Snake River Canyon Disc: The A.C. Urie Sighting

Summer 1947. Flying saucers were in the news. Kenneth Arnold had reported his sighting on June 24, and the reports around Twin Falls, Idaho, kept coming. On July 4, about 60 picnickers there reported 35 discs. On July 11, teenagers in the same town built a model disc as a hoax. Then came August 13. At about 9:30 that morning, county commissioner L.W. Hawkins looked up at Salmon Dam and saw "two circular objects that reflected light." "I can't say what it was," he said, "but I can say there is something in the air."

About 1:00 p.m. A.C. Urie ran the Auger Falls Trout Farm in the Snake River Canyon, about 9 miles northwest of Twin Falls. There the canyon is roughly 400 feet deep and 1,200 feet wide. His sons, Billy, 10, and Keith, 8, were down by a boat. Billy saw it first. His father looked up.

The object came down the canyon from about half a mile away. It was light sky blue. The Times-News described it as "an inverted pie-plate, or broad-brimmed straw hat that had been compressed from two sides." Flat bottom. Domed top. About 20 feet long, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide. A red, tubular fiery glow burned at the side.

It flew about 75 feet above the canyon floor, level with Urie and some 300 feet from him. "The canyon floor is rough at that particular point," the paper reported, "and it rode up and down over the hills and hollows at a speed indicating some type of control faster than reflexes." Urie put the speed at about 1,000 miles per hour. There was very little noise. "Just a s-w-i-s-h when it passed by." The Mormon poplars beneath it did not simply bend. In Urie's words, they "spun around on top as if they were in a vacuum." Within seconds it slipped behind a hill about a mile away.

FBI agents interviewed the family. The boys remembered sharper, more angular construction than their father did. They saw "a knot on the side of the device from which the flames were shooting." The flame was about a foot through and ran back to the rear without tapering. Daylight showed between flame and body. No smoke. No smell. The FBI called Urie "a sober, middle-aged man" who was "completely sincere." Reporter John Brosnan agreed. Engraver Vic Goertzen drew the published picture from the family's description and sketches.

The file reached Project Sign. Its consulting astronomer, J. Allen Hynek, asked: "Could this, then, have been a rapidly traveling atmospheric eddy?" The Air Force concurred that the object "was simply a rapidly moving atmospheric eddy." Yet in 1955, Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, prepared by Battelle, listed the case as an Unknown, according to researchers Patrick Gross and Brad Sparks. Other accounts say it remains officially listed as explained.

In The Hynek UFO Report, published in 1977, Hynek returned to the case in a chapter titled "It Can't Be: Therefore It Isn't." He wrote: "The fact that I have never seen such an 'eddy' … and that I blithely discounted other pertinent evidence, haunts me to this day." He conceded that the witnesses deserved belief, and that career pressure had kept him from saying so.

No photographs exist. No radar, no traces. Only testimony and drawings, preserved in declassified files. Still, the case endures. Largely because the man who explained it away later took it back.