Retro Raunch Revisit

JUN 24, 1947: American pilot Kenneth Arnold makes the first widely reported post-WWII UFO sighting in the USA after claiming to have seen 9 silver-colored discs flying in unison near Mount Rainier in Washington state. His description of the shiny craft flying at an estimated 1200m/h became nationwide news with coverage preceeding the later Roswell,NM incident in Jul of alleged recovery of debris from a crashed UFO on a ranch which was quickly attributed to having been a weather balloon that would spawn conspiracy theories for decades about a military cover-up, and later/further involving the secretive Area 51 USAF base in Nevada, and Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson USAF base in Ohio -- which the authorities have long-stated are research & development facilities but have had many argue are clandestine operational testing grounds involving captured UFOs to reverse engineer their technology and even holding actual alien bodies. The first reaction to Arnold would see a wave of over 800 more reported sightings from the public and he became famous literally overnight resulting in constant phone calls and receiving some 10,000 letters. Directly stemming from him, the press would coin the terms "flying saucer" and "flying discs" as the popular names credited for beginning the first modern era of UFO sightings. Shortly afterwards he was asked by Amazing Stories magazine to investigate 2 cases of harbormen in Tacoma,WA involving supposed fragments of a flying saucer involving strange white metal material. Known as the Maury Island Mystery, when he contacted the Air Force, 2 officers were sent to collect the wreckage and upon returning to their California base, were both killed when their B-25 Mitchell plane crashed in Aug. Arnold began writing & speaking of his experiences for years such as collaborating on articles & books, self-publishing pamphlets, and being interviewed by respected broadcaster Edward R. Murrow & telling him he had another 3 sightings of 9 spacecraft. In Jan 1951, Cosmpolitan magazine accused him of ignitng mass hysteria in a fraudulent manner similar to Orson Welles' famous Halloween radio prank in Oct 1938, the 'War of the Worlds' martian invasion. In 1955, Arnold believed he had witnessed 7 more sightings and began promoting a bizarre theory that UFOs were a kind of sky jellyfish that rather than being physical ships were rather organisms of an animal lifeform indigenous to Earth's atmosphere or interplanetary travel. In 1956, Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt (involved with 'Project Blue Book' which was the official systematic government study of UFO phenomena from Mar 1952 to Dec 1969, and has been criticized by detractors for being a deliberate misinformation campaign in service to shady national security) called the Maury Island Mystery "the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history". By 1962, Arnold had briefly shifted to politics first running as Governor of Idaho which he lost and then in 1964, campaigning for Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater who lost to Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1977, Arnold appeared at a convention by Fate magazine that marked the 30th anniversary of his Mount Rainier encounter. He died in Jan 1984.