The First Flying Saucer: Incident at Mount Rainier
And the UFO sightings that followed
It begins with the death of 32 people. The military plane had been one of six on a flight to Seattle in the winter of 1946. Over Washington the weather becomes lurid. There are heady, ugly winds threatening low visibility and spreading an eerie groan of turbulence along the metal bodies of the planes. Four of them turn back and settle down into the safety of Portland. One intrepid flight continues forward and somehow manages to avoid the worst of the storm, being the only one able to successfully arrive in Seattle. The final plane, with almost three dozen marines onboard, disappears after getting off course. Conditions around Mount Rainier make it impossible to find the wreckage amongst the young, sunlit layers of fresh snow. The wreckage is so well concealed that it would not be found again until the summer of next year when a $5,000 reward is offered for whoever can identify the site of the crash. The bodies of the marines are distorted beneath a glassy, refracted covering of ice. They are preserved within the white and water-beaded heart of a glacier.
A month before the discovery of the crash — a Tuesday, the 24th of June — amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold is exploring some of the shadowy canyons at the base of Mount Rainier in the hopes of finding the wreckage. It was this…
