Today in History – January 16, 1984 – Death of aviator who made first widely reported UFO sighting in the U.S.

16 January 1984 With the release of the UFO papers almost to the day of his death, this Today in History seems most timely. On January 16, 1984, Kenneth A. Arnold, an American aviator, and businessman passed away. He is best known for making what is generally considered the first widely reported unidentified flying object sighting in the United States, after claiming to have seen nine unusual objects flying in a chain near Mount Rainier, Washington.

The Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting occurred on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that Arnold estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour (1,932 km/hr). This was the first post-War sighting in the United States that garnered nationwide news coverage and is credited with being the first of the modern era of UFO sightings, including numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks. Arnold’s description of the objects also led to the press quickly coining the terms flying saucer and flying disc as popular descriptive terms for UFOs.

Just a few days ago, “more than three decades’ worth of government UFO records are now yours to download and peruse, thanks to the efforts of some intrepid truth-seekers.

The massive data dump includes more than 2,700 pages of UFO-related documents declassified by the CIA since the 1980s. (The U.S. government also calls them “unidentified aerial phenomena or UAP). According to The Black Vault — an online repository of UFO-related documents operated by author John Greenwald Jr. — the documents were obtained through a long string of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed over the last quarter-century.” (1)

If you’d like to read them, download the CDROM contents at: https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ufos-the-central-intelligence-agency-cia-collection/

Sources: Wikipedia Portal Aviation, and (1) https://www.space.com/cia-declassified-ufo-archives.html

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