Paola Harris

“It is my impression that everyone, no matter what part they play in this existence that seems to go on into infinity, has a special purpose or a special task or a special reason for being what they are and for doing things they do.”
– The Coming of the Saucers by Kenneth Arnold / Raymond Palmer

We all know that June 24^th, 1947 was an important date in the history of this discipline we now call Ufology, the study of UFOs. It is obvious from Kenneth Arnold’s own words and those of his third youngest of four daughters, Kim Arnold, that Arnold had a sense of destiny about his sighting of nine disks traveling at over one thousand miles an hour in an echelon formation between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams in Washington State.  Being a pilot and a credible witness, Arnold is however most famous for coining the term “flying Saucer,” a word that has inserted itself in our working vocabulary of the study of unidentified flying objects in general. His description of the objects to newsmen in Pendleton, Oregon in 1947 was that “they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across water.” Somehow, he believed in this destiny, that he was in the right place at the right time.

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