Flying Saucer

"Flying saucer" is the original 1947 press coinage for a UFO, born from a simple misquote. Pilot Kenneth Arnold described nine objects near Mount Rainier moving "like a saucer would if you skipped it across water" — a comment about their bouncing, skipping motion, not their shape, since Arnold's objects were actually crescent-shaped. Wire-service reporters compressed that into "flying saucer," and the disc image stuck instantly and permanently in public imagination, well before Arnold's own account could correct it. The consequence, which skeptics treat as Exhibit A for the psychosocial hypothesis, is that for years afterward a disproportionate share of witnesses reported round, saucer-shaped craft — a phenomenon ufologists later named "shape drift," in which the dominant reported shape of the era tracks the dominant media image of the era rather than any independent physical reality. "Flying saucer" dominated headlines and reports through the 1950s until USAF officer Edward Ruppelt introduced the more neutral "UFO" around 1952 specifically to get away from the shape it implied. The phrase now reads as dated and slightly campy, evoking 1950s B-movies more than a serious report, which is part of why "UFO" and later "UAP" displaced it in formal use.