Hello and welcome to the program UFO Warning.
In this episode, we're talking about the 1947 Flying saucer
wave. That's correct, the 1947 Flying
Saucer Wave. Now, a lot was going on back in
1947. Remember, in June of that year,
Kenneth Arnold had his sightings.
So those nine flying saucer discs, he called them over Mount
Rainier WA. In July, the first week, the
first week of July, there we had the Roswell incident where a
crashed UFO and bodies were reported.
Then, of course, we know that the Department of Defense came
in and just completely snuffed that story out.
And we had flying saucer stories happening in Kentucky and Idaho
just all over the place. In particular we had a couple,
well, more than a couple sightings actually.
And Saint Louis. And so many in fact that it was
reported as the flying saucer scare down there in Saint Louis.
Now this article comes to us from Saint Louis Dispatch dated
July 7th, 2023. Talking about that.
It says flying saucer scares kept Saint Louis on edge in
1947. Nova Hart and his fatherinlaw,
JH Jackson saw the mysterious things soaring noiselessly over
their July 4th picnic near Creve Coeur Lake and what is now
Maryland Heights, Hart said. It was silver, Gray and round
quote. Our wives saw it too, and so did
some people in an automobile who stopped when they saw us looking
up, said A Hart, then of 3969 A St.
Ferdinand Ave. in Saint Louis. I can say.
I can say it certainly was strange.
And none of us drinks a drop. So there you have it.
They've given you names, dates and places.
Pretty good reporting. Hart and Jackson were the 1st
St. Louisians to report one of the
flying saucers that suddenly were all over the American sky
in the summer of 1947. Some newspapers called them
Flying Disc. Eventually the accepted term
became. Unidentified Flying object or
UFO's So see this July 4th sighting would have actually
been before the reports of Roswell came out.
I think that's important to keep that in mind.
The article goes on. It says the first sighting was
made June 25th, 1947 by private pilot Kenneth Arnold who said he
saw nine saucers. Zipping at 1200 mile per hour
east of Seattle, it says another aviator spotted them over
Bakersville, California, and sightings poured in from Texas,
Louisiana, Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky.
Among the witnesses were the Idaho Lieutenant governor and a
weather Bureau meteorologist. Thus began in enduring national
craze. So you've got some pretty
reliable witnesses there if you have the Idaho Lieutenant
governor and a federal meteorologist.
Now the article continues. It says military brass scoffed,
then dispatched fighter planes to search for saucers.
If some form power is sending flying disk over the United
States, it is our responsibility to know about it, an Army Air
Force spokesman said. Just like today that first they
ignore it, then they try to debunk it, and when that doesn't
work, then they try to pretend like they're concerned and which
is what's going on here. The wave hit Saint Louis on July
25th when Hart told his story. One evening later, Doctor Walter
Hoffer, 23 Black Creek Lane in Ladue, saw six saucers flying SE
in formation. People in Shrewsbury, Webster
Groves and South Saint Louis also saw them.
George Malcolm 5632 follows on Ave. described the six as silver
streaks floating in the air. They were around and made no
noise. So you have a mass sighting of
these UFO's. They described them as flying
saucers. This is.
This is just after the Kenneth Arnold sighting, just before the
Roswell sighting. So you have these saucers moving
across the sky and they described them as having
streaks, is like it almost like there were comets, one person
said. But they were standing still so
they couldn't have been comets. So you see these UF O's.
First we have the one hovering above the park, broad daylight,
now we have these, They're being seen at various times.
This is what in in the evening and are saying that they have
streaks trailing behind the craft.
Reports came from 38 states. In Canada, newspapers dutifully
contacted scientists who suggested weather balloons,
reflections from searchlights, vivid imaginations, generalized
fear of world peril 1 California physicist cited the
transmutation of Atomic Energy. What you have here is the the
typical journalist contacting the authority figure, the
authority figure in synchronicity with the
government, is building this parallel narrative, and what
that involves is just making up all kinds of silly excuses, not
using one bit of critical thinking.
Or, you know, fall in the scientific method or anything
like that. There already was enough serious
news in 1947 to keep Americans on edge and the Iron Curtain run
across Eastern Europe. The Soviets coveted the atomic
bomb Communists were gaining in China.
Could a visit from outer space be so unlikely or unwelcome?
Well, I don't know. These things do seem to be
attracted to places where there's a lot of suffering or a
lot of drama happening. And maybe they were here in
response to us letting off all those nuclear bombs.
Who knows? So the article finishes up here.
It says. Inevitably, reports trailed off,
undone by mockery and pranksters.
On July 9th, nearly 100 people called the Post Dispatch to
report disk plunging from the sky.
It turned out three pilots had dropped them in a publicity
stunt for their flying school near Fenton.
