Alternate Perceptions Magazine, June 2025
Kenneth Arnold, stigmatized as “The Man Who Started It All.”
By Brent Raynes
Shanelle Arnold holding an artistic rendering of one of her grandfather’s UFOs sighted on June 24, 1947.
The cover of The Coming of the Saucers by Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer, from 1952, republished in 2023 by Shanelle Arnold, available on Amazon.
Shanelle Arnold, 48, today a resident of Portland, Oregon, is the granddaughter of Ufology’s legendary Kenneth Arnold, a private businessman and pilot from Boise, Idaho, who happened to be flying his single-engine Callair plane through Washington state when he observed nine high speed crescent-shaped objects estimated to be flying possibly 1,200 miles per hour, near Mount Rainier, back on June 24, 1947. He thought that he had possibly observed guided missiles, suspecting them to have been of Russian origin. He felt it was his duty to report such a thing. It was shortly after World War II, we had fought Germans and Japanese, with enormous casualties, and nerves were still on edge.
Shanelle’s mother Kim Arnold said soon after his sighting he was describing the flight pattern of the objects saying how “they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water. And that’s kind of how the funny term flying saucer was born.”
“He got a lot of ridicule, and it made him a recluse,” Shanelle explained in a phone conversation with me. “But like now, with my era, people are a lot more open minded. There are people who actually listen to you. I just want him to be remembered for history.”
Shanelle said her grandfather had eight UFO sightings during his lifetime. The eighth one was over Susanville, California. It was there in 1952 that he saw two “craft,” one of which was totally transparent, however. “They looked like something alive,” he said. “I’ve had the feeling with these things that they are aware of me, but they made no effort to come close.”
Shanelle had republished The Coming of the Saucers in 2023, which originally came out in 1952, written by Kenneth Arnold and Amazing Stories magazine editor Ray Palmer (who also had a hand in creating the popular and still being published Fate magazine back in 1948, a non-fiction magazine dealing with genuine anomalies). She placed a color photograph of her grandfather on the cover, with a motion picture camera in hand standing next to his airplane. It’s available on Amazon. “I’m not really looking for any money or anything like that,” she said. “Mine has pictures in it of the family that nobody else had.” She pointed out how he was a real pioneer in this field. “But he felt like he was never really given credit for being the pioneer.” In fact, he often found himself being ridiculed, misunderstood, and dismissed out of hand for reporting such an aerial anomaly, which he simply felt was his duty as an American citizen, feeling it was something authorities needed to be alerted to. What if it had indeed been a threat of some kind to national security? Certainly, many citizens and even officials today have been concerned about large unidentified drones (or what they identify as such) appearing over neighborhoods and military installations today.
One of my earliest and most trusted correspondents in the UFO field was researcher and author Lucius Farish out of Plumerville, Arkansas. In a letter he wrote to me in December 1984, he wrote: "Everything I've been able to learn about Arnold (and I spoke to him by phone on a couple of occasions) leads me to believe that he was definitely not the type to have participated in any type of hoax. I don't know if Arnold knew Palmer prior to 1947 or not, but my impression is that he did not. Yes, Palmer published UFO reports (from readers) in Amazing Stories, prior to Arnold's sighting, but I don't think that has any real bearing on anything, except to indicate that Palmer was aware of such reports. That's probably why he contacted Arnold for his full story. I think Palmer was certainly capable of hoaxing and 'milking' any subject for all he could get out of it. I wouldn't have trusted him as far as I could have thrown him! But there is no reason that I can see to hold Arnold responsible for Palmer's possible misdeeds."
“Ray Palmer was definitely trying to promote himself with my grandfather’s book,” Shanelle remarked. “Palmer’s picture in the book is huge.”
“There were two officers who came to his (Ken Arnold’s) house and they had dinner with my grandmother and him.” The visitors were Lt. Frank M. Brown and Capt. William Davidsonof A-2 Military Intelligence with the Air Force. “He got really famous pretty fast, and the government was kind of concerned about that,” Shanelle said. Gregory Long, a UFO researcher and author, interviewed Kenneth Arnold in 1981. That interview appeared in The MUFON UFO Journal (Number 165, November 1981) and in it Long wrote about this concern: “After discussing Arnold’s sighting with him, the two officers went through his mail and selected letters from religious groups and organizations that had written Arnold for accounts of his experience. Capt. Davidson himself told Arnold that the government was aware of the effects of religious fervor, and that they did not want that to happen here.”
“Arnold also soon learned how the Air Force, at first personable and friendly to him and eager to hear of his sighting, soon changed its attitude, perhaps because of the threat his experience posed to the government.”
