Nine Flying Objects: The Amazing Story of Kenneth Arnold

By Gregory Long

For decades, controversy has raged over the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) seen by thousands of witnesses across the globe. In June 2021, the Pentagon submitted a report to the US Congress admitting that jet pilots had been reporting UFOs for decades and that whatever their reality, the objects appeared to be an unknown advanced technology. June 24, 2022, marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of UFOs. On the same month and day in 1947, a thirty-two-year-old skilled mountain pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw nine silver, disk-shaped objects flying at incredible speed near Mount Rainier in Washington state. Fearing he had seen possible Russian missiles, he performed his patriotic duty and reported them to a small newspaper in Oregon. He described their motion as if "you took a saucer and skipped it across the water." Hence, the term flying saucer was born.Arnold, a well-known businessman with a reputation for honesty and integrity, was plunged into fame overnight. Nine Flying Objects tells the story of an innocent man who struggled the rest of his life with the consequences of his report. Set in the early days of the Cold War when the newly named US Air Force was emerging from the ashes of World War II and fear of the atomic bomb gripped the hearts of millions, Arnold poured his own resources into his one-man crusade to discover what he had seen and to fight those who doubted and ridiculed him. Based on interviews of Arnold and extensive historical documents, Nine Flying Objects captures the tenor of a time when UFOs were born and a single witness stood up for the truth against a government seeking to hide the reality of the single-most enduring mystery of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662474934

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Nine Flying Objects

Gregory Long

Copyright © 2022 Gregory Long

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-7492-7 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-7493-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part 2

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part 3

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Epilogue: Nine Flying Objects

Sources Used

Anonymous. Marine Plane List Revealed. Oregonian, December 14, 1946, page 3, section 2.

Death certificate, Kenneth Arnold, January 17, 1984, Seattle-King County Department of Public Health, Vital Statistics Section.

About the Author

Introduction

Seventy-five years ago, something extraordinary happened. Strange airborne objects began appearing in the skies of America. The objects had been seen earlier, mostly above Germany and Japan in World War II, and there had been a few scattered sightings after the war ended. But it was on June 24, 1947, that everything changed. On that date, mysterious aerial objects soared into the minds of millions of Americans and eventually captured the imagination of the entire world.

It was on June 24, 1947, that a private pilot reported observing nine silver-colored objects flying north to south down the spine of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. An honest, patriotic man with considerable flying experience doing business by plane throughout the Northwest, he was stunned by their flight characteristics, shape, and incredible speed, unachievable by any known aircraft on earth at that time.

The man, thirty-two-year-old Kenneth Arnold, described their flight to a news reporter, saying that it was as if you took a saucer and skipped it across the water. That description quickly transformed into the term flying saucer. Hundreds and hundreds of sightings flooded the Northwest and across the United States in the following weeks.

The US Air Force soon became involved, renaming the saucers unidentified flying objects (UFOs). After twenty-two years of futile and begrudging attempts to explain the objects, the Air Force washed its hands of the mystery in 1969, leaving a solution to be found by private citizens. However, after ensuing decades of persistent, recurrent sightings and numerous revelations of the government's continuing secret interest in the objects, the UFOs remain with us. Spectacular radar and visual sightings by Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015 propelled the mystery into fresh light in 2017, and today American military and intelligence organizations have established a formal project to attempt to identify the phenomenon.

This book commemorates what is usually viewed as the starting point of the modern UFO era. Few people know that Arnold pursued an answer to what he saw throughout his life, investing considerable money, energy, and emotions in his pursuit of the truth. Except for UFO historians, even fewer know that Arnold had several more sightings and was involved in a tragic flying-saucer hoax in Tacoma, Washington, not long after his sighting. The book serves to reveal everything that could be unearthed about Arnold. Hundreds of official government documents, newspaper reports, radio and TV broadcasts, private correspondence, and interviews with Arnold and family members reveal a persistent, sometimes idealistic portrait of the man who catapulted a ridiculed subject into national—and eventually worldwide—prominence. Arnold's story is also told within the context of the beleaguered US Air Force, suspicious of communist Russia and unable to explain the origin and purpose of the objects. Overshadowing Arnold's sighting and those of its own pilots, the Air Force continuously struggled to grapple with the potential threat of the objects in the face of mounting Cold War fears and Russia's development of the atomic bomb.