That sounds like a really bad idea to me.
This is something we see a lot. I mean, anytime you have a UFO
wave of sightings like this, you're always going to have some
knucklehead out there trying to exploit the opportunity.
It doesn't change the fact that you've had all these reliable
witnesses report basically the same thing.
And. And these sightings that
happened over a period of several days, but not just in
Saint Louis, this was going on all across the country.
Now I want to take a look at another article I found.
This was really had to get off in the weeds to find this.
The website's called unexplainable.net and it's still
dealing with this wave of UFO sightings, in particular the
ones that happened around Saint Louis.
Now I'm not sure. It looks to me like the person
that posted this posted basically the copy of the report
that was that was there from the newspaper article and you can go
to the website and read it yourself there.
I've had a couple typos in it, but we'll get through it now.
They posted this on November 24th, 2005, so this has just
been hanging around out there on the Internet for what, 18 years?
But. I love looking at these old
newspaper articles from back in the day, and this one here says
it came from the Saint Louis Post Dispatch dated July 3rd
1947 and he's got it here On his website it says Army gets around
to checking flying Disk and is mystified.
Dateline, Washington, July 3rd. Now remember the dateline on
this article is July 3rd, 1947 and that first sighting reported
in Saint Louis was July 4th and hit the papers on July 5th.
Now of course before that we had the sightings in Kentucky and of
course in June we had the Kenneth Arnold sighting out in
Washington. That was a famous one.
But this is July 3rd, so just before the reports in Saint
Louis. It says Army research experts
can't explain the flying saucers reportedly seen in several
Western states, but they are investigating.
They said the Army Air Force has checked all their research
authorities and contractors, but none of them knew or could
suggest anything concrete about the saucers at 1st.
Army officers laughed off the reports.
Now they're beginning to take them at least a little
seriously. At any rate, the Air Force
Research Center at Right Field, Ohio, is looking into the
reports, and all service intelligence agencies are at
work on them. Remember July 3rd?
This is even before Roswell, Army experts suggested, as a
bare possibility that some civilian inventor has been
making experiments of some kind. Sounds like they're grasping at
straws. The possibility that the disk
might be of foreign origin was indirectly put forward by an
Army Air Force spokesman, who said.
If some foreign power is sending flying disk over the United
States, it is our responsibility to know about it and take proper
action. See how they're diverting
attention. Just like now you spot the UFOs
and the first thing they say is, well, it could be the Russians
or the Chinese. Same thing happening back then.
Meanwhile, 8 more names were added to the list of persons who
say they have seen strange objects in the sky.
EE Unger, meteorologist in charge of the United States
Weather Bureau in Louisville, KY said today he saw one of the
mysterious diss objects last night when leaving a Louisville
theater. So that would have been July
2nd. That one was spotted in
Louisville, KY and you got this other one spotted on July 4th in
Saint Louis and Boise. Lieutenant Governor Donald S
Whitehead revealed that at that last June 24th.
The day Kenneth Arnold of Boise, ID said he saw speeding objects
wavering through the air along the slopes of Mount Rainier, he
and Head Justice of the Peace JM Lampert observed a strange comet
like object hanging in the western sky.
There you go. Same day Kenneth Arnold has his
famous sightings. These guys say, hey, we saw a
saucer too, but this one looked like a comet because it had a
trail behind it. JM Lampert observed a strange
comment like object hanging in the western sky.
Dick Rankin, a former Portland, OR flyer with more than 7000
hours of airtime, declared he saw the mysterious disc over
Bakersville, California going 3 to 400 miles an hour on June
23rd. So there you have sightings on
June 23rd, June 24th, July 2nd. On July 4th, they're just keep
happening over and over and over.
And that's not even considering the crashed UFO Roswell that
happened a little before July 8th.
Now the the person that posted this website does have some, I
think, insightful comments. We'll take a look at those.
Now there's this comment that I really liked it says I find it
interesting to know it at this time.
The quoted witnesses are not yet, as Mr. Bill Moore phrased 2
farmers along the Mississippi River.
I hope you don't. Miami Quoting you, Mr. Moore,
but our EE Unger, United States Weather Bureau Meteorologist
Donald S Whitehead, Lieutenant Governor Boise ID, JM Lampert,
Head Justice of the Peace and Dick Rankin, a former flyer with
7000 hours flight time. So you're talking about people
that we would consider to be reliable witnesses.
It would seem to me that the meteorologist would have been
able to identify a weather balloon if you'd seen one.
Guys, got a point. And it would also seem difficult
for a weather balloon to travel 300 to 400 miles an hour if it
had been a weather balloon, as stated by the pilot, who again
would seem to me to be a reliable source as to the
velocity of the object he saw. Obviously this guy's flying an
airplane for 7000 hours. He probably knows how fast
something's going. And of course you have a
Lieutenant governor and a head justice of the peace.
