Kenneth Arnold with His 1947 Callair Mountain Plane (NC33355)
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An early photo of Kenneth Arnold with his 1947 CallAir mountain plane (NC33355) The Singular Adventure of Mr Kenneth Arnold Martin Shough1 © June 2010 (revised July 2010) The author would like to acknowledge in particular Mary Castner, Barry Greenwood, Patrick Gross, Jean-Pierre Pharabod, Don Ledger, Tom Tulien, Brad Sparks, Joel Carpenter, Bruce Maccabee & Andy Coupland for valuable discussions, encouragement and information during the course of this inquiry. 1 UK Research Associate, National Aviation Reporting Centre on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP). [email protected] The Singular Adventure of Mr Kenneth Arnold Martin Shough 1) Introduction In one sense it would be true to say that this seminal sighting of nine "peculiar looking aircraft" over the Cascade Mountains of Washington on June 24 1947 (see Appendix 1) needs little introduction. As a result of it pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold acquired a fame and notoriety far beyond anything he could ever have envisaged when he took off from Chehalis, Washington, and set a course for Yakima in his little CallAir plane that sunny afternoon. News of what the press dubbed "flying saucers" instantly captured the imagination of the world, and reports of things seen in the sky have ever since continued to fuel one of the 20th century's - and now the 21st's - most widespread, most persistent and most influential popular mythologies. Yet that mythology has effloresced into many extraordinary forms, most of which the Kenneth Arnold of 1947 would hardly have recognised as having anything to do with his own puzzling but straighforward observation. And it is necessary to record that despite more than 60 years of sometimes scholarly debate about this hydra-headed mythological monster, its origins remain not well-understood, its meanings controversial, its ultimate cultural value uncertain. Simply by being the first,2 Arnold's experience enjoys a unique position of pre-eminence in both the history and the semiotics of saucerdom, ensuring that his narrative has been retold and repackaged innumerable times. Tracing the progress of that one narrative in its transactions with the co- evolving meta-narrative of our times becomes a social history in itself, one which few historians have tried conscientiously to unravel. Instead, Arnold's narrative or some version of it has all too often been exploited, to the detriment of history and objectivity, as a mere didactic fable enlisted to serve conflicting ideological agendas. A survey of the literature reveals a good deal of inaccuracy and even misrepresentation. Such is to be expected in parts of the enthusiast literature. But all too often it comes from otherwise well- informed and sensible critics from whom one expects better. Perhaps in some cases this reflects the significance of the Arnold sighting as a laboratory for testing our theories about the psychosocial roots of the UFO myth - the issues are exposed with unique clarity, and the stakes are that much higher, the temptation to find confirmation of our prejudices that much greater. Of course most of science and society today remains aloof from the question. Keeping a cautious distance is understandable - a too-impressionable intimacy with the facts has undoubtedly left many enthusiasts in thrall to the myth itself. In-depth studies with no agenda do exist, but they are few and much published material is undeniably discouraging. The unhelpful result is that our opinion- formers by and large keep so prudent a distance from the myth that they cannot clearly make out the nuclear facts at all, leaving the rest of us relying with scant confidence on popular rumour. So there is still a need for a rigorous re-examination of what Arnold said he saw, as well as a mature understanding of the ways in which his story reflected, and was reflected by, the contemporary culture. Obviously no individual analyst can hope to have the 'final word' in such a complex and difficult area. It is an ongoing project, in which the present study is offered as a contribution. Inevitably many of the issues addressed here have been broached by others; but not always fairly, and, when fairly, not always thoroughly or in an integrated way. I hope the reader will also find some fresh perspectives here on what remains a fascinating historical mystery. 2 Not the first sighting of something puzzling in the sky, of course, but the first widely-publicised report of unidentified flying machines in the modern post-war era, and the unarguable trigger for the social phenomenon that ensued. 