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19471776 Club

Boise aviator clocks nine bright objects over the Cascades at 1,200 miles per hour

Kenneth Arnold, searching for a downed C-46 near Mount Rainier, tells a reporter the craft moved like saucers skipping on water.

The skies over the Cascade Range were clear on June 24, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a Boise businessman and experienced aviator, detoured from a routine flight to search for a downed Marine Corps C-46 near Mount Rainier. Flying at 9,200 feet, he noticed nine bright, flashing objects traveling in a long chain at what he timed — using the interval between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams — at roughly 1,200 miles per hour. Arnold told a reporter they moved like saucers skipping on water. The press did the rest: "flying saucer" entered the language that week, and it has never left…

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More from June 24
1922

The American Professional Football Association votes to call itself the National Football League

Two years after clubs from four states formalized the game in a Canton auto showroom, the league sheds its borrowed name for one that fits its ambitions.
1937

Navy orders North Carolina and Washington; first battleships laid down in a decade carry 16-inch guns

Japan's refusal to sign the London Naval Treaty triggers an escalator clause, swapping the planned fourteen-inch guns for nine sixteen-inch weapons on both hulls.
1948

Stalin seals Berlin; two million people are cut off from the West

Soviet forces close all rail and barge routes into the Western sectors, 110 miles inside Soviet territory, over the Allies' plan to introduce the Deutsche Mark.
20211776 Club
The 12-story, 136-unit beachfront condo gave way at 1:22 a.m.; a $15 million repair program had been approved, but the main structural work had not yet begun.
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More from Cold War America
1950

Gaetjens heads it in; the US beats England, 1–0, in Belo Horizonte

Borghi shuts out the sport's reigning aristocracy; the American squad includes a hearse driver, a schoolteacher, and men who trained together exactly once.
1956

Eisenhower signs the highway act; 41,000 miles of interstate and $25 billion set in motion

The president who crossed the country on rutted Army roads in 1919 authorizes the largest public works project the nation has yet attempted.
1946

Blandy detonates the bomb over Bikini; the target fleet survives, and the Navy claims vindication

Test Able misses its aim point by 2,130 feet, scattering results that disappoint the Navy's critics but settle nothing about the weapon's power at sea.
1964

Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act; King watches as a year's promise becomes law

The bill survived 72 days of Senate delay to pass 73 to 27, outlawing discrimination by race, sex, religion, and national origin in schools, workplaces, and public accommodations.
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