That all changed 75 years ago. In June 1947, a commercial pilot, Kenneth Arnold, claimed to have seen nine "flying discs" zipping across Washington state in the US at 1,200 mph. The editor of the East Oregonian newspaper sent this utterly unverifiable story to the Associated Press news service, and on 26 June, Hearst International put out a press release that contained the fateful term "flying saucers".
