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Wikipedia says that today marks the anniversary of the modern era of UFO sightings. From the site:
The post World War II UFO phase in the United States began with a reported sighting by American businessman Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947 while flying his private plane near Mount Rainier, Washington. He reported seeing nine brilliantly bright objects flying across the face of Rainier towards nearby Mount Adams at "an incredible speed", which he calculated at at least 1200 miles an hour by timing their travel between Rainier and Adams. His sighting subsequently received significant media and public attention. Arnold would later say they "flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water" and also said they were "flat like a pie pan", "shaped like saucers," and "half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear. ...they looked like a big flat disk."
We know today that many UFO sightings were likely secret military aircraft or experiments that the public mistook for alien spacecraft. Of course, during these post-WWII years the U.S. was quite tight-lipped about its military activities because of the growing urgency and competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Of course, the era of Communist scare and McCarthy was still a few years in the future when Arnold saw his UFO. I'm wondering if so-called "UFO sightings" were a good or bad thing for the United States during the Cold War. On one hand, they may have provided fodder for conspiracy theorists and others who claim (perhaps even to this day) that the U.S. government is not transparent enough in its actions. On the other hand, sightings of UFOs may have been cause for concern by Soviets who had no idea of knowing what the truth to the matter was; the U.S. could take advantage of the situation by continuing the feed of misinformation to the Reds. Any thoughts?
