wanted. They, along with the FBI, made sure to refer to the sightings as "mass hysteria", "swamp gas", or even the planet Venus. When some of their own pilots chased these objects and didn't come back from the encounter, they found excuses to cover it up, like the case of the P-51 Mustang pilot whose plane was destroyed when he tried to intercept a UFO.