Will the world soon solve the mystery of the UFOs? Are they, as many believe, evidence of an extremely advanced nonhuman intelligence from another planet or parallel universe? Or will another seventy-five years elapse until we know what it was that Kenneth Arnold saw on June 24, 1947? And will all the ridicule he initially endured after he performed his patriotic duty to report the objects be washed away in the light of the truth?

To the memory of Patricia Long

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 the things they do.

—Kenneth Arnold, The Coming of the Saucers, 1952

Astronomy, I am told, is an observational science. One astronomer sees something in the sky, two or three others see something in the sky and verify his observation. It gains worldwide publicity and tremendous scientific coverage. One man reports flying saucers. He has a minimum of fifty thousand people in the world over a period of thirty years that verify his observations, and everyone is stuffed into the category of loony jerks. It is simply amazing!

—Kenneth Arnold, 1977

I have been asked what Ken's reactions were to the very difficult part he played, and played very well, as you recognize today. The government cover-up, the criticism, and the antipathy (debunking) to any ‘new' concept were difficult to accept and certainly had a deep effect on both of us as we endeavored to live our life patterns. However, he was a person of great strength and integrity. As the years passed and the sightings continued, he would simply chuckle and say, ‘Well, honey, the powers that be in the government haven't been able to slay the dragon yet!'

—Doris Arnold, 1977

When you see a flying saucer, then you'll know. And when you know, no one else will know.

—Kenneth Arnold, 1980

Prologue

August 9, 1945

The flight crew sat in motionless silence. Light glinted on the dark-green lenses of their goggles. They looked like insects. They might have been visitors from another planet.

As the B-29 banked, its huge metal frame creaking under its deadly load, the airmen's hearts beat faster. The plane was Bockscar, a spinner of dreams, a creator of history, all in the name of freedom, imagined into being by a science broken free of the soul and about to shatter time as never before.

Behind Bockscar lumbered another gray B-29, The Grand Artiste, one of the observer planes, and behind that, another observer plane catching up.

Clouds like white smoke disintegrated silently against the canopy of Bockscar, flitted their tendrils into space. The pilot, MAJ Charles Sweeney, felt the clammy chill that comes before the oncoming footsteps of death.

He straightened out Bockscar and checked his instruments. He sensed the gas burning in the engines, precious seconds exploding in cries of flame. They had lost time waiting for the clouds to clear. It was now or never.

The voices of Sweeney and his bombardier, CO Frederick Ashworth, hissed and snapped over their earphones as the two men coordinated their movements. Sweeney cursed at the clouds that kept hiding the earth below. Ashworth looked through his sights, the crosshairs vibrating, the droning of the engines rippling up his legs as he braced himself in his tiny cocoon.

We have to use radar, Ashworth called out into his mic.

No! Sweeney's metallic voice spoke in his ear. Look!

The clouds were parting as if peeled back by the invisible hand of a watching giant. The plane rushed out of the clouds into clear light. Twenty-nine thousand feet below, spread out in tiny, dark geometric shapes, lay Nagasaki. Without a thought, the final seconds dying, Ashworth pushed the button. The horrible egg weighed ten thousand pounds. Instantly, the plane lurched upward, like a balloon cut free, five tons of extra weight gone in the blink of an eye.

Observers in the trailing planes half a mile away saw a black unidentifiable flying object plunging downward. Sweeney looked at his instruments. Eleven-oh-one in the morning. One-one-zero-one. Falling, falling. Sweeney madly worked the controls, banking the plane to escape. Falling and—flash! A brightness the soul of a million suns! The flash broke through the arc welder lenses in their goggles, then blinked out.

