On June 24th 1947 pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains when his attention was drawn to a set of nine strange looking objects darting across the sky.

At first he thought they were reflections of the sun but after looking at them more closely he realised that they were objects flying in formation. The objects he saw had wings what were curved and shaped like a crescent moon.

His next thought were that they were some new aircraft that the Air Force were developing and he started to time them on his clock. He calculated that they were flying much faster than any aircraft he had read about.

When asked by reporters to describe the objects he told them ‘like a saucer would if you skipped it across water’.

From this moment on the term ‘Flying Saucer’ has been used by the popular press to describe UFOs.