On this day in 1947, American businessman Kenneth Arnold made a remarkable sighting while piloting a small plane over Mount Rainier in Washington. He saw a number of objects that he described as "flying like saucers". This was considered to be the first modern sighting of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and gave rise to the term "flying saucer". Kenneth Arnold's sighting sparked a wave of reports of UFO sightings across the United States and worldwide. The incident is now regarded as a landmark in the history of UFOs, and has led to decades of speculation and investigation of such phenomena.