William Laurence, a reporter, yanked his goggles off. A glorious bluish-green light Laurence could have never imagined illuminated the entire sky. Three shock waves rocked Bockscar, then crashed against the observer planes. The planes trembled uncontrollably. Laurence held tight. He surrendered his mind to the moment, telling himself to sear into his memory each sensation as it exactly happened.

Four more blasts in rapid succession battered the planes. Observers in the tail of one plane saw an immense orb of orange-red fire rising skyward, like a jellyfish toward the surface of the sea. With it, enormous white smoke rings floated. And then a pillar of lavender light tore upward like a rocket, attempting to tear asunder gravity and to launch itself into outer space. The pillar hurtled and stretched upward until it was two miles in length. Then the pillar transformed itself into a churning stem, its thick, wide bottom near the surface of the earth brown, its thin center amber, its top creamy white.

Below the wayfarers flying above the shores of a new reality lay the fiery landscape of a freshly born idea. The three B-29s turned to face the monstrous, toiling organism that grew taller and now poured itself out at the top of the stem into a giant mushroom that boiled and churned and rolled upward further to eight miles above the earth to gaze upon the world it knew it could now conquer. The mushroom cloud kept seething and struggling into life, gaining dominance over the pull of the earth, and then the mushroom cap broke free from the stem and soared upward, faster and higher, up to 60,000 feet, heading toward outer space.

As the cap flew upward, its shape changed to the form of a silken flower. Giant petals curved downward. The outside of the flower was white, the inside rose-colored. Thirty-five thousand atomized bodies had gone into the making of that flower, into that terrible beauty.

The flower kept rising, carrying its shrieking souls spaceward as if to meet waiting visitors there hovering on the edge of the thin shell of the earth's atmosphere.

The three planes turned away, not wanting to look further, their gas dwindling dangerously low. Some of the men on this flight, part of the 509th Bomb Group, would find themselves stationed later at Roswell, New Mexico, after war's end.

Beneath them burned Nagasaki. It was 11:02 a.m., August 9, 1945.

Part 1

Chapter 1

Kenneth Arnold

Many, many years before Nagasaki, an aerial intelligence hovered just at the edge of the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the blue-and-white planet below. Through the clouds, the invaders would have beheld a particularly huge, brown-green landmass on the planet's surface. Of course, the intelligence knew the name of this landmass. Slow-moving specks of life, two- and four-legged pulling crude-wheeled devices behind them, traversed the green forests, low hills, and prairies on the landmass. The intelligence heard the natives call the region Mnisota , the land of sky-tinted water. The space observers watched the two-legged ones, called the French, sail their puny brown ships across the blue-wrinkled face of a large water region called Atlantic. The explorers trickled in small numbers into Mnisota . The French claimed the land for themselves, but others soon followed, these from England and Spain. Over the next forty years, the region was settled primarily by Scandinavians, then in 1858, Mnisota became a thing called a state. And the space visitors knew that Germans had also sailed Atlantic. The space intelligence especially wanted information about the two-legged German specks that moved slowly on the globe to the Land of 10,000 Lakes, as Mnisota was now named.

No one knows exactly why, but he seemed a good candidate, the speck-man named Kenneth Arnold. Perhaps, it was his intellect; perhaps, something in his genetic makeup, his heritage. They might have tracked him from birth or merely chose him at random. But he was an excellent choice. He had German in him (and Scandinavian blood), not that that made a huge difference, but it provided Kenneth Arnold a certain amount of strength and fortitude for the task that the space intelligence wanted him to perform.