Hardly incompetent sources. And later articles when the Army
and Navy began A concentrated campaign to stop the rumors.
And we'll go to that article next.
The citizens are told that hundreds of these weather
balloons are sent aloft by many organizations through the US
each and every day. We saw the same argument with
the UFO that was shot down over Lake Huron.
If it's not a party balloon, then it's just a quote, UN quote
research balloon put up by a balloon club.
Kind of. Stretching that, I think the
articles are there, it says. And look for yourself now.
We will do that. We'll take a look right now at
the Saint Louis Post Dispatch article from July 8th so you can
see things were kicking in the high gear by July 8th.
So you had the story break about the UFO crash in Roswell, NM and
that was out there for about a minute and then everything had
to kick in the high gear because all heck broke loose and so.
What I think we forget sometimes was that the Roswell crash
report came on the heels of all these other UF O's.
I mean, Roswell wasn't just this isolated event.
Roswell happened after you had the wave in Saint Louis and
Kentucky and Idaho and Washington.
So you have all these sightings building up to an actual crashed
UFO. Something obviously was going on
there. But instead of giving us
transparency and clarity, the US government decided to give us a
parallel narrative. Now let's begin with this
article. This report here also comes from
the Saint Louis Dispatch, and it looks like it's July 8th.
Now remember, that's the day that the Roswell report came
out. So.
But they when they first reported that, hey, we found
these crash spaceship and there's dead bodies.
And, you know, just swept the nation.
Of course now it looks like they're doing some backtracking
here. It says Army tells what disk are
not Washington, July 8th. Official Washington was sure
today that it knew what the flying saucers wore.
Not. But it hadn't the faintest idea
what they wore. The Army Air Forces said they
had the matter under investigation.
Preliminary study has disclosed that the flying disk are not. #1
Secret back-to-back to logical weapons designed by some foreign
power, #2 new type army rockets or #3 spaceships.
Privately some Air Force officers say the saucers are not
and let it go at that. But officially the A, A, F
that's the Army Air Force said it is keeping an open mind
because the disk have been reported by so many normally
responsible persons. So.
Apparently this article came out the same day as the report from
Roswell, but I don't see Roswell mentioned here, so this must
have just broke at the same time the story broke out there.
That just shows you how crazy this UFO wave was.
No such phenomena can be explained by any experiments
being conducted by the A, A, F, the official report said.
The statements of witnesses are being correlated in an effort to
identify the reported objects. Rear Admiral.
Paul F Lee, director of the Naval Research Laboratory, said
tersely. We concur in the Army
announcement. A guided missile expert attached
to the Naval Research Laboratory said he had seen one of the
saucers. Dr. CJ Zahn said he and two
fellow scientists reported it June 29th at White Sands, New
Mexico. When he reported when he
reported fighting to the Army, he said, he got nothing but
knowing smiles. That's one of their own guys, a
rocket scientist, he says. Hey, we saw one of these things
at White Sands. June 29th would have been five
days after Kenneth Arnold sightings, and about a week
before Roswell. We noticed a glare of the sky,
he said. We looked up and saw a silvery
disk rolling along. We watched the thing for nearly
60 seconds, and then it simply disappeared.
It didn't go behind a mountain range.
At one point it was clearly visible, and then it just wasn't
there. Wow.
So you're talking about something that almost seems
either it's just going to be so fast you can't see it or it's
interdimensional. But this just shows you how fast
were. Things were happening 1947 in
July, you had these multiple sightings in June and July, and
then the same day that that that this Roswell crash is reports
released at the same time you've got this basically a debunking
effort going on by the Army Air Force.
Against the sightings that have happened so far in the last
month. So right as the Air Force or the
Army Air Force is trying to debunk the current sightings
boom one crashes in Roswell, NM and those guys must have been so
busy. Now I want to take a look at one
last article. Now I want to finish up here by
taking a look at this Kenneth Arnold sighting.
It's kind of thought to be the sighting that really kicked
things off as far as UFO awareness in the United States
in the modern era. Back in June of 1947.
We do know that other people had witnessed craft before Arnold
came forward, but by him having the courage to come forward and
report these things, it just opened up a whole new Ave. of
disclosure. This article here is from the
Spokane Review. It's my Chris Apple title says
UFO's over Washington on June 24th, 1947. 73 years ago
Wednesday, Automatic Firefighting System company
owner and licensed pilot Kenneth Arnold of Boise, flying from
Chalet to Yakima spotted nine large metallic looking objects
flying rapidly over near Mount Rainier.
It would be the first to many reports of flying saucers or
unidentified flying objects from around the world.
