cont...
Given the smaller size and velocity, the single witness status of the event
falls into place. The DC-4 pilot wouldn't have a prayer of seeing a flock
of swans 14 miles away. Ground observers would likely miss swans two miles
up. The few that might notice them might never make the connection they had
anything to do with Arnold's "saucers." If somebody did make the
connection, would he overcome the reticence of saying the guy was that far
wrong?
That heel shape that Arnold drew could still be a source of sane objection. 
Even granting swans and heels are both bilaterally symmetrical, it is a 
stretch to call the match compelling. I suspect there is a different 
explanation for the heel shape. There was a plane of the era called a Flying 
Flapjack, which has a significant resemblance to Arnold's drawing. It was the 
fastest naval aircraft of its time. We can safely say Arnold was not looking 
at a Flying Flapjack in reality. There weren't nine of them around. They 
didn't fly quite so erratically. The relevant officials denied they were in 
the right place at
the right time. But, they weren't secret.
It had been featured on the cover of Mechanix Illustrated a month before
Arnold's experience. As a pilot, Arnold likely heard of the craft and it
influenced his depiction of the objects on some level of mind. Just as
people nowadays "fill in" perceptions of stars, ad planes, and the like
with their knowledge of what saucers should look like, Arnold may have
filled in his perception of waterfowl with knowledge of what fast planes
were then looking like. We know from the Project Blue Book files that the
1947 Rhodes photo, which, as noted earlier, was one of only two
similarly-shaped UFOs in saucer history, involved a
photographer/model-builder who knew of the Mechanix Illustrated cover and
suggested the involvement of Flying Flapjacks in the ongoing mystery.29
The likelihood of ornithological misinterpretation may be enhanced by an
incident that happened a month after the big event. While en route to
Tacoma to investigate the Maury Island mystery, Kenneth Arnold encountered
a cluster of twenty-five brass-colored objects that looked like ducks, but
displayed a terrific rate of speed. "I was a little bit shocked and excited
when I realized they had the same flight characteristics of the large
objects I had observed on June 24," he wrote. They also appeared round to
him. He turned his plane to follow them, but they disappeared to the east
at a speed far in excess of his airplane. He concluded, "I know they were
not ducks because ducks don't fly that fast." Maybe so, but he later
learned that several farmers in the vicinity "observed what they though was
a peculiar cluster of birds that morning." Ted Bloecher, a historian of the
1947 saucer flap dryly commented, "Understandably, Arnold did not report
this sighting to the newspapers, nor to the Air Force."30
It might be pleaded that this second incident is less relevant than it
strikes at first blush. It may less indicate a proneness to make a certain
class of errors than the fact that Arnold could have been overwrought and
desperate to find more proof of what happened to him in the midst of harsh
media and public opinion. Such conditions did not exist during the first
sighting. Yet, the fact remains we do have a troubling repetition under
conditions where independent witnesses exist who put a rather mundane slant
on stimuli Arnold hypes as extraordinary.
One last issue begs to be brought up. Arnold was an experienced pilot and
it could be pointed out that the average pilot would have ignored
sufficiently geese-like phenomena once he was satisfied they did pose a
collision threat. If they were the tiny image, so close to the limits of
acuity, that calculations indicate they were, why did Arnold so over-react?
One feature of the case invites notice as a possible psychogenic factor.
Arnold wasn't in the vicinity of Mount Rainier by accident that day. He was
searching the area to locate a large marine transport, a C-46, which had
gone down and crashed a month and a half earlier. The families of the
victims had put up a $5,000 cash reward for anyone who could locate the
crash site so the bodies could be recovered. This involvement of a mass
death suggests certain possibilities.
One is that the feat predictably exists that if death visited this place
once, it might well do so again. If Arnold was of a paranoid cast of mind
to begin with, such a consideration could make him keyed up to over-react
to the slightest stimulus -- a variant of a haunted house situation. A
second possibility is that Arnold was jazzed up by the prospect of getting
that money, but on another level of mind his superego was aware of the
ghoulish nature of his search. His conscience might have induced twinges of
self-loathing which manifested in fears of supernatural punishment -- the
fear of collision initially, but also manifest in concern the objects were
secret weapons. Still later, after the encounter and the publicity, he
feared they could be used to carry atomic bombs and threaten life on
earth.31 Here the psychology of paranoia colors the emotionality of the
event and pushes what was fundamentally trivial into a higher level of
significance. The undercurrent of Cold War tensions modeled on the surprise
of the secret superweapon sprung on Hiroshima a couple years earlier would
find in Arnold's paranoia a seed to grow a new fear for the culture to
embrace.
I am hopeful it is not personal conceit that lets me think prior skeptics
were wrong in their solutions and that this is, finally, the correct one.
It is simple logic that we can't all be right and that is assuredly
disconcerting if one hopes that skepticism should lead to a conclusion that
reasonable men can consider reliable and consensual. Some skeptics, I am
tempted to warn, were governed by an idee fixe idiosyncratic to each which
led them to apply solutions too repetitively in their work. So far as I can
discern, I have no particular obsession with birds. I feel this solution is
painfully banal and devoid of poetry or grandeur. It just seems to me it
fits the most facts with the fewest loose ends. Only the historical
importance of the Kenneth Arnold case makes the matter of its solution of
any interest. Reject it and no larger consequences to our understanding of
the flying saucer phenomenon seems to follow. Accept it and advocates will
say, "So what? We didn't consider it a classic anyways."
After 50 years though, aren't you glad we made the effort?
Notes
 23. Steiger, Brad, Project Blue Book, Ballantine, 1976, pp. 34-6.
 24. Geldard, Frank A., The Human Senses, John Wiley, 1966 pp. 83-7.
     Woodworth, Robert S. & Schlosberg, Harold, Experimental Psychology,
     Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965, pp. 382-6.
 25. Arnold, Kenneth, The Coming of the Saucers, Amherst, 1952.
 26. Arnold, Kenneth, "How It All Began" in Fuller, Curtis G., Proceedings
     of the First International UFO Congress, Warner, 1980, pp. 17-29.
 27. Aymar, Gordon C., Bird Flight, Dodd, Mead, 1936 p. 51.
 28. Heintzelman, Donald S., North American Ducks, Geese, & Swans,
     Winchester Press, 1978, p. 2. Kortright, Francis E., The Ducks, Geese
     and Swans of North America, Stackpole, 1967, p. 42.
 29. Project Blue Book microfilm roll #1, National Archives.
 30. Bloecher, Ted, Report on the Ufo Wave of 1947, 1967 p. III-14
 31. Project Blue Book microfilm roll #1, ibid.
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