ever, there have remained a percentage of this total [of all UFO
reports received by the Air Force], about 20 per cent of the reports,
that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible
things. We keep on being concerned about them."

In warping, twisting, and changing the Arnold incident, the writers
of saucer lore haven't been content to confine themselves to the
incident itself; they have dragged in the crashed Marine Corps' C-46.
They intimate that the same flying saucers that Arnold saw shot down
the C-46, grabbed up the bodies of the passengers and crew, and now
have them pickled at the University of Venus Medical School. As proof
they apply the same illogical reasoning that they apply to most
everything. The military never released photos of the bodies of the
dead men, therefore there were no bodies. There were photographs and
there were bodies. In consideration of the families of air crewmen
and passengers, photos of air crashes showing dead bodies are never
released.

Arnold himself seems to be the reason for a lot of the excitement
that heralded flying saucers. Stories of odd incidents that occur in
this world are continually being reported by newspapers, but never on
the scale of the first UFO report. Occasional stories of the
"Himalayan snowmen," or the "Malayan monsters," rate only a few
inches or a column on the back pages of newspapers. Arnold's story,
if it didn't make the headlines, at least made the front page. I had
the reason for this explained to me one day when I was investigating
a series of UFO reports in California in the spring of 1952.

I was making my headquarters at an air base where a fighter-bomber
wing was stationed. Through a mutual friend I met one of the fighter-
bomber pilots who had known Arnold. In civilian life the pilot was a
newspaper reporter and had worked on the original Arnold story. He
told me that when the story first broke all the newspaper editors in
the area were thoroughly convinced that the incident was a hoax, and
that they intended to write the story as such. The more they dug into
the facts, however, and into Arnold's reputation, the more it
appeared that he was telling the truth. Besides having an
unquestionable character, he was an excellent mountain pilot, and
mountain pilots are a breed of men who know every nook and cranny of
the mountains in their area. The most fantastic part of Arnold's
story had been the 1,700-miles-per-hour speed computed f