United Airlines Flight 105 UFO Sighting (1947)

Background

United Airlines Flight 105, a Douglas DC-3, left Boise, Idaho on the evening of 4 July 1947 bound for Pendleton, Oregon. The sighting came about eight minutes into the flight, shortly after takeoff at roughly 9:04 p.m. Mountain Time, and it was reported by radio to the control tower at Ontario, Oregon. It arrived in the middle of a national surge that had begun two weeks earlier with Kenneth Arnold's report near Mount Rainier, and within a few weeks at least 800 similar reports had been logged across the United States. What set Flight 105 apart was who made it: the witnesses were trained professional aviators rather than farmers, prospectors or private fliers, which made the report hard to dismiss in the press.

The sighting

First Officer Ralph Stevens and Captain E. J. Smith both saw the objects. Flight attendant Marty Morrow corroborated the account, while the eight passengers reported seeing nothing. According to the newspaper accounts summarized by Wikipedia, the crew described four or five flat, circular objects flying in a loose formation, with one larger than the rest. They vanished and were replaced by four more. The DC-3 chased them for ten to fifteen minutes, about 45 miles, without closing the distance. Smith later told the Associated Press the objects were "bigger than aircraft," but told United Press he could not confidently describe their shape or size. That hedging is part of why the case has been read in such different ways since.

Investigation and aftermath

Newspapers across the country carried the crew's story the following day. The Idaho Statesman's aviation editor, and Kenneth Arnold himself, retraced the route by air and saw nothing unusual. The FBI interviewed Arnold and Smith on 12 July. In late July, Arnold and Smith looked into the Maury Island hoax, which had emerged from the same wave of reports. On 28 July, a different pair of pilots reported a "disklike object" on the same route, a sign of how quickly the flying-disc story had spread among crews.

The Air Materiel Command reached a conventional conclusion. Because the sighting occurred around sunset, when optical illusions are most likely, the objects could have been ordinary aircraft, balloons, birds, or an illusion. Later Air Force commentary went further and suggested that suggestion had shaped observers during the 1947 flying-disc craze. This explanation has been the official position in most accounts, though it does not address the crew's own insistence that the objects were large and kept formation.

Case for and against

The case for an unusual event rests on the professional standing of the witnesses, the corroboration from a crew member, and the fact that the pilots tried, and failed, to close with the objects. Edward Ruppelt, who later directed Project Blue Book, treated the wave of 1947 reports as a serious puzzle, and the press coverage at the time was wide and sympathetic. Against it stand the sunset timing, the absence of any sighting by the passengers, the vagueness of the descriptions, and the surrounding atmosphere of 1947, when a single publicized report could trigger a string of copycat claims. The case has no physical evidence and no photograph.

Richard Dolan's UFOs and the National Security State places the sighting within a broader argument about official secrecy, while skeptical accounts treat it as an early example of how a credible-sounding first report gets absorbed into folklore. Both readings depend more on context than on anything the crew recorded in the moment.

Legacy

Despite the official explanation, Flight 105 became a standard reference in UFO literature, cited as the first sighting by commercial pilots and as a benchmark for the early flying-disc era. The Columbus Telegram, Rapid City Journal and other papers that ran the story on 5 July 1947 helped set the template for airline-crew UFO reports that followed in later decades.