Arnold's name had its roots in Old German, from arn meaning eagle and wald meaning to rule or power. Therefore, eagle power. This was a fitting name for Kenneth Arnold for he would eventually take to the air, like an eagle, in his own aerial device. And later, after what he saw flying in the sky one day, he would wield his power against those who would come to ridicule him, although in the end of his life this power would die, and many questions of why he was chosen would die with him. And so the Kenneth Arnold story began in a time of great immigration.

It is believed that in 1853, a twelve-year-old Prussian girl named Catherine made her way to America on a ship with her father and sisters to escape political persecution. Apparently, her father died onboard during a calm in the Atlantic passage. Arriving in America, she married a man named Orlanda Arnold. Perhaps, Orlanda's name was actually Roland, the census taker having misheard Catherine's German pronunciation. In any event, at age nineteen, she gave birth to a son, also named Roland, on March 13, 1860, in Chicago, Illinois. Four months later, in July, Catherine and her husband and infant, Roland, moved from Chicago to St. Paul, Minnesota. There, the Arnold child was educated and grew up. It is unclear (sometimes, but rarely, the watchers failed at securing each fact of their target), but most likely, that his parents became well-educated farmers. In 1880, when Roland was twenty years old, he was on his own, apparently a farm laborer and living in a boarding house in St. Paul. However, four years later, he was discovered living with his mother, his father having died. Throughout his life, Roland would retain close ties to his mother.

At age twenty-eight, Roland fell in love with a Beata Jorgine Gjerde of Sacred Heart, Minnesota. Roland preferred to call her Bertha, sometimes Betsy. She, a daughter of immigrant Norwegians, was twenty-three. In October 1897, after Bertha gave birth to their fifth child, they moved their family to Sebeka in Wadena County, just about smack-dab in the center of Minnesota. There Roland built a two-story house at 220 Jefferson Avenue near the Redeye River.

There was a small thriving population in Sebeka. Things changed that year when COL William Crooks, chief engineer of the Great Northern Railway, visited the area. He mapped out a rail connection of the Great Northern to run from Sauk Centre in the south to Sebeka and beyond. The line would serve the now booming lumber industry that was supplying lumber to construct the burgeoning towns of the northern plains. The area was named on Crooks's maps Sebeka from the native Ojibwe sibi meaning town beside the river.

When thirty-one-year-old Roland Arnold arrived, Sebeka had 233 citizens. Sebeka's growth came not from just logging but from dairy farming. But Roland wasn't content with just farming. He had a deep need for social interaction, lots of talk, and friendship among a wider social network than just family. Bertha was a Lutheran, and they both attended the North Lutheran Church where they garnered many friends. Roland had a personality trait of needing to do good deeds for others, along with protecting the innocent and seeing that justice was properly served. By all accounts, he seemed a good man within the limits of the universal human frailty he shared with everyone else. With his abiding streak of friendliness, discipline, desire for social order, respect for the law, and a knack for business, he quickly became a leading community figure. He also had a talent for politics. It didn't take long for him to earn the confidence of the citizens of Sebeka and even become known by county and state officials.

Roland's many friends and town leaders asked him to become justice of the peace, which he readily accepted. It didn't take long for people to tip their hats and greet him with ‘Morning, Judge or merely refer to him as R. C. A common sight in Sebeka, he strode into various establishments sporting his prominent mustachios cascading next to his voluble lips to garner the latest goings-on in Sebeka or to talk the weather, the progress of crops, and political gossip.

Soon Roland was forty-eight and feeling his age a bit although he remained robust, hopeful, and maintained a great deal of physical strength. But despite his age, he decided to add to his income another way, which he was convinced could be considerable. He decided to homestead in far northeastern Montana near the Canadian border. It was boom time for oats and wheat, and plenty of rain was falling. In 1909, total wheat production reached eleven million bushels. And so it was to Montana that Roland Arnold headed with dollar signs in his eyes. He found a job with the Minnesota Threshing Company. As the alien intelligence observed, it was in 1912 that, while contacting farmers to sell the latest threshing equipment in the Plentywood and surrounding areas, Roland decided to drive west in his Model 10 Buick and then swing south to Glasgow, a total of 150 miles. He was on a journey to discover a place to homestead with dreams of becoming wealthy from wheat farming. He discovered a piece of land with knee-high grass and a spring creek running through it. He wrote excitedly back home to his folks in Sebeka, and he and his mother, Catherine, and later his oldest son, Edward, filed for homesteads.

