The Maury Island UFO Incident: The Story behind the Air Force’s first military plane crash by Charlette LeFevre, Philip Lipson Read Free Book Online Page B

musically
talented (he sang and played the trumpet). Grandma says he was great
with his finances. She also says that he was highly intelligent, a genius!”
–Mike and Jeni James, October 13, 2006.

Kenneth Arnold
Background
     
Press photo of Kenneth Arnold in front
of his plane.
    Kenneth Arnold would write the
definitive first hand report of the
Maury Island mystery in his and
Ray Palmer’s “I Did See the
Flying Disks!” in the first issue of
Fate Magazine in 1948 and the
later book “Coming of the
Saucers” in 1952.
The first Fate Magazine featuring
    A
Kenneth Arnold gives a detailed personal
account of all the stories, sightings, and
information
that
cannot
be
lightly
dismissed as a hoax, and details of the era
in 1947 still reeling and on the alert from
World War II.
Kenneth Arnold’s plane and UFO sighting personal
account
of
the
events,
    Kenneth Arnold was born March 29, 1915 in Sebeka, Minn.
He
moved to Scobey, Montana when he was six. He attended school in
Minot, ND. He played football and was a swimmer and diver for the
University of Minnesota. Arnold would take his first flying lessons at
the age of 16, paid for in barter for gasoline from his father's filling
station. However, it would take him 13 more years to gain his pilot's
license, just short of his 30th birthday. In 1938, he went to work for
Red Comet, Inc. of Littleton Colorado.
He invented a specialized automatic dry chemical fire extinguisher
system, which he distributed through his company Great Western
Engineering that he founded in 1940.
He married Doris Lowe on January 30, 1941 and moved to Boise,
Idaho in 1944. He was active in the Idaho Search and Rescue Mercy
Flights and acted as a Deputy Federal US Marshall.
    On June 24th, 1947, Kenneth Arnold would became world famous
when he sighted a formation of nine flying discs over Mt. Rainier. Bill
Bequette's report on the AP news wire of Arnold’s sighting has been
attributed to first using the term "flying saucer" thus the “flying saucer”
was coined.
    On April 7th, 1950, Arnold would be interviewed by Edward R
Murrow, the famous TV journalist and explained the origin of the term
“flying saucer”:
MURROW: Here's how the name "flying saucer" was born.
ARNOLD: These objects more or less fluttered like they were, oh, I'd
say, boats on very rough water or very rough air of some type, and
when I described how they flew, I said that they flew like they take a
saucer and throw it across
the water.
Most of the newspapers
misunderstood and misquoted that too. They said that I said that they
were saucer-like; I said that they flew in a saucer-like fashion.
    In an interview with Bob Pratt in 1978, Arnold mentioned that he
was constantly bothered by “busybodies and intelligence people, they
ask a bunch of stupid questions and then all of a sudden ask a question
that I know they couldn’t possibly have asked if they weren’t pretty
familiar with what the military was trying to do. It’s like they all went
to the same school.
    He also mentioned that he learned that Lieutenant Frank Brown
was a counter-espionage agent working out of Mitchell Field in NY.
Nevertheless, he and Captain William Davidson were very gracious to
him. Around 1950 he was invited to speak at “The Knife and Fork
Club” on its lecture circuit for $100 per day concerning his sighting.
He even printed his own booklet ” The Flying Saucer as I Saw It” to use as
a program guide for his speech. Arnold said that Brown and Davidson
said, “You let us take care of it, Ken. Don’t offer yourself for
exposure, or we would advise you not. Of course you can do as you
please, but I think you will regret it.”
“Another thing that puzzled us was that we were familiar with the
details of what happened there at Tacoma (Maury Island) and when the
news releases came out the public relations apparently through the
Pentagon, there wasn’t any semblance of the truth of the whole thing.
It was
just laughed off as if