Earlier this year a long-time newspaperman named Bill Bequette died at the age of 93 in Kennewick, Wash. An obituary described him as “straight as an arrow,” ” honest as the day is long,” and a man who didn’t like cliches. That’s a pretty good line for an obituary.
Another line in that obituary and others also noted that Bequette wrote the first “flying saucer” story.
Unfortunately — and I hate to write this so shortly about Bequette after his passing, he sounds like a grand newspaperman — the journalist apparently screwed things up by misquoting a source.
he web site Life’s Little Mysteries has published a tidy (and eye-opening) piece about the curious origins of UFO mythology, and Bequette plays a leading role.
From the story:
On June 24, 1947, an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying a small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington state when he saw something extraordinarily strange. Directly to his left, about 20 to 25 miles north of him and at the same altitude, a chain of nine objects shot across the sky, glinting in the sun as they traveled.
To read the rest of the article, click here.