Kenneth Arnold Sighting: Was it a Horten he saw?

Gdi stupid phone Why can't i have decent mobile service. Sorry for the rant at the top...anyways to begin:

The premise of this thread stems from a question i had at the Bill Yenne AMA, after he replied to a previous question I had about Die Glocke. He mentioned that there were disk-shaped craft from the Nazis, and my mind immediately sprung to the Horten Ho 229, regarded as the first stealth aircraft (if actually went in production).

So I dug in some research on the subject of the Horten, and upon looking at the blue prints, i discovered a very distinct similarity, so up goes a browser tab and I've brought up the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947.

I'm sure most UFO enthusiasts know the story: pilot KennethArnols is flying over and sees a flying disk like objrct that reminds him of a skipping saucer.

As i am unable to post pictures right now, the description and later drawings of Arnolds' saucer look amazingly similar to the Horten, and it is no lie that the US Army picked up at least one of the original prototypes after the war. Add in the snatch up of Nazi scientists from Operation Paperclip, and there is a possible perfect storm of a clone of the aircraft that could have been seen by Arnolds and others, starting off the current UFO craze.

Stretching it furthrr, a Horten like craft could have crashed in Roswell and they (air force) purposely made it a UFO to distract from the project as a cover for the secret stealth program, which inturn produced the stealth bombers and perhaps the flying triangles of today.

These are just my thoughts on the subject at hand, so feel free to add your thoughts.

reply to post by TheToastmanCometh


his testiomony disputes your OP

reply to post by ignorant_ape


I see what you mean...Arnolds described them being more rounded, but who is to say the USAF didn't tweak the design a little to make it go faster/streamlined?

I am rewriting this post because I just realized that wing-shaped craft were in development in the US in the 40's. I was thinking that we didn't have evidence of such until later on, but I was wrong. Northrop messed around with many of these over the years, and right after WWII they seemed to have developed the YB-49, which has some characteristics of the 229. I had to look up the fact to learn that flying-wing aircraft were being toyed with since the 20's or so. It just seems that Germany was the first to actually produce a jet-powered wing. It seems that some of the advantages to such craft were already well known.

I though Arnold said he saw several craft all at the same time! Would they be flying test aircraft in such numbers?

reply to post by VoidHawk


Those who discredited him said that the saucers were a mirage or glare...

My thought is perhaps a Horten like plane was underneath him and the sun glinted off it, creating the glare which made it look like multiples?

As for a glinting Horten, mostlikely the Air Force would have been testing the flight patterns before painting on anti-radar paint, or they followed the original plans (the Horten bros said that the anti-radar property of the 229 was due to charcoal in the wood glue )

If I remember rightly, Arnold said, in essence, that he saw nine craft, eight disks and one semi-circular craft, which according to his calculations, were all travelling at minimum of 1,200 mph, a speed which is twice that of the Horton 229.

Perhaps he saw one of these.

reply to post by Thingy


What is the picture of first of all?

Secondly, how sure was Arnold's speed of the object? The plane he was flying was a CallAir model A-2, the top speed being 150 mph...and his speed was roughly 110 mph on his flight to Yakima.

The Horten had a reported speed of 607mph. Speed of sound is roughly over 700 mph.

Now i may be off in my physics, but in comparison with the A-2 and the Horten, Arnold may have seen the craft going much faster than he was, concluding that it might be going at a perceived supersonic speed, as the intruments on his plane could not have gone past the maximum speed.

Powdered Toast Man Rocks! I have a book called "Beyond Top Secret" that has a picture of an artists rendering of what Arnold might have seen, and it does look suspiciously like a Horten Flying Wing. But then again, flying a plane and trying to observe something that's outside the windscreen could cause a few problems with perception. I was once walking down a path in the greenspace near my home and saw a large group of objects with wings swept forward. they where white with black wing tips. I was sure they were alien, until the wings started flapping! I was shocked! how could I be so easily fooled? The were just cranes gliding, but they looked really like, well, some kind of space craft. Another time saw a flying saucer speeding over the SCIF I used to work at. Stopped the car. got out. blinked my eye's and just about got a "Holy S*^%" off before it banked, and it was a B-2! the lighting conditions made it look like it was a solid object. I beleve in UFO's because I have seen them and made official reports on them. What are they? UFO's But yeah, for the time and place, maybe it was some DoD sponsored research aircraft. or Pelicans !

reply to post by tencap77


Oddly enough, an explanation by sceptics tells that the objects Arnold saw were pelicans, but I'm sticking to my guns on the Horten clone.

doublepost

reply to post by TheToastmanCometh

What is the picture of first of all?

It's a frame from the Kumburgaz footage filmed by Yalcin Yalman

Secondly, how sure was Arnold's speed of the object?

I don't when Arnold obtain his pilots license, but he was 16 when he took his first flying lessons and 32 years old when he had his first sighting, in his book he states:

"Since 1944 I have spent more than 4,000 hours in the air flying in mountainous country. I call on my customers in five western states by plane and I take an active part in the Idaho Search and Rescue mercy flights as well as acting as a deputy sheriff for the Ada County, Idaho, Sheriff's Aerial Posse. I also act as relief deputy Federal United States Marshal; and frequently fly Federal prisoners up to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary."

So he was an experienced pilot who knew the terrain.

As for the objects speed you can only go off what he said and the method he used to reach his conclusion:

"Even though they held a constant direction they swerved in and out of the high mountain peaks which are found on the hogsback of the Cascade mountains between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. I determined my distance from their pathway to be in the vicinity of twenty-three miles because I knew where I was and they revealed their true position by disappearing from my sight momentarily behind a jagged peak that juts out from the base of Mount Rainier proper. Considering that I was flying all this time in the direction of their formation, this determination can be only approximate, but it is not too far off.
Between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams there is a very high plateau with quite definite north and south edges. Part of this chain-like formation traveled above this plateau toward Mount Adams, while part of the formation actually dipped below the near edge. As the first unit of these craft cleared the southernmost edge of this background, the last of the formation was just entering the northern edge. I later flew over this plateau in my plane and came to a close approximation that this whole formation of craft, whatever they were, formed a chain in the neighborhood of five miles long.
As the last of this group of objects sped past and seemed to gather altitude at a point beyond the southernmost crest of Mount Adams, I glanced at the sweep second hand of my instrument clock. As closely as I could determine, this strange formation of aircraft had covered the distance between Mount Rainier to the north and Mount Adams to the south in one minute and forty-two seconds."

"When I landed at the large airfield at Pendleton there was quite a group of people to greet me. When I got out of my plane no one said anything. They just stood around and looked at me. I don't recall just how the subject came up in those first few minutes after I had landed, but before very long it seemed everybody around the airfield was listening to the story of my experience. I mentioned the speed I had calculated but assured everybody that I was positive that my mathematics were lousy.
I don't know how many fellows sat down and started figuring it out ...When it kept coming out in excess of seventeen hundred miles an hour I thought, "Holy smoke, we're taking the measurement of distance far too high up on both Mount Rainier and Mount Adams." So we took a measurement of the very base, as closely as it could be determined, and which I knew from the map was far below the snow line. The distance was 39.8 miles. Even covering this distance, which was so far on the conservative side that I knew it was incorrect, we still had a speed of over thirteen hundred and fifty miles per hour. To me, that evening, that was that. They were guided missiles, robotly controlled. I knew that speeds of this velocity the human body simply could not stand, particularly considering the flipping, erratic movements of these strange craft."

For what it's worth, I believe that Arnold witnessed something that was not of this world, because I saw similar things in 1997, the description and circumstances differ slightly but I think they were essentially the same craft.