2) A note on units Belgian researcher Roger Paquay has argued3 that an aviator would automatically use nautical miles, so that all calculations of the sighting geometry assuming distances in statute miles would be in error by a factor 1.15. For example, by adopting Arnold's upper bracket of "25 miles" distance to the objects we could then place them nearly 29 statute miles (45km) away, with consequences for the discernibility of the shapes of objects that might be close to the limit of resolution of the human eye (see Section 8). It doesn't appear that this issue has been raised in earlier literature. The world of modern aviation does widely use knots, of course, and the modern aeronautical charts used for navigation in commercial and military sectors are scaled in nautical miles. But the AAF investigation established early on that Arnold never used specialised aeronautical charts (see Fig.1). Indeed it would be surprising to find a private pilot in the Pacific Northwest thinking in knots and nautical miles in 1947 when US CAA standards were still specified in statute miles per hour and would remain so for another 22 years.4 Even today performance specifications of aircraft are almost universally given in statute mph, followed by km/hr and possibly knots.5 Moreover if Arnold had meant knots because he thought in terms of knots, then one feels that he would have said "knots", but he always used mph.And we have several internal tests that can be done on speeds and distances contained in Arnold's own accounts to prove rather nicely that he was thinking in ordinary statute mph. For example: a) Arnold contrasts the calculated speed of his objects with the fastest jet airspeed thought possible in June 1947, i.e. approaching Mach 1.6 That speed he gives as "in the vicinity of 700mph".7 Interpreted as statute mph this is correct. But 700kt or 805 mph would have been well over the highest possible value of Mach 1, which rises to only ~760mph exactly at sea level b) Arnold describes8 how the speed estimate was made when he landed at Pendleton by transferring the objects' clock-timed 102sec transit between Mt Rainier and Mt Adams onto a map. Taking the distance between points near the summits, said Arnold, they kept coming up with about 1700mph. If he had meant 1700 knots (nearly 2000mph) this would imply that the distance between summits was about 48 nmi (55.2 statute miles). In fact it is only ~41nmi. But 102 seconds over 48 statute miles does equal about 1700mph, proving that they were measuring their map in statute miles.9 3 Roger Paquay, email to Martin Shough 24.11.2009 4 "Prior to 1969, airworthiness standards for civil aircraft in the USA Federal Aviation Regulations specified that distances were to be in statute miles, and speeds in miles per hour. In 1969 these standards] were progressively amended to specify that distances were to be in nautical miles, and speeds in knots." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_(unit)#Aeronautical_terms 5 A 2007 discussion on units on the WikipediaTalk aviation projects page concluded with the following (abbreviated) explanation of why statute miles and mph were settled on for WP:AIR over nm and knots: '. practically all aviation reference books intended for a general audience use statute miles; and very many (if not most) books intended for a specialised, enthusiast audience do too. Every one of the English-language books that I use on a regular basis for my contributions gives figures in statute, not nautical, miles. The nautical mile is not only irrelevant to most readers of our articles, but in fact to the specifications of many (I would guess even most) of the aircraft we have articles on . In the US, the Navy always used and continue to use the nm, but the Army/Air Force only introduced it after World War II (1946 or 48?), and civil aviation only started to use it in 1952. Even in 2007, many suppliers and manufacturers in the burgeoning homebuilt market seem to specify in statute miles . We cover a lot of pre-1948 US Army/Air Force aircraft and pre-1952 civil ones.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Aircraft/Units 6 Yeager's record-breaking experimental X-1 rocket famously did not break this so-called barrier until 4 months later. 7 Arnold, K. and Ray Palmer, The Coming of the Saucers, Amherst 1952 pp.13 8 Arnold, K. and Ray Palmer, The Coming of the Saucers, Amherst 1952 pp.13-14 9 Actually the true distance appears to be a little under 47 statute miles but the thrust of the argument is unaltered. Fig.1 Detail from the report on an interview with Kenneth Arnold, July 12 1947, by Army Air Force Counter Intelligence Corp agent Frank Brown, July 16 1947 (Project Sign files) c) Arnold, seeking to minimise this unbelievable result, said he then conservatively moved the points of measurement down from the summits to the bases of the mountain cones, "below the snowline", and got 39.8 miles.10 39.8 nautical miles or ~46 statute miles is about 8 statute miles too long to fit between the bases of the mountains below the snowline (~6-7000ft in summer; see below).