On 24th June 1947, a private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold entered the history books when he reported seeing a line of nine strange fast-moving objects near Mount Rainier in Washington State. His sighting - and the twisting of his description of the objects' movement through the air into the phrase "flying saucer" - sparked off a phenomenon which continues to baffle, intrigue and inspire millions of people seventy-five years later. The UFO subject remains unsolved even now, with new reports of civilian and military encounters emerging in the 2020s.
Arnold's sighting was not the first in 1947, but the press attention it received and the subsequent reports of flying discs and other mysterious objects by airliner crews and military pilots stirred the US Army Air Force into action. By the end of the year, the newly-created US Air Force had established its first official UFO investigation program, Project Sign, charged with collecting sightings reports and analysing them. Sign would give way to a similar program, Grudge, in 1949.
Whilst there are several infamous UFO sightings from the 1946-1949 period in addition to Kenneth Arnold's, many of the aerial encounters that took place during this time are much less well-known. This new work charts these events, including aircrew testimony and official evaluations. Intertwined around these sightings are the stories of the USAF investigation programs Sign and Grudge, which are fascinating in themselves.
If you consider yourself knowledgeable about the UFO subject, this book should still hold information that you've never come across before. For those readers who have come to Ufology after the ground-breaking events of December 2017, when three infamous US Navy FLIR videos showing mysterious craft were publicly released, this work will give you an incredible insight into the early years of the modern-day UFO phenomenon, setting the present day into context. If you don't necessarily believe in this sort of thing, then the story of how something gripped a nation is interesting in itself. Finally, if you are sitting on the fence in terms of what you believe about UFOs, this book offers a relatively unbiased look at what transpired between 1946 and 1949. The author is not trying to tell you that men from Mars were invading the Earth, or aliens from Zeta Reticuli. However, something was going on back then - and continues to even now, seventy-odd years later.