It was a hot summer day on July 4, 1947, when Captain Emil Smith and his crew set off on their routine flight from Portland to Seattle aboard United Airlines Flight 105. As they navigated through the skies over the Pacific Northwest, they were expecting nothing out of the ordinary.
But as they flew, they were suddenly startled by multiple unidentified objects in the sky. These objects were unlike anything they had ever seen before – they were shiny, disc-shaped, and seemed to be moving at an incredible speed.
The crew was in disbelief as they watched the objects darting through the sky. They had heard about similar sightings from private pilot Kenneth Arnold just a week prior, but never thought they would witness something like this themselves.
As soon as they landed in Seattle, Captain Smith and his crew immediately reported the sighting to the authorities. The news of the Flight 105 UFO sighting quickly spread, and it wasn’t long before nearly 800 similar reports flooded in from all over the country.
Four days later, the Roswell Army Air Field made a shocking announcement – they had recovered a “flying disc” that had crashed in the desert. However, this announcement was quickly retracted when it was discovered that the object was actually a conventional weather balloon.
Despite the Air Force’s conclusion that the Flight 105 sighting was likely caused by “ordinary aircraft, balloons, birds, or pure illusion”, many people were convinced that what the crew had seen was something far more mysterious and otherworldly.
Captain Smith and Kenneth Arnold became determined to get to the bottom of these strange sightings, and began a collaborative investigation into additional disc reports, including the infamous Maury Island hoax.
To this day, the Flight 105 UFO sighting remains one of the most famous and mysterious events in aviation history. And while we may never know for certain what the crew of Flight 105 saw on that fateful day, it’s up to each of us to decide whether we believe it was an ordinary occurrence or something truly extraordinary.
