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