Arnold's report appeared in the afternoon and evening papers in the northwest on June 25th. On the 26th, morning
papers were already carrying new reports. The first 2 to appear were those of Byron Savage, in Oklahoma City (see
I-1), and W. I. Davenport, in Kansas City (see II-1). Savage, a businessman and private pilot, like Arnold, must have
felt a special bond with the Boise observer, for he is quoted as saying, I know that boy up there really saw
them
.
The Davenport sighting had occurred on June 25th and he, like Arnold, reported having seen 9 objects, but with some major dissimilarities: the objects traveled in a loose formation, made noise, and left vapor trails. The only thing they had in common with Arnold's objects was their number, and their great speed.
So soon did Savage and Davenport file their reports that these two cases appeared simultaneously with Arnold's on the morning of June 26th as front-page, banner-headline stories in the Portland Oregon Journal. Later that same day, other reports began to appear.
There are 13 reported sightings on record for June 25th, 5 of which were reported by the end of June. (Several of these cases are of uncertain dates, based on the newspaper data that were available.) Most of the sightings took place in western states, but New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Missouri also are also represented. 3 of these sightings occurred after dark. 6 are multiple object reports, 4 of which described two UFOs. At least 19 people were involved in the reports, most of whom were identified.
On the following day, June 26th, the number of sighting dropped to 8, 6 of them, from the Utah-Arizona area, and one each in Oklahoma and Illinois. All were daylight observations except the one in Illinois, which is the only multiple-object report in the group. In this report, the witness, Mrs. J. M. Harrison, of Chicago, described watching a large fireball pass over at 2 a.m.; as it moved toward the northwest it diminished in size and broke up into 2 dozen small discs which whirled around so rapidly she was unable to make an accurate count of them (Case 64). The sightings of June 26th involved a total of thirteen witnesses, eleven of whom were identified by name.
On June 27th, the number of sightings rose again to at least nineteen. (Several other sightings reported in the Montreal Star a few weeks later may have been confirmations of the fireball meteor recorded by the American Meteor Society and described in Popular Astronomy, January, 1948, pp. 39-40; it was reported seen at 8:56 P.M. EST over upper New York state, moving roughly from the area near Albany toward Watertown, according to the astronomer, Dr. Charles P. Olivier.) Eight of the June 27th reports were from New Mexico, and three came from Washington state; one of the latter, from a town near the Columbia River called Woodland, was a most unusual and well-reported multiple-object sighting (see II-2). 3 reports were made in Texas, but 2 of these, in El Paso, lack even the barest of details, including definite dates. 2 reports were made in Arizona and one each came from Arkansas, British Columbia, and Vermont. (The Vermont report, Case 86, might also be a confirmation of the New York meteor reports.) 4 of these 19 sightings occurred at night, although the 2 El Paso reports are uncertain; the remainder of the sightings were made by day.
For June 28th through the 30th, sightings averaged about a dozen per day; thirteen for June 28th (including 2 of uncertain date), twelve for June 29th, and 14 for June 30th. The low percentage of after-dark reports remained about the same as earlier during these 3 days: 30 daylight sightings, 7 after dark, and 2 uncertain. Over half of these reports came from the west. Other reports came from Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Ontario, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee. 15 were multiple object reports, and of a total of nearly eighty witnesses involved during these 3 days, about 60 of them were identified in news accounts.
The Air Force files include seven reports from the period of June 28th through the 30th, none of them being classified as unidentified. Among the more interesting of these cases is a sighting by Carl J. Zohn, a Naval Research Laboratory missile expert, made at White Sands, New Mexico on June 29th (see III-18), and an air-to-air sighting made near Grand Canyon by a Navy pilot of 2 objects plummeting to earth on June 30th (II-12). Few of the 39 reports for this period received headline attention when they were printed, and by June 30th newspaper coverage was not quite as widespread as it had been several days earlier. But UFO sightings would very shortly pick again as the July 4th holiday approached.