In 1914, Roland resigned from Minnesota Threshing and moved his possessions from Sebeka to Montana on an emigrant railroad car. By 1915, Roland and his sons were settled into their new rough-hewn house, and the land was plowed and seeded. His son, Edward, age twenty-two, married a twenty-two-year-old woman named Bertha (or, as Edward called her, Bert). Soon, Bert was pregnant, and until she gave birth, this was not the time to travel. Time passed, and as the alien minds noted, at 3:00 a.m. on March 29, 1915, Bert gave birth in the Sebeka Clinic to a baby they named Kenneth. Unknown to the newborn child, he inherited all his grandfather Roland's genes for self-reliance, hard work, sales, and politicking. Several months later, little Kenny, as he was affectionately called, took the train with his mother and the rest of Roland's family to Scobey. Despite the harsh conditions on the plains, it began as a good life for Kenny Arnold and his extended family. The Arnold clan managed to plant wheat and make their first harvest, all while enduring howling winds and periods of blistering heat and subzero cold.

Little Kenny Arnold's first brush (there would be others) with death came a summer night at 1:00 a.m. when he was barely a year old. While asleep in his parents' house, a vengeful lightning storm struck. Sheets of rain pummeled the house, white flashes illuminated the dirty glass in the windows, and ear-splitting thunder shook the walls. Terrified, his mother leaped up from her iron bed and scooped up Kenny from the buggy which served as his bed. She cuddled him close to her breasts as the storm screamed outside. Suddenly, a blue-white lightning bolt crashed through the roof, ripping off part of the ceiling, and shot down the bedpost next to the buggy. It burned a hole through the wood floor and in a flash burned off Bert's clothes up to her waist, then raced to the buggy and set it on fire. The foot of the bed dropped with a thud into the hole in the floor. In a blink, flames were licking madly across the ceiling.

Helen, Bert's niece, who had been sleeping overnight, ran into the bedroom. Bert handed Kenny to Helen and ran for a pail. At last, the fire out, choking on smoke, Bert and Helen escaped the smoldering embers in the bedroom and staggered out into the storm. They cautiously picked their way through the blinding rain and down the muddy road to Roland Sr. and Betsy's house where Kenny's father, Edward, had been visiting. There, little Ken woke up and stretched his tiny limbs, having slept through the thunder and the fire, having escaped the mighty lightning bolt of the gods, either through chance or design. He would never know. The tiny spark of his soul slept coddled in that state of unconsciousness that surrounds each life from birth to death, the mystery lit bright and then darkening at the unpredictable end. The lightning bolt would appear later, as a symbol, but we are getting ahead of the story.

The Arnolds stuck together and made their respective homesteads work for them. Plentiful rain and the right temperatures were making everything good—there was plenty of food on the table. In 1915, the Arnolds were enjoying the fruits of that great miracle year of oats, barley, and wheat, the most ever grown in the history of Montana, forty-two million bushels. Fifteen miles west of the Arnold homesteads was the town of Opheim. It didn't take long for the good-natured and garrulous Roland to befriend the attorneys and become justice of the peace. Every Friday morning, Roland drove his new Buick into Opheim to handle legal matters and chat politics. Opheim boomed. In addition to the rain, World War I had started, and wheat prices were at a premium to feed the war effort in Europe. It was the good life, heaven on earth.