Of Kenneth Arnold, Shanelle confided: “He told me to think for myself and not really trust the government. There was one point where he had a reel-to-reel of a UFO over Idaho Falls and he sent it to the government to explain this UFO and they cut it out and sent it back and said, ‘There is no UFO in this film.’ That really made him mad. He got that from a friend that was in the military. So, he felt he had proof, and he felt like they could explain it and they just denied it. My mom Kim Arnold still has the film. He just got really disheartened by all the times he had tried to get something done.”
Kim told her daughter that back when all of this initially started and was going on that many who Kenneth Arnold thought were his good friends were actually “deceitful.” She mentioned for example how one Dave Johnson had been paid by military intelligence to spy on him. “Your grandfather believed Dave Johnson was his best friend.”
“Dave Johnson is the one who saw a flying saucer banking in a cloud over Boise,” Kim said. “He was flying around Boise looking for one. He printed an article on it in the Idaho Statesman newspaper. Another man who worked for the Idaho Statesman saw a flying saucer fly over his backyard while he was outside barbequing. That was printed in the Idaho Statesman newspaper too.”
Dave Johnson I was informed was the man who drove Ken Arnold out into the country outside of Boise, Idaho. He told Arnold to walk about 50 feet from the car, as it was quite possibly bugged. He warned him to stop talking about UFOs. This goes along with what Kim Arnold was saying in an interview about such an incident, recalling how her father was told, “Ken, these government men are nothing to mess with. My brother works in the government, and he’s seen them eliminate their own men.” She continued, “So, that’s the kind of story as small children we had to grow up and live with. We were in fear that the government would eliminate our parents or do something to harm our parents. It was a serious threat.”
Kim talked about how her father had given two or three speeches on UFOs in Boise, Idaho at the Knife and Fork Club. On the last one he was getting ready to speak when she claimed “the government men came in and stopped him from doing speeches. It was frightening.” Shanelle had told me how the Knife and Fork Club was going to pay her grandfather a hundred dollars per presentation. “He made the booklet, The Flying Saucers I Saw. The military learned of this offer and suggested Arnold not publicize the experience. The Air Force was still working on the investigation of his sighting. Then later a letter arrived from the Knife and Fork Club, mysteriously withdrawing the offer of doing the seminars. He couldn’t prove the military was behind it, but he thought the implication was too strong to ignore. He thought he would get people together and talk about their experiences and maybe get some answers, but he was stopped.”
But Kenneth Arnold was not discouraged. “He felt like it was his duty to figure this phenomenon out,” Shanelle said. “He spent like $30,000 of his own money investigating UFOs over his lifetime.” Some of the investigations he had done turned up in the early issues of Fate magazine. In Long’s interview with Arnold, he recalled details of some of Arnold’s cases that he had looked into. Long wrote: “Arnold related stories of UFO sightings experienced by other individuals in the Northwest and in Idaho. One that was particularly intriguing concerned two disks that flew over Mount Adams, Washington, and crashed in the trees, leaving behind a gelatinous substance and a sulphurous odor. The foreman of a construction crew building a road for the county at the base of the mountain scooped up a sample of the substance in a jar. The sample subsequently vanished into thin air.
“As the afternoon lengthened, Arnold brought out tape recordings of interviews he made with witnesses in the late 1940’s of strange phenomena in the skies. Three of these interviews concern flying men. “What was most striking about these interviews were the straightforward, detailed descriptions of the objects, and the insistence of the witnesses that they had seen something undeniably real. The mundane context of the experiences also seemed noteworthy. In one case, a woman had been eating an orange and had gone to the kitchen sink to wash her hands when she thought she saw seagulls in the air, but looking more closely, noticed that three men dressed in khaki suits and wearing helmets were flying in the sky at the height and speed of an airplane.
“In a fourth interview, an electronics and radar expert spoke with Arnold about mysterious targets observed at the Landing Aids Experiment Station on the coastline in Arcata, California. These targets appeared on radar for three years, most often in the summer, over the ocean, and travelled on 180-degree headings with little change of bearing at 30 miles an hour at 3,000 feet. The source of these targets was invisible to the naked eye and to aircraft sent aloft. In some cases, the targets split into two, which continued on 180-degree headings and then later merged together. Some targets came to a complete halt. The radar expert never found a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon after extensive study and the painstaking elimination of all possibilities.
“Arnold pointed out to me that the radar station was later closed down after military interest in reports of ‘mystery submarines’ in the area and of objects seen leaving the ocean.”
Arnold was very particular in how his story and investigations were presented. Shanelle said he turned down Doubleday, who offered to pay $50,000. However, they wanted to fictionalize the story, she said, and he was against that happening. In addition, the National Enquirer had their reporter Bob Pratt try and negotiate with Arnold to use The Coming of the Saucers, presumably I understand to serialize it in their tabloid. Arnold was offered $8,000, but he turned it down, feeling it was not a sufficient offer for a true story on one of the greatest mysteries in human history. And besides that, Arnold knew that the Enquirer had already paid one of President John Kennedy’s mistresses $250,000 to print her story.
