But I kept coming back to Mantell’s death and the Air Force orders for pilots to chase the saucers. If the disks were American missiles, that didn’t jibe. When I reached the lobby, I found it was ten after four. I caught a taxi and made the Congressional Limited with just one minute to spare. In the club car, I settled down to look at Purdy’s summary. Skipping through the pages, I saw several familiar cases. Here and there, Purdy had scrawled brief comments or suggestions. Beside the Eastern Airline report of a double-decked saucer, he had written: “Check rumor same type seen over Holland about this date. Also, similar Philippine Islands report—date unknown.” I went back to the beginning. The first case listed was that of Kenneth Arnold, a Boise businessman, who had set off the saucer scare. Arnold was flying his private plane from Chehalis to Yakima, Washington, when he saw a bright flash on his wing. Looking toward Mount Rainier, he saw nine gleaming disks outlined against the snow, each one about the size of a C-54. “They flew close to the mountaintops, in a diagonal chainlike line,” he said later. “It was as if they were linked together.” The disks appeared to be twenty to twenty-five miles away, he said, and moving at fantastic speed. Arnold’s estimate was twelve hundred miles an hour. “I watched them about three minutes,” he said. “They were swerving in and out around the high mountain peaks. They were flat, like a pie pan, and so shiny they reflected the sun like a mirror. I never saw anything so fast.” The date was June 24, 1947. On this same day there was another saucer report. which received very little notice. A Portland prospector named Fred Johnson, who was working up in the Cascade Mountains, spotted five or six disks banking in the sun. He watched them through his telescope several seconds. then he suddenly noticed that the compass hand on his special watch was weaving wildly from side to side. Johnson insisted he had not heard of the Arnold report, which was not broadcast until early evening. Kenneth Arnold’s story was generally received with amusement. Most Americans were unaware that the Pentagon had been receiving disk reports as early as January. The news and radio comments on Arnold’s report brought several other incidents to light, which observers had kept to themselves for fear of ridicule.