Kenneth Arnold's plane crashes

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Interesting POD. Arnold sighting certainly kicked UFOs into high gear. In the weeks that followed, everybody and his dog saw UFOs, everywhere. I think the UFO craze might start later and weaker, but there are other events that would start it. This one, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book

More generally, in the 50's everybody had his brain filled with sci-fi pulp stories of Aliens, astronauts, flying saucers. It is no surprise UFO sightings happened.
 
Um, I notice Wiki & links do not mention that era's US' lifting bodies. IIRC, there were very few occasions that they came out to play as a group. Also, without a bomb-load or brimming fuel tanks, they would have been that nimble...
 
Interesting POD. Arnold sighting certainly kicked UFOs into high gear. In the weeks that followed, everybody and his dog saw UFOs, everywhere. I think the UFO craze might start later and weaker, but there are other events that would start it. This one, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_incident

I don't know, I think it might butterfly it away entirely... There had been sightings before, and lots of them - the ghost rockets, the foo fighters, etc. But for whatever reason those ones didn't latch into the public consciousness the way the 1947 flap did. I don't really understand - and I'm not sure anyone understands - why that particular flap sparked this whole huge thing, or why it ended up being interpreted as aliens, so it seems plausible to me that even a slight change in circumstances could butterfly one or the other away entirely. Even if "lights in the sky" still become a cultural phenomenon, maybe they would be lumped in with ghosts as paranormal phenomena, the way writers like Jacques Vallee view them today. Or maybe they would be interpreted as produced by fallout from atomic testing - which, IIRC, was an idea that circulated briefly at the time - or some other hypothesis.
 
What might be an interesting angle to pursue is if Arnold crashed his plane and survived, after seeing his UFOs. And then an aspiring reporter starts a story with the headline "PILOT FORCED TO CRASHLAND BY FLYING SAUCERS" or something equally sensational.
 
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