Kenneth Arnold, 1947: The “Flying Saucer” Born from a Wrong Headline

On the afternoon of 24 June 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold flew near Mount Rainier in Washington State. He saw nine bright objects in a line, moving past the mountain peaks at a speed he estimated at more than 1,000 miles per hour. Arnold did not call them spaceships. He said their motion looked like a saucer skipping across water.

The next day, newspapers turned his description of motion into the name of an object. An Associated Press report described “nine bright saucer-like objects.” The phrase “flying saucers” spread across the United States and then the world. From that moment, every strange light in the sky could be pulled into a saucer shape, even though Arnold had never said that all nine objects were round.