Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Nathan Connolly, I'm Brian Ballow, and I'm Ed Ayers.

Each week, Nathan, Ed, our colleague Joanne Freeman and I, all historians, take a topic from the news,

and we try to see how we got here.

And we're going to start off today in 1947, flying over Mount Rainier in Washington State.

And why is it we're up here in Nathan? And who's flying this thing?

That's all right, it's all right. We're in the plane of a businessman named Ken Arnold,

and we're actually out here helping with the recovery mission.

A military plane went down somewhere in the mountains in Washington State in a call-win-out

to private pilots to go look for this plane.

This is historian Jeffrey Criple.

Ken Arnold was one of these pilots that was flying around

Washington State looking for a down military plane.

While Ken Arnold was in the air, he came upon something peculiar.

9 objects flying in perfect formation,

whizzing around the sky at speeds that he knew as a pilot were not possible for any

ordinary plane. Since this happened in the early days of the Cold War, Arnold assumed they were

enemy aircraft. The assumption was if the Soviets were going to bomb us, they were going to come

from the northwest. So he radioed in like a good patriot and reported exactly what he saw.

...