The feeling of being under surveillance, of someone possibly having “bugged” one was becoming too familiar for Arnold. It seemingly happened while Arnold was investigating the so-called Maury Island incident soon after his sighting. He got a phone call in his Tacoma hotel room from a reporter with the United Press International named Ted Morello saying that his office had gotten several recent anonymous phone calls telling of Arnold’s movements and gave precise details about private conversations in the hotel room with Fred Crisman and Harold Dahl, regarding allegations of dramatic UFO activity in the area of Maury Island in Puget Sound [more on that in a separate article in this issue), and a United Airlines pilot Captain Emil Smith, who was assisting Arnold with the investigation. “He’d pick up the phone and hear an echo,” Shanelle told me regarding her grandfather. “He just felt the room was being bugged.”
After the two military men, Davidson and Brown, headed out on August 1st for their return to Hamilton field in California, their B-25 bomber’s left engine suddenly ignited over the Columbia River. Two passengers were able to parachute to safety, but Davidson and Brown died in the crash near Kelso-Longview, Washington. A Counterintelligence Corps team was dispatched to the site, but reportedly failed to locate any traces of the slag materials they were given that allegedly were dropped from a UFO in the vicinity of Maury Island. The newspaper reporter mentioned earlier had received a total of five anonymous calls on July 31 and August 1. It was on the day of the fatal crash that the caller claimed that the military men’s plane had been either sabotaged or shot down. Shanelle remarked how following that crash her grandfather was preparing to leave as well. “He left the airport to go back to Boise and somebody had shut off his fuel line and he almost crashed his airplane and he had to make an emergency landing. That really scared him. The whole Maury Island thing I guess kind of freaked him out.’
Palmer had reached out to Arnold soon after his Mount Rainier sighting hit the news, to which Arnold provided him with a copy of the report he had made to the Air Force. Next Palmer wrote back and offered Arnold $200 to investigate the claims of the Maury Island UFO case described by Crisman and Dahl, which Arnold agreed to do.
Interestingly, Crisman was no stranger to Palmer. In fact, in the June 1946 issue of his Amazing Stories magazine, a letter was published from Fred Crisman claiming how he and another airman in Burma nearly lost their lives in a cave where they encountered an alien machine that shot strange rays at them.
“The general opinion seems to be that Crisman had CIA connections, but whether he had deliberate plans to discredit UFOs, I don’t know,” Farish wrote me. “As you know, he was apparently involved in the JFK assassination in some manner, as he was subpoenaed to testify in Clay Shaw’s trial in New Orleans. Quite a mystery man, in several respects.”
Crisman was quite a complex character. I highly recommend Kenn Thomas’ book Maury Island UFO: The Crisman Conspiracy (1999). There’s simply not enough space to cover it all here. However, Kenn Thomas did an excellent and comprehensive job of it. Crisman was indeed a mystery man. A good number of researchers were really digging into his stories and background trying to pin everything down. Tom Adams of Paris, Texas, best known as the editor of Stigmata regarding the cattle mutilation phenomenon, was also busily trying to connect the many dots regarding Crisman, who actually wrote Tom in September 1970, claiming “I will have a book out this coming March, that will cover the story and most of the events of a later date. A great many people have written many words that are not exactly true about the events to which you refer.” Not unexpectedly that book never materialized.
In an interview on Mike Clelland’s Eye Witness Radio Network Kim Arnold revealed that shortly after that historic sighting in 1947 a mysterious “ball of light” appeared inside their home. “That was shortly after he [Kenneth] had seen the flying saucers and it first appeared in my older sister’s bedroom,” Kim Said. “Then I guess it went down the hall and then it appeared in my mother and dad’s bedroom, and my dad was so frightened he fell to his knees and started reciting the Lord’s Prayer.”
Kenneth Arnold also detected the presence of ‘invisible visitors’ in his home by noting deformations of his armchair cushions, according to Kim. “Toward the end of my dad’s life he did an interview in 1982,” Kim added. “He believed it was possible that the flying saucers were the connection between the living and the dead. He believed that possibly at the time of our death, that maybe this is just a different way we travel.”
Shanelle has taken her grandfather’s thoughts on UFOs and an afterlife connection to heart. She has made herself available to the public to talk about her grandfather’s historic legacy and its possible implications. In 2019 she appeared In Chehalis, Washington, at an event called the Chehalis Flying Saucer Party located at the Lewis County Historical Museum. She said she shared these personal thoughts with attendees, “The flying saucers are the connection between the living and the dead. They come from the dimension we go to when we die. They are the Angels of the Bible.” In September, she’ll be at the Flying Saucer Party again on Friday, the 12th, and Saturday, the 13th. (https://www.flyingsaucerpart.org)
In Long’s interview with Arnold in 1981, he began to wonder if Arnold was a “nuts and bolts-er” or if he had drifted into another area of speculation as he talked about a “dangerous theory” that Ray Palmer brought up in stories a man named Richard Shaver used to send him back in the 1940s claiming he had been in contact with the so-called Dero, subterranean beings who traveled about in craft similar to so-called “flying saucers,” and then too there was the mysterious book Oahspe that supposedly revealed a history of our planet and the heavens, going back some 79,000 years, with beings who also traveled in flying vehicles. Palmer proclaimed: “I think that the flying saucers are the spirits of the dead.”