On the homestead, Kenneth Arnold grew up with animals. He took a special liking to dachshunds. Bert had nicknamed Kenneth Sonny Boy when he was three and gave him a cat named Snuggle Puss. When he was four, she had a new name for her Sonny Boy, Ready for the Roundup, and plopped him on Old Major, a horse. Then it hit, at first just a hint, lackluster rain in the spring of 1917. Then in the summer, scorching heat slunk in. Temperatures between 100 and 110 broiled the land. Hot, cruel winds blew away two million acres of topsoil. Soon the earth was cracked and blackened; the springs dried up. Then came a biblical plague of grasshoppers. They devoured thousands of acres of crops. Grass fires ignited. By spring of 1918, shocked homesteaders across central and eastern Montana could barely grow their own food let alone grow crops for market. Their savings bottomed out; they began selling out, then left in a mass exodus.

By 1919, when the war ended and post-war wheat prices dropped, the death blow struck. Between that year and 1925, more than half of Montana farmers lost their land, and sixty thousand people left the state. They headed mostly to California or to Oregon and Washington or back to their original homes. Somehow, the Arnolds hung on during the mass flight—either from the grace of God or luck or their own fortitude or a combination of all—but they hung on. During the disaster, Roland Arnold offered the dwindling community hope. He was so popular he successfully ran as a Democrat from Valley County for a seat in the 16th Legislative Assembly in the Montana House of Representatives. He served from January until August 1919, attempting to provide relief to farmers.

But the Arnolds continued to struggle. Then they could hang on no more. The devastation broke the family apart. In 1922, Roland called it quits, and he and his family returned to Sebeka to live where he assumed his previous role of justice of the peace, a gentleman farmer, and a man of wisdom. For a while, his son, Edward, worked in the Opheim Garage and then for the International Harvester Company, but in 1922, he packed up his wife and Kenneth and moved to Minot, North Dakota. And this was where Kenneth Arnold fully grew up. Minot was another one of those homestead towns that sprang into existence overnight as the Great Northern Railway inched its way west through North Dakota in the early 1880s. In those years, a few hardy homesteaders were already in the area. They started affectionately calling Minot the Magic City since it had sprung up as if by magic. By the time Edward Arnold arrived with his wife and Kenneth, the town had a population of 10,100. Edward Arnold, shattered by his Montana experience, at least had found a community that was economically vibrant. Unfortunately, he was poorly educated, and he had to cobble together various jobs to provide for his family. He eventually managed to buy a house in a pleasant neighborhood up against North Hill near the newly built Minot State Teachers College. He finally settled into operating a gas station in Crosby, northwest of Minot on the main highway.

In Minot, rapidly growing Kenneth Arnold (he was seven now) found many things to do after school and on the weekends. He ran and played in 52-acre Roosevelt Park next to the Mouse River, which featured a zoo and swimming pool. When he wasn't swimming in the pool, he was swimming in the Mouse River where he studied tadpoles and frogs in eddying pools. He fell in love with the hot summers and the bone-cracking cold of winter. He went duck and goose hunting with his father. As the days drew short in the fall, he drank in the crisp evening skies salted with handfuls of diamond-bright stars. He hiked the secret places of the woods to lie down in the shade and listen to the pulsing of his blood while his thoughts drifted like feathers.

In winter, Arnold skated in the rink. He raised a dog named Bogus and trained him to pull a sled in wintertime and a cart with wheels in fair weather. His mother, Bert, would remind him to take his skates off so the blades wouldn't cut the linoleum. In the spring and summer, Arnold would walk in the woods to pick berries and spy on gypsies who often camped in another of Minot's many parks, Oak Park, a wonderful place where you could get lost, pick crocuses, disturb gophers, and in winter trudge and slide down on makeshift sleds or bare-wood skis.

Arnold would walk for miles; the family car was used only for serious trips. Sweating from exercise, he would tromp into the kitchen, and Bert would reveal her latest homemade pies and pour milk collected from the backyard cow. In the evening, she played the piano and sang and encouraged her children to join her around the musical altar of the home. She loved life and wanted her children to love it the same.

