After reading the
article about the research into the June 23, 1947 Cedar Rapids UFO sighting, a
few suggested that maybe we should do that for all these older sightings. I
think that the idea might be more trouble than it is worth. Here’s why.
The Cedar Rapids case
was important because it was alleged the sighting of a disc took place prior to
Arnold and more importantly, it was documented prior to Arnold. Granted, the
documentation was in a newspaper, but if the witness said that he had seen a
disc-shaped object and it was reported before Arnold, it became important. It
would suggest that the Arnold description didn’t have the influence that some have
since claimed.
Now, as I explained,
I looked at several sources, including Dick Hall’s The UFO Evidence. Some sources suggested the sighting was published
in newspapers but I could only find a single footnote and it didn’t reference a
newspaper article as the source. Instead, it cited Frank Edwards in a 1956
speech.
So I began the search
which eventually revealed the sighting was not made on June 23, but on the 24th,
it didn’t happen in Cedar Rapids or Iowa, and it wasn’t published until
sometime after Arnold. It became just another single witness sighting of
something in the sky that did nothing to advance our knowledge of UFOs.
Many of these early sightings
have nothing in them to help us. Many of the 1947 sightings that preceded
Arnold were reported after Arnold. If there is no documentation to support the
date, meaning something dated before the Arnold sighting hit the streets
(meaning when it was published), then it does nothing for us. There are many of
these, but in every case I have looked at, they were noted after Arnold.
I went back through
Keith Chester’s marvelous Strange Company,
looking for sightings of Foo Fighters that were described as disc shaped. The
trouble was all of the sightings he collected were told to him long after
Arnold had told his tale. That doesn’t mean that they were no good or were
confabulations; it just means that they couldn’t be documented prior to Arnold.
This all came about
simply because I wanted to document disc-shaped craft before Arnold… and there
is very little to do that. Yes, I know that John Martin used the term in the
late 19th century but it was a description of size rather than
shape.
Yes, I know that we
can track through sighting reports from the early 20th century and
find some. But these are all prior to 1940. What I wanted to find was some disc-shaped
craft reported between 1940 and Arnold in June 1947.
All this is a
long-winded way to suggest that looking into the sightings that were reported
after Arnold but claimed to have been made before Arnold isn’t going to help in
what I wanted to do. Some of these sightings are of no real scientific value no
matter when they were published. They were single witness and any evidential
value they had has long eroded.
There is one thing
that could be done. Everyone can do what I did with the Cedar Rapids sighting.
Chase it down. If you live in a town with one of these old sightings, you might
want to see if you can get to the original story and not the one that is
currently being reported. If you find the information is accurate, so much the
better… but I’ll bet that it has been skewed somehow. I don’t know how many
times I have tried to chase a sighting to the original source only to find it
is significantly different or even worse, was never reported. Someone made it
up long after the fact.
The point is that
some sightings are just of no real importance… others should be taken to the
original source and see how that stacks up with what we see today… and finally
there are some very important sightings that should be stripped of the rumors
so that we can concentrate on the facts.
