UFOs - 'UFOs entered popular consciousness as "flying saucers" - the name an anonymous wire-service reporter gave to the silvery discs Americans were reporting by the thousands in the last week of June 1947. At 3 P.M. on June 24 private pilot Kenneth Arnold, passing over Mount Rainier, Washington, spotted nine shiny disc-shaped objects flying in formation at what he conservatively estimated to be 1200 mph. The worldwide publicity resulting from his sighting, plus the other sightings that came in its immediate wake, brought the UFO age into being.'

• Taken from the Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology edited by J. Gordon Melton.