On the morning of the same day that Kenneth Arnold made his sighting, a Portland prospector, Fred M. Johnson, saw a
loose group of five or six objects in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. He described them as round, metallic-looking
discs
and said they appeared to have tails, or fins, as they banked in the sun about 1000 feet overhead. They
were approximately 30 feet in diameter and Johnson turned his telescope on one of the objects for a closer look. As he
did this, he noticed that the needle on his compass was behaving in an unusual manner, weaving wildly back and forth
while the objects were overhead. This strange reaction stopped as soon as the objects moved off to the southeast. They
had been in view from 45 à 60 s. The Air Force classifies this sighting as Unidentified.
Residents of Acampo, a residential community just north of Lodi, reported that they had heard a loud roar and saw a
strange glow in the sky just before dawn. At the same time, the entire town had a power outage. Mrs. W. C. Smith, wife
of a high school physics instructor, said the noise was like a four-motored bomber with its props feathered for a
take-off
. Looking toward the sky she saw a red glow just as all the power in the community failed. Neighbors
reported having seen the same glow and hearing the same roar.
Erving Newcomb of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company threw cold water on any connection between the outage and flying
saucers
. He said a low-flying crop-dusting plane
had probably struck a power line
and burned out a
transformer. There were no reports of any damaged power lines and as far as anyone knew, there had been no
crop-dusting going on before dawn on that Sunday morning.
Six silver discs like silver reflections
were reported by Ralph Whitmore, an advertising man. He saw them at
3:10 p.m. going northeast over Roosevelt Park in the direction of Mount Wilson (Case 636).
Around the same time, an anonymous man from the Hollywood area phoned the papers to report that he had just seen 6
discs the size of small plates
hovering over power lines near his home when he went outside to find out what
might be causing "strange noises" on his radio.