Project Blue Book case file: Kenneth Arnold

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

It is therefore not wise any sharper except again as to the incidental demands upon the eyes of a pilot.

At the time of the experience related above, I had flown fourteen and one-half hours on an assignment to find a disc and if possible, to photograph it. In all frankness, I was tired. I may have been suffering, although slightly, from want of oxygen.

Prior to sighting the object, I had concluded there was no point in pressing the search, that I probably would never see the disc-like objects referred to by and by Captain of United Air Lines.

At all times during the search, both on that day and the two preceding days (particularly when I was with ) I had literally talked to myself to keep beating into my head that I would not fall victim to the power of suggestion or self-hypnosis arising from a naturally very intent desire to find a disc and bring success to the assignment given me.

I therefore do not believe that I was the victim of suggestion or hypnosis. I am familiar with the optical illusion of a fixed object begin- ning to move after it is watched a sufficient length of time. I know what tricks the eyes will play as to moving bodies, and have learned of this particularly during night formation flying.

I saw the object appear suddenly. If it had moved in a jerky fashion (as it did at first) for the full length of time I observed it, I would not be so strong in saying that I saw something not an aircraft, not a balloon, and not a corpuscle moving across the retina of either eye. The nausea described by the object when its edge was presented to me convinces me that I saw an object actually performing in an erratic flight path.

The question remains, of course, whether I saw it. The motion picture film, developed and processed by K. K. Stohr in the Lastman laboratories at