School wasn't interesting, or when it was interesting and Kenneth got curious, he'd ask the teacher questions, and he couldn't control his questions, and they were damn difficult ones. They were philosophical and thoughtful, and he wanted to know why things were the way they were. He ended up disrupting the class; he wanted to talk so much. He was impatient; he wanted to learn how to do things and then do them without waiting, not just read about people getting up and doing. And because school wasn't enough doing, he went fishing instead. Or duck hunting. His father tried to lay down the law but failed. His father was physical and loud and sometimes abusive, and one time, Arnold ran away from home. And it was a long time before he came back, but it didn't change his father or school.

Arnold lived upstairs, and it just so happened that the back bedroom window led out onto the roof of the porch. So it was an easy drop to the ground at night when the old man was lying snoring after another day's grimy work. Like his father, Arnold could work with machines, and he knew the technical ins and outs of mechanical contraptions. But he vowed that he'd never do dirty work, not unless he could build something easily and make good money out of it.

At age twelve, Arnold burned to join the Boy Scouts. He loved Indian lore and the fine details of nature, the lives of insects, the budding of flowers, the growth of trees, the patterns of the weather, and the passage of the moon and stars. He loved to study nature; to him, it's an abiding mystery. The Boy Scouts represented in his mind the means to understand nature and to make himself into a man with principles and ethics. He believed in the ideals of the Scouts. He read their literature and memorized the words on the banners floating in front of a glorious American flag rippling in the wind: Loyalty. Patriotism. Service. Be Prepared. Do a Good Turn Daily. His mother pinned an Eagle badge on his shirt before a court of honor in Minot. On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law, to help people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. He believed in doing good to others and loving his country. He was an all-American, patriotic boy from the Midwest.

And Arnold believed in God, but it was a belief that was anchored in reason. For a time, he was a Unitarian. In a book he saved, he recognized the values that he was beginning to live as he grew toward manhood. The Bible was viewed as a book like other books requiring constant exercise of reason, not blind faith. Everyone had a soul that lived eternally in an infinite time where reason could lay hold on truth. Higher truth was to be found through freedom of belief. And young Kenneth Arnold wanted to be free.

Wanting to drink in life, push himself faster and harder, his hormones put him on motorcycles where he scarred himself and nearly killed himself. He raced dogsleds. He won the silver cup in the Lions Club Dog Derby on New Year's Day in 1929. The newspaper reporter who took Arnold's photo alongside Bogus noted the number thirteen on the young man's sweater, which Arnold said he had chosen because Ralph Pritz on the Teachers College football team wore it, and Pritz was a really good player. The headline of the story read: Bogus Came Through to Victory Despite Hoodoo 13 Handicap. Arnold's victory was on the first day of the first month of the year 1929. January 1, 1.1. Start of a new year, a new cycle.

Arnold didn't know it then, but the numbers would haunt him his whole life. In that same year, a man from Great Falls, Montana, Earl T. Vance, took Arnold flying, taking off from the new 148-acre municipal airport at North Hill. The airport had been dedicated in July 1928 during the Northwest Air Show in front of thirty-five thousand cheering people. Minot had a reputation for holding flying exhibitions since 1911. In 1919, a commercial airport was established west of Minot with only a half-mile runway with a single plane in a hangar. Now there were five planes and air service to Bismarck. Earl Vance was a heroic pioneer to many. He had entered the Army in 1917 to become one of the early graduates of the military's new aviation program. Before he left the service in 1919, he had instructed new military pilots. Afterward, he developed one of the nation's first civilian airports at Aberdeen, South Dakota, and flew his plane in barnstorming exhibitions in the Midwest. He sold airplane joy rides for a dollar a minute, ten minutes minimum.

Arnold was thrilled. He wanted desperately to learn how to fly. He had no money, but his father provided gasoline for Vance's plane, and using that gas, Vance gave fourteen-year-old Arnold the most memorable experience of his boyhood. Then and there, Arnold decided he wanted to become a pilot. He longed for his own wings of freedom. He dreamed, always dreamed, of flying.

