Mount Rainier Formation Intercept Attempt 1950

On June 21, 1950, exactly three years after Kenneth Arnold's landmark sighting in the same Mount Rainier corridor, a USAF pilot flying an F-51 and the crews of two commercial airliners simultaneously observed a formation of nine disc-shaped objects traveling at high speed near Mount Rainier. The discs were in the same echelon formation Arnold had described in 1947 and exhibited the same characteristic side-to-side rocking motion. CAA observers at a relay station on the mountain also filed a report. The FBI's Seattle field office — alerted under Hoover's standing order — dispatched agents and compiled a classified report that noted the geographic persistence of disc sightings in the Mount Rainier–Cascade corridor. The report directly referenced the 1947 Arnold sighting and suggested the phenomenon was not random but showed geographic pattern. USAF Air Defense Command scrambled jets from McChord AFB but the formation was beyond intercept range by the time they reached altitude.