Kenneth Arnold

Kenneth Albert Arnold (March 29, 1915 – January 16, 1984) was an American aviator, businessman, and politician.

Arnold is known best for reporting what is generally considered the first widely publicized modern sighting of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the United States, after claiming to have seen nine silver-colored objects flying in unison near Mount Rainier, Washington on June 24, 1947. After his alleged sighting, Arnold began investigating reports of UFOs, writing and speaking about the topic for several years afterward.

In 1962, Arnold won the Republican Party's nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Idaho, losing the election of the same year.

Biography of Arnold Arnold was born on March 29, 1915, in Sebeka, Minnesota. He grew up in Scobey, Montana. He was an Eagle Scout and all-state football player in high school.

In 1938, he began work for Red Comet, manufacturer of automatic firefighting equipment. He was promoted to district manager the next year. In 1940, Arnold started his own company, the Great Western Fire Control Supply in Boise, Idaho, which sold and installed fire suppression systems, a job that took him around the Pacific Northwest.

In 1941, Arnold divorced his first wife, Lillian, and married Doris Lowe (1918–1990); they had four daughters.

Arnold was contacted by Raymond A. Palmer, editor of science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, Palmer sent $200 to fund the investigation.

Arnold interviewed Fred Crisman, an associate of the harborman, who reported having recovered debris from Maury Island in Puget Sound and having witnessed an unusual craft.

Writing in 1956, Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt would conclude "The whole Maury Island Mystery was a hoax. The first, possibly the second-best, and the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history." Ruppelt observed:

The government had thought seriously of prosecuting the men. At the last minute it was decided, after talking to the two men, that the hoax was a harmless joke that had mushroomed, and that the loss of two lives and a B-25 could not be directly blamed on the two men.

In spring 1948, Arnold and Science Fiction editor Raymond Palmer collaborated on an article titled "I Did See The Flying Disks", based on Arnold's sighting. In 1950, Arnold self-published a 16-page booklet titled "The Flying Saucer As I Saw It". In 1948, he authored "Are Space Visitors Here?" and "Phantom Lights in Nevada".

In January 1951, Cosmopolitan magazine published an article titled "The Disgraceful Flying Saucer Hoax", which accused Arnold of "[igniting] a chain reaction of mass hypnotism and fraud that has taken on the guise of a prolonged 'Martian Invasion' broadcast by that bizarre hambone Orson Welles".

Reportedly, Arnold came to believe he had experienced seven additional sightings, one of which involved a transparent saucer he likened to a jellyfish. In 1962, he argued "the so-called unidentified flying objects that have been seen in our atmosphere are not spaceships from another planet at all, but are groups and masses of living organisms that are as much a part of our atmosphere and space as the life we find in the oceans".

In 2012, daughter Kim Arnold explained that her family had felt threatened to speak about the topic.

Political career and later life In 1962, Kenneth Arnold announced plans to campaign for Governor of Idaho, and won the Republican nomination for the 1962 Idaho lieutenant gubernatorial election; in the election, Arnold lost to incumbent Democrat William Drevlow. In 1964, Arnold publicly campaigned for Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, flying an airplane painted with Goldwater '64 slogan "Au-H2O-64".

He appeared at a 1977 convention curated by the magazine Fate to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of the modern UFO age.

In 1984, Kenneth Arnold, aged 68, died from colorectal cancer at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Washington.