Then he was plunging into bigger swimming holes and colliding into frantic bodies. He made the swimming team and was also playing football for the Minot High School Magicians. In his junior and senior years, he was selected all-state end of North Dakota. He avidly clipped out the sports stories from the Minot Daily News: Kenny Arnold played his usual driving game at the other wing. At the same time, he was running a football, and he was teaching young people how to swim and dive at Scout camps and at the municipal pool. He was a Red Cross Life Saving examiner for three years. When he was only seventeen, he entered the Olympic trials in fancy diving in Los Angeles but was eliminated. That didn't faze him; he was always optimistic.

He was offered an athletic scholarship to attend the University of Minnesota: diving and football. This was godsend considering the Great Depression and his modest background. He scraped up the money and bought a Model T Ford and drove up to Minneapolis with fifty-seven bucks in his pocket. While swimming, diving, and playing football for two coaches and attending classes, he washed dishes at the Bridge Café on Fourteenth and Fourth in Minneapolis. He was fully muscled now and fast and exuberant. And he was handsome: dark, gleaming brown hair, rich olive skin, a broad, strong nose, beautiful blue eyes, full sensuous lips, and the natural, warm smile of a salesman. He was popular, and he was discovering women, and they were discovering him. He had everything to live for. Then he injured his knee, and his athletic career, and his only real source of income to fund his education, ended.

He fell back on his voice, his self-confidence, and his charm, like his grandfather. He became a salesman. After working for a while in Minneapolis, he figured his success was out West. He attended the University of Utah. To make his way, he sold ladies' clothing: knit suits and dresses. Turns out Arnold's best clients were women in the red-light district. One day, while selling a dress to an attractive woman, but not a denizen of the red-light district, he was politely rebuffed for a date, but the woman stated he might like to meet her sister.

Her name was Doris Georgene Lowe from Weiser, Idaho. Doris was already engaged, but he pursued her. She was a willowy 5'8" tall brunette with skin like ivory. She had dimples and a fresh, healthy blush to her cheeks. Her dark-gray oval eyes invited him: their irises held the reflected purple light of the Idaho mountains. Arnold wrote her a poem in his own blood. Arnold was deeply romantic, deeply in love with Doris. He believed they were soul mates. He believed that destiny had brought him from the Midwest to find her.

Doris, Dearest of Dearest,

As these buds will open, so has our love opened to breathe the fresh air of an infinite plan. Likened to a drift of new fallen snow that has softly laden the mighty mountains from where God gave you life, my river of love from a different land has cut a pathway two thousand miles to envelope you with me into one, that we both may travel together down the final lush meadows and pleasant valleys into God's eternal sea of life. May God keep watch over us both in the days and the years that are yet to come.

Kenneth

If he were to rightly woo Doris and ask her to marry him, he needed money, and quickly. In 1938, he fell upon an offer to work for Red Comet Inc. of Littleton, Colorado, a manufacturer of automatic firefighting equipment. Red Comet needed a strong salesman, and impressed by Arnold's personality and character, they offered him a job to establish a regional office in Boise, Idaho. Perfect, for Idaho was Doris's home.

It took Arnold only two years to conclude that he could make a lot more money, tons of money, if he worked for himself. In 1940, he established his own company, Great Western Fire Control in Boise. On January 30, 1941, he married Doris Lowe.

The equipment Arnold sold was designed to put out fires in out-of-the-way ranch buildings, small-town warehouses, machine shops, stores, homes, dance halls, and other facilities where fire stations and volunteer firemen were scarce or nonexistent. He sold small glass bombs that emitted a burst of foam to full-blown water-ejection systems costing $10,000 or more.

In 1943, he earned his pilot's certificate. He was fed up selling by car, tired of being stuck in the mud or walking 15 to