Is anybody out there?

One summer in 1947 a pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying over Mount Rainier in Washington State when he caught sight of nine “strangely disk-shaped objects” ahead of him. They were weaving in and out of mountain peaks, “like saucers skipping on water”, he said. Thinking they were refracted light from water droplets he rolled down his windows, but the objects remained unchanged, moving impossibly fast (an estimated 1,700 miles per hour), flying in a long line and flashing bright lights. There were further sightings over the coming weeks, and newspaper articles that spawned the term ‘flying saucer’ and a feverish interest in UFOs.

Such sightings