Documents / Document
This US Air Force Project Blue Book case file on Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine objects near Mount Rainier, Washington, on 24 June 1947 was released through The Black Vault. It contains the Project 10073 record card, which concludes the objects were a mirage, plus Arnold's telegram, questionnaire data and interview notes. It also includes J. Allen Hynek's analysis arguing the objects were closer and slower than Arnold estimated. Other items are David Johnson's sworn statement on a Boise sighting, a Tacoma investigation telegram and news clippings.
“Nevers”11 pages
UNCLASSIFIED The next search, begun within half an hour after landing from the first one, consumed another two hours, but was negative. I explored the region where I saw the object. Immediately after sighting the object, I asked if there were other aircraft in the area. There was a P-51 of the 190th squadron practicing maneuvers in the vicinity of Kuna, but that was behind me. A G-82 passed over Boise, but I saw that aircraft go beneath me by some 2,000 feet. The P-51 in the vicinity of Kuna proceeded to the area where I saw the object, at my request, and conducted a search. It was negative. During the afternoon, flights of P-51s were sent out to cover the area, and some of them flew high altitude missions on oxygen. These searches were negative. I was subsequently informed that personnel on both the United Air Lines side of Gowen field, and on the national guard side, observed a black object maneuvering in front of the same cloud formation, which by now had grown so that the clouds reached a probable height of 19,000 or 20,000 feet from a mean base of 15,500 or 14,000 feet, mean sea level. Three of these men were national guard personnel and I talked to them, asking them to describe what they saw, before telling them my story, in order to avoid suggestion or inference of a leading nature. They saw the object (from the ground) while I was on my second search. They believed the time to have been 14:00 hours. The object performed in the same erratic manner, they said, as I observed. The above is the extent of the story, and information concerning myself is now in order. I have approximately 2800 hours of flying time in equipment ranging from primary trainers to 3-29s. Of course, that does not increase my powers of observation except as to those practiced daily by an airman. UNCLASSIFIED
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 62 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.