Flying Saucers

A few years ago I went to the romantic-sounding town of Boise, Idaho, to meet Kenneth Arnold, the man who first reported flying saucers. In 1947 Ken was a salesman of fire-fighting equipment up there in the north-west of the United States, where the towns are small and the distances vast. To get from customer to customer he flew his own plane.

One day he was flying in brilliant sunshine along the Cascade Mountains, a spectacular chain of old volcanoes, when he saw what appeared to be nine distant aircraft, travelling at great speed towards Mt Rainier. He timed them going past two of the mountains, and worked out they were doing more than 1200 m.p.h. - a speed undreamed-of in 1947.

When Ken landed he was soon surrounded by journalists, demanding the details of how these things flew. Ken thought for a moment, and then said it was like saucers that you might skip across a pond. Next day the newspaper headlines screamed FLYING SAUCERS, which is what unidentified flying objects came to be called, and thousands of people claim to have seen them.

Do UFOs exist? Yes, certainly. One Christmas recently I was given a toy helium-filled balloon in the shape of a Tyrannosaurus Rex; we named him Trevor. On New Year's Eve, sensing that Trevor yearned for freedom, we took him out into the garden and let him go; he sailed happily up and away. To anyone else who saw him he must have been a UFO, although we knew him well.

On a more serious note, the military boffins must frequently try out new forms of aircraft for surveillance and defence, which have to be kept secret; these too are UFOs.

But are there saucer-shaped alien spacecraft hovering above - extra-terrestrials spying on our every movement and occasionally abducting helpless victims? No, I don't think so. I do believe there is likely to be some other life, elsewhere in the universe, but if it exists we are much more likely to hear from it by radio. To visit planet Earth would take hundreds of years, even from the nearest stars. Why should intelligent creatures bother to spend all that time travelling when they could communicate so much more quickly - it would be like travelling to Australia to say Hello to a complete stranger, when you could just pick up a phone, or use email...

Page last updated: Friday, 19 October 2007 12:49

Radio Times articles, from 2003-2005

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Flying Saucers