Eight Arnold-like objects photographed over Tulsa, Oklahoma, July 12, 1947 (from Tulsa Daily World).

The primary corroborative sighting, however, occurred ten days later (July 4) when a United Airlines crew over Idaho en route to Seattle also spotted five to nine disk-like objects that paced their plane for 10 to 15 minutes before suddenly disappearing. The next day in Seattle, Arnold met with the pilot, Cpt. Emil J. Smith, and copilot and compared sighting details. The main difference in shape was that the United crew thought the objects appeared rough on top. This was one of the few sightings that Arnold felt was reliable, most of the rest he thought were the public seeing other things and letting their imaginations run wild. Arnold and Cpt. Smith became friends, met again with Army Air Force intelligence officers on July 12 and filed sighting reports, then teamed up again at the end of July in investigating the strange Maury Island incident.

A similar sighting of eight objects also occurred over Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 12, 1947. In this instance, a photo was taken and published in the Tulsa Daily World the following day (photo at right). Interestingly, the photographer, Enlo Gilmore, said that in blowups of the photo, the objects resembled baseball catcher's mitts or flying wings. He was of the opinion that the military had a secret fleet of flying wing airplanes. He had been a gunnery officer in the Navy during the war, and using information from another witness, also a veteran, he performed a triangulation and arrived at an estimation of speed of 1,700 miles per hour (2,700 km/h), or essentially the same estimate as Arnold's. One of the objects, he said, seemed to have a hole in the middle.

Two or three photos of a similar, solitary object were taken by William Rhodes over Phoenix, Arizona on July 7, 1947, and appeared in a local Phoenix newspaper and some other newspapers. The object was rounded in front with a crescent back. These photos also seem to show something resembling a hole in the middle, though Rhodes thought it was a canopy. Rhodes's negatives and prints were later confiscated by the FBI and military. However, the photos show up in later Air Force intelligence reports.

Arnold was soon shown the Rhodes photos when he met with two AAF intelligence officers. He commented, "It was a disk almost identical to the one peculiar flying saucer that had been worrying me since my original observation — the one that looked different from the rest and that I had never mentioned to anyone." As a result, Arnold felt that the Rhodes photos were genuine.

SOURCE:  Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting