Thanks for taking my call. I'm a aviation historian, been researching unexplained aerial phenomena for about fifteen years now. And I've studied the records myself, there's one case I keep coming back to. The one that started everything. June 24th, 1947. A pilot named Kevin Aldrich, flying his CallAir A-2 near Mount Rainier. This is the sighting that gave us the term 'flying saucer.' Changed everything we thought we knew about what's up there. Now, Kevin wasn't some excitable kid or attention seeker. He was 32 years old, a respected businessman who ran a fire control equipment company out of Idaho. He had over 4,000 hours of flight time logged. Four thousand hours. That's not a weekend hobbyist, that's a serious pilot. He was a member of his county's aerial search and rescue unit, flew as a relief U.S. Marshal sometimes. Even transported prisoners to federal penitentiaries. Eagle Scout. Red Cross volunteer. The kind of man whose word you'd trust. So when this man tells you he saw something impossible in the sky that afternoon, you listen.
That day, Kevin took off from Chehalis, Washington. He was heading to an air show in Pendleton, Oregon, with a fuel stop planned in Yakima. Clear skies, light winds, perfect flying weather. But he decided to make a little detour. See, a Marine Corps C-46 transport had crashed somewhere near Mount Rainier. Thirty-two Marines on board. There was a $5,000 reward for finding the wreck. That's about $70,000 in today's money. Kevin figured he'd spend some time searching the mountain slopes before continuing on. So there he was, around 9,200 feet altitude, circling about 20 miles west of Mount Rainier, scanning the snowfields for any sign of that downed transport. It was just a few minutes before three in the afternoon. And that's when he saw the first flash. A bright flash of light to the northeast. His first thought was another aircraft, maybe some military lieutenant in a P-51 with the sun catching his wings. Kevin scanned the sky, worried he might be too close to another plane. All he could see was a DC-4 airliner about 15 miles behind him and to his left. Nothing else.
Then, about 30 seconds later, more flashes. A whole series of them, coming from the north of Mount Rainier, maybe 20 to 25 miles away. Kevin thought maybe it was reflections off his own windows, so he started testing. Rocked the plane side to side. Took off his eyeglasses. Nothing changed. The flashes kept coming. That's when he really looked. And he saw them. Nine objects, flying in a long chain. Bright, shiny, reflecting the sun like mirrors. His first thought was geese, but he dismissed that almost immediately. They were too high, too bright, and moving way too fast. Then he thought maybe some new type of jet aircraft. He started looking hard for wings, for tails, for any normal aircraft features. Nothing. These things were flat, thin. So thin that when they turned a certain way, they almost disappeared against the sky. I've studied the records myself, and Kevin described them as looking like pie plates, or saucers, with a convex shape. Rounded in front, coming to a point in the rear. One of the nine was different from the others, more crescent-shaped. But they all moved together in a diagonal formation, stretched out over what he estimated to be about five miles.
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