Kenneth Arnold UFO Sighting, Cascade Mountain Range, Washington State (July 25, 1947)
A first saucer wave case from Cascade Mountain Range, Washington State. Kenneth Arnold reported observing nine strange objects flying over the Cascade Mountains.
Background
On July 25, 1947, in Cascade Mountain Range, Washington State, U.S. government investigators recorded an unidentified-object incident later released to the public on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident is one of the first wave of “flying saucer” reports that swept the United States after the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947 and the Roswell incident of July 1947. The case was filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose Knoxville, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and other field offices routed UFO reports to headquarters under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations.
What the document records
Kenneth Arnold reported observing nine strange objects flying over the Cascade Mountains. He provided a written report detailing his observations, including estimations of their speed, distance, and size. The investigating agent believed Arnold genuinely saw what he reported and found his estimations consistent with aeronautical charts.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
""if I saw a ten story building"". ""I saw what he stated that he saw"". ""Mr. Arnold is in the wrong business, that he should be writing Buck Rogers fiction""
Type of case
The case is a visual sighting reported by ground or air observers.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by default. The federal government has not concluded that the events were anomalous, has not concluded that they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons (especially the Project Mogul series in the late 1940s), atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds, and astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon.