United Air Lines Flight 105 Sighting, Emmett, Idaho

Summer 1947. On June 24, Kenneth Arnold's sighting had set off the flying saucer craze. Ten days later, Captain Emil J. Smith of United Air Lines still wasn't convinced. He had dismissed the reports: "what that other fellow probably saw was the reflection of his own instrument panel." As he boarded his Douglas DC-3 at Boise on the evening of July 4, he joked, "I'll believe in those discs when I see them."

Flight 105 left Boise at 9:04 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. Eight minutes later, as the airliner climbed out over Emmett, Idaho, First Officer Ralph Stevens spotted what he first took for an approaching aircraft. "What the devil is that?" he asked.

Five objects approached head on. Then they quickly reversed direction and flew parallel to the airliner. In a loose formation, they stood silhouetted against the sunset. "They weren't aircraft," Smith said later. "They were bigger than aircraft and flat and circular." They were smooth on the bottom and rough on top, with neither wings nor tails.

Smith called Stewardess Marty Morrow forward to confirm what they were seeing. Stevens switched on the landing lights. The formation changed from a very tight cluster to a more open one. Then it began to open and close repeatedly. Finally the first group veered to the left and disappeared in a gradual climb.

Then four more appeared to the left of the plane. Three flew in a straight line. The fourth was off by itself, higher than the flight path. Smith followed them, but the DC-3 could manage only about 185 mph.

"We saw them clearly," the crew said. "We followed them ... for about 45 miles. They finally disappeared. We were unable to tell whether they out sped us or disintegrated." In Smith's words: "when they did leave, they left fast!"

Smith asked the CAA tower at Ontario, Oregon to look southwest. An eastbound United flight looked too. Neither saw anything. The eight passengers reportedly did not see the objects.

Newspapers across the country ran the story the next day. On July 12, FBI agents interviewed Smith and Arnold. The case went into the Army Air Forces' early saucer file as Incident No. 10, in the Project Sign era. Air Materiel Command concluded: "Since the sighting occurred at sunset, when illusory effect[s] are most likely, the objects could have been ordinary aircraft, balloons, birds, or pure illusion." Yet James E. McDonald and other researchers say Project Blue Book lists the case as unidentified.

The Air Force also pointed to the power of suggestion during the craze. Critics of that verdict note that no other aircraft reported being in the area. McDonald stressed the clear weather, the several witnesses who knew aircraft, and the length of the sighting. Later, the aviation editor of the Idaho Statesman and Arnold flew the same route again. They saw nothing unusual. In 1948 a thesis writer summed up the crew this way: "These were reportedly competent men shaken by their own eyesight."

It was the first report by professional pilots in the 1947 wave and was often called the most famous sighting of that summer after Arnold's own. "Everybody can't be seeing things," Arnold said. Smith went on to investigate disc reports with Arnold, most notably the Maury Island claims, which were later admitted to be made up. Edward J. Ruppelt later retold the case in his 1956 book. On July 28, 1947, a different crew on Flight 105 reported a disklike object.