Naturally, Long wanted to know what Arnold’s take was on Palmer’s “dangerous theory.” Long recalled, “He shrugged his somewhat bowed shoulders as he sat facing me in a wicker chair. ‘I don’t know what they are, but I’ll tell you a story.”
And here’s the story. Arnold shared how he often helped in search and rescue missions. One incident in particular from back in either the early fall of 1952 or 1953 had long remained on his mind. He had just landed his airplane at Fall River Mills in California, when it started to snow. He said the weather had been rough all that day. On the ground, Arnold soon learned that a plane had just crashed near a ranch some six miles out of town. When he arrived there with about twenty other men at the ranch, the plane had gone down some 20 to 30 minutes before. The farmer, his wife and children described how they had stepped outside following the crash and saw a basketball sized luminous sphere circling the area. Later a second sphere appeared just before the rescuers arrived, and like the first one, it disappeared into the worsening snowstorm. In fact, the storm had gotten so severe that it wasn’t until the morning that rescuers were able to reach the crash site where the bodies of two college students were found. One of them died from a crushed head, and the other had been practically cut in two, but somehow managed to crawl to the base of a tree where, according to a medical doctor, he died about 20 minutes after the crash, which would have corresponded with the approximate time that the second light was observed by the farm family!
Arnold claimed that from his experience such sightings were not unusual. He added that people involved in search and rescue missions often report seeing such lights in the vicinity of where fatalities have occurred, and that the same thing he recalled had happened at crash sites in Idaho.
In addition, he recalled how when he was a young boy of about seven, he and others observed a globe of light in the same room where the body of his great-grandmother lay in state. Shanelle told me, as Long had found out too, that her grandfather had been “a big fan of Charles Fort, who had published four books between 1919 and 1932, that had countless unexplained phenomena, including UFOs. He felt like he had some sort of task to figure that all out and he was a fan of the Oahspe Bible. The guy who wrote it was like a medium, a channeler. It talked about flying craft.” “He was kind of like Edgar Cayce,” she added. “I’m kind of into Edgar Cayce too. He was something of a prophet.”
As I am preparing this feature, my own copy of the Oahspe is resting on the dining room table in front of me. 991 pages. It’s a massive volume. Noted UFO author John A. Keel seemed deeply impressed by it himself. Out of all of the “inspired literature” he had poured through over the years, Oahspe seemed especially unique to him.
In his controversial and thought-provoking book UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), Keel wrote of the Oahspe: “It was written by a New York dentist named Dr. John Newbrough in 1880. He was, so the story goes, awakened one morning by a hand on his shoulder and a bodiless voice. He found his room lit up ‘with pillars of soft light so pleasing to the eyes it was indescribable.’ His mysterious visitors ordered him to purchase one of the newly invented typewriters and to spend an hour each morning sitting with his fingers on the keys. He didn’t know how to type, but he turned out a voluminous manuscript at the rate of about 1,200 words an hour. When it was completed, it was an intricate history of the human race, filled with amazing information about our solar system, such as the Van Allen radiation belt, which has only been recently confirmed by our space program. Much of the historical information in Oahspe checks out. A complex language, a mixture of ancient tongues and even Algonquin Indian, is defined and utilized in the texts. To research such a book and compile the language would have required many years of study and hard work for a seasoned linguist – which Newbrough was not.”
A few pages later in his book, Keel returns to the Oahspe volume with a pretty startling claim: “Buried within the fine print of Oahspe there are many words which I have heard UFO contactees use! Not many people have the patience and scholarship to read Oahspe, and I’ve yet to meet a contactee who had even heard of it! So here we have another piece of neglected evidence: the actual language of the ufonauts. It is not a secret. It is known and spoken by many.”
References:
British Flying Saucer Review (FSR), Volume 32, No, 5, pp 2-12, 1967 (from documents obtained by Peter Gersten and CAUS) with comments by John A. Keel, FSR Consultant. Link: https://www.calameo.com/read/00058403777718a28992f
The MUFON UFO Journal, No. 165, November 1981. Interview Kenneth Arnold: UFO “Pioneer,” by Gregory Long.
The Coming of the Saucers, by Kenneth Arnold & Ray Palmer. Republished by Shanelle Arnold. Available on Amazon.
