On this day, 77 years ago, a UFO sighting was reported in the US, giving popularity to the term ‘flying saucer’. Here are three cool recommendations based on the incident to check out
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On June 24, 1947, a private pilot from Idaho, Kenneth Arnold, saw bright flashes of light passing through Mount Rainier, Washington, and exclaimed that they looked “like a saucer if you skip it across the water”. After conversations with Arnold, the press described the incident using the terms “flying disc” and “saucer-like”, based on his observations. The US press called this the earliest modern UFO sighting. If you, like us, cannot get enough of these mysterious celestial occurrences that continue to mystify the human race, here’s a fascinating list to deep-dive into interesting interpretations and analyses of the incident.
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Listen
Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World: Episode 46
Akin’s podcast looks at the mysteries of the world, the miraculous, the adventurous, and the unimaginable. They explore the unbelievable from the “twin perspectives of faith and reason”. In this episode, Akin looks back at the reports and shares how when he first read them, he believed these to possibly be reflections in the sky or an experimental aircraft, until he read Arnold’s own account. With Dom Bettinelli, he takes the listeners back to the 1930s and 40s through a wave of sightings that occurred at the time of World War I, dissecting some possible theories from the interviews that Arnold gave.
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Kenneth Arnold. Pic Courtesy/Youtube
Breaking Walls: Radio, Roswell and the Flying Saucer Crash
In this podcast, the wall-breakers bring together patches of radio announcements from the past, which reported incidents of “aerial objects”, and paint a picture of the 40s for the viewers to give context to each of these. If Akin’s podcast is his exploration of Arnold’s sighting, this one is a fantastic glimpse into such sightings from the standpoint of the reporters who spoke to those who witnessed these, including Arnold.
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An illustration shows six of the nine UFOs spotted by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947 based on his notes and description. Pic Courtesy/Wikimedia Commons
Read
The Coming of the Saucers by Kenneth Arnold
Straight from the man who saw something strange in the sky, this is an account of what happened on the day of Arnold’s sighting, and what followed thereafter. The book includes the author’s investigation into a controversial incident that had occurred earlier during the same week. It is packed with related anecdotes such as how he escaped a plane crash and an interesting history of sightings in the years that followed. The photographs allow the readers to witness what Arnold did.
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