the Mount Rainier area, so Arnold decided to fly around awhile and
look for it. He was looking down at the ground when suddenly he
noticed a series of bright flashes off to his left. He looked for the
source of the flashes and saw a string of nine very bright disk-
shaped objects, which he estimated to be 45 to 50 feet in length.
They were traveling from north to south across the nose of his
airplane. They were flying in a reversed echelon (i.e., lead object
high with the rest stepped down), and as they flew along they weaved
in and out between the mountain peaks, once passing behind one of the
peaks. Each individual object had a skipping motion described by
Arnold as a "saucer skipping across water."

During the time that the objects were in sight, Arnold had clocked
their speed. He had marked his position and their position on the map
and again noted the time. When he landed he sketched in the flight
path that the objects had flown and computed their speed, almost
1,700 miles per hour. He estimated that they had been 20 to 25 miles
away and had traveled 47 miles in 102 seconds.

I found that there was a lot of speculation on this report. Two
factions at ATIC had joined up behind two lines of reasoning. One
side said that Arnold had seen plain, everyday jet airplanes flying
in formation. This side's argument was based on the physical
limitations of the human eye, visual acuity, the eye's ability to see
a small, distant object. Tests, they showed, had proved that a person
with normal vision can't "see" an object that subtends an angle of
less than 0.2 second of arc. For example, a basketball can't be seen
at a distance of several miles but if you move the basketball closer
and closer, at some point you will be able to see it. At this point
the angle between the top and bottom of the ball and your eye will be