These excerpts from a hypothetical Baedeker have summarized the ideas publicized by the most literate and most persuasive advocates of the saucer theory. The chapters that follow will examine certain flying-saucer cases. As the discussion continues and is able to account for specific UFOs in terms of normal physical phenomena, these anarchistic worlds of saucerdom will gradually dissolve and merge with reality as we know it--a world that holds many mysteries but is still subject to the laws of nature. [I-1] Fort, Charles. _Lo!_ New York: Claude H. Kendall, 1931. [I-2] Air Force Files. [I-3] Keyhoe, D. E. _The Flying Saucer Conspiracy._ New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955. [I-4] ---- _Flying Saucers from Outer Space._ New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1953. [I-5] ---- _Flying Saucers: Top Secret._ New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960. [I-6] Michel, A. _The Truth about Flying Saucers._ New York: Criterion Books, Inc., 1956. [I-7] Jessup, M. K. _The Case for the UFO_. New York: Citadel Press, 1955. _Chapter_ II LO! The overture to the _Flying Saucer_ opera took place in the summer of 1947, presenting the main themes that were to develop with fantastic variations during the fifteen-year-long drama that followed: mysterious apparitions in the sky, alleged interplanetary visitors, government investigators, growing public excitement, civilians who zealously encouraged the hysteria, and, as a climax, an elaborate hoax that produced material “evidence” to prove the existence of spaceships. _Arnold’s Nine Disks_ The first man to report a flying saucer was a veteran pilot named Kenneth Arnold, representative of a fire-control equipment firm in Boise, Idaho. On the afternoon of June 24 Arnold was flying a private plane on his way from Chehalis to Yakima, Washington. Above the Cascade Mountains at about 9200 feet, he noticed a series of bright flashes in the sky off to his left. Looking for the cause, he saw what appeared to be a formation of peculiar aircraft approaching Mount Rainier at fantastic speed. There were nine very bright, disk-shaped objects which he estimated to be twenty to twenty-five miles away, forty-five to fifty feet long, and traveling at a speed of almost 1700 miles an hour. Talking with a reporter that evening, Arnold said that the objects “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” In a later report to Air Force Intelligence he stated: “They flew very close to the mountaintops, directly south to southeast down the hogback of the range, flying like geese in a diagonal, chainlike line, as if they were linked together.... They were flat like a piepan and so shiny they reflected the sun like a mirror.”[II-1]