At three o’clock in the afternoon he was near Mount Rainier. A plane was lost in the area, so Arnold flew round for a time and looked for it. He was looking down at the ground, when he noticed some lights away to his left.

There were nine of them in a line: the front one was highest, and the one at the back was lowest. Each object was round and shinning, and almost as big as a plane. The objects all travelled in line together, and sometimes they flew in and out among the mountains. Once, they passed behind one of the mountain-tops.

       Arnold noticed where they were at different times, and wrote it down. One question that interested him was: How fast were the objects flying? When he landed, he looked at his notes: 75 kilometers in 102 seconds. That meant the objects were travelling at 2700 kilometers an hour. That’s what he told the newspaper later. The newspapermen asked him: “How were these objects moving?”

     “Each one moved up and down as it travelled,” he said. “Like a plate when you throw it along the top of water.”

      This answer was taken up by most of his listeners. And next day newspapers all over the United States said Kenneth Arnold saw ‘flying plates’over the Cascade Mountains.

      Arnold didn’t say that at. He talked of objects that moved like plates thrown across water. He didn’t say they looked plates. But it was too late to make changes. Flying plates were in the news.