While flying to Yakima on a sales call, Arnold read about a
downed marine C46 transport that had crashed near a mountain near
in January. With skies clear and a little
time on his hands, Arnold lingered over the area in hopes
of spotting the wreckage and earning a $10,000 reward.
That would have been a tremendous amount of money, and
if you look at the map here, you can see the sighting happened
just kind of in the. South Central, part of the
state, right there over Mount Rainier.
What a scenic place to spot these things at.
Arnold gave up his his search shortly before 3:00 PM and was
proceeding to Yakima when a series of bright flashes caught
his eye. At first he thought the objects
might be geese, but they seemed to reflect an awful lot of
sunlight. As if someone had started an
Arclight in front of my eyes, Arnold would say.
So that's like looking at a welding light.
It's pretty bright. And they appeared to be moving
incredibly fast, Arnold figured The objects were 25 or 30 miles
away and flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet.
Of course, you know about two miles, judging from their
distance, speed, and size against the mountaintop the
objects passed in front of and behind Arnold.
He estimated the size of each to be larger than a DC-10 airliner.
It's pretty good sized and moving about 1200 mph, which
would have suggested the craft were traveling at nearly twice
the speed of sound. The first Air Force pilot to
break the sound barrier wouldn't do that until October, four
months later. Of course, that was Chuck
Yeager. We certainly wouldn't wouldn't
have had nine of those airplanes to do that with.
Once he was back on the ground, Arnold filed a report of his
sighting. He said the objects didn't
didn't alarm him. He had just assumed they were
some kind of experimental aircraft.
But the military was baffled by the report.
So they claim. Both the Army and the FBI would
interview Arnold and come away impressed by his character and
apparent integrity. But they had no clue what Arnold
seen or what might travel that fast.
As far as we know, nothing flies that fast except a V2 rocket,
which travels about 3500 miles an hour, an Army spokesman in
Washington, DC, told reporters. And that's too fast to be seen.
Everyone says I'm nuts, Arnold told The Associated Press.
And I guess I'd say it too, if someone else reported those
things. But I saw them and watched them
closely. It seems impossible, but there
it is. Arnold described the objects as
being flat, like a pie pan and saucer shaped.
So that's what reporters wrote in the news stories.
Headlines flashed around the country of flying saucers.
Arnold didn't enjoy the the publicity in the least.
A preacher in Texas told his flock the sighting was a
harbinger of doomsday. Later that week, Arnold was in
Pendleton, OR for an hour for an air show, and when a woman in a
cafe recognized him from the newspaper reports and ran out of
the joint sobbing. There's the man who saw the men
from Mars. However, Arnold spent $150.00 on
a new camera with a telescopic lens, just to be ready if he saw
the flying pipe hands. You know, he sounds like a
pretty reliable guy. What's to say here he owned his
own company, Automatic Firefighting System.
Company owner. He was just wasn't a salesman or
employee. He mean he owned his own
company. He looks like a real well
dressed guy in the picture. He didn't have anything to gain
by this. He he really didn't.
There would be no reason for him to come forward with the siding.
And it really was what seems to have kicked off the awareness,
at least in UF O's on a mass scale.
Now, there were other sightings we see here July 5th, 1947,
Boise ID. That's the one we talked about.
Shortly after takeoff on a light on a flight from Boise to
Portland OR United Airlines, captain EJ Smith and his
copilot, Ralph Stevens see five flying disc.
Smith later tells reporters that before his own sighting, he had
been skeptical of Arnold's widely reported account.
So you got. June 24th, Arnold, you got
sightings on what the 25th. You got sightings on July 5th,
sightings on July 4th, July 2nd, and then Roswell, July 8th.
Well says here 7th and then it says here January 7th, 1948.
Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell, that was a sighting
there. They claim he blacked out
because he went too high and ran out of oxygen.
They don't know that. I mean that's just the official
story you had 19. July 24th, 48 Montgomery, AL.
The crew of a DC passenger liner flying from Houston to Alabama
passes a glowing, fast moving, windless torpedo shaped craft
that appears to have two rows of lit windows.
Air Force investigators say they probably saw a meteor because
meteors always have windows in them, right?
And you know you got one here in north in North Dakota where the
plane came back with too much weight activity.
That's October 10th, 1948, Minnville, Georgia. 1950 Great
Falls, Mt 1950 Lubbock TX 51 Washington DC 52 N Norfolk, VA
52 The list just goes on and on. Anyway, really cool stuff. 1947
the UFO wave. I think that really changed how
we view UFO's in the United States and the spectacular
courage of of Mr. Arnold to come forward to share his experience
along with these folks in Saint Louis who just said this is what
we saw. This is and and we don't care if
anybody believes us. We just we know what we saw.
Until next time, this is UFO warning over now.