Overview
On 24 June 1947, Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mt. Rainier on a business trip from Chehalis to Yakima Washington in a light aircraft when he spotted a string of nine shiny, flying objects that seemed to skip around like a rock skipping on a water pound.
Arnold estimated the objects to traveling at speeds up to 1,200 miles per hour. These objects were flying from Kenneth’s left to the right of the aircraft and then they disappeared out of sight.
He referred to these objects as “saucers” skipping across a pond. When the news media got hold of the story, someone coined the term “flying saucers”. Thus for about 73 years, the term flying saucer became a standard for identifying something seen in the sky that was not immediately identifiable. A new phenomenon was born from the 1947 sighting of Kenneth Arnold.