MISSOURI — When pilot Kenneth Arnold took off from Chehalis, Washington, in his single-engine airplane one afternoon in June 1947, he was looking for a lost military aircraft that had crashed. But what he found was something completely different—something that would set off a cultural obsession in the U.S. that persists today.
While flying around Mount Rainier, Arnold reportedly encountered nine curious, wingless objects speeding through the sky at 1,200 mph, faster than any plane at the time could. Arnold spent years afterward trying to describe what he had seen, reportedly using a term that has been ingrained in the American lexicon ever since: “flying saucer.”
Since then, Americans have been uniquely fixated on the idea that aliens are somewhere in the sky above us—and the number who believe that to be true is growing. In 2019, a Gallup survey found that 33% of Americans believed some UFOs were alien spacecrafts, while 60% felt they could all be explained by human activity or some natural phenomenon. Just two years later, in 2021, 41% of respondents said they believed at least some UFOs were alien-related compared to 50% who were confident any sightings could be explained by human behavior or scientific events.
The full article is available at ozarksfirst.com.
(Story by Stacker, Tony Nguyen, found at ozarksfirst.com)
Storms Give Way to Quiet Weekend
Major Fishing Event Underway on Table Rock Lake
Severe Storms Ramp Up Today
Drought Minimal in Missouri, Major in Arkansas
Area Police Department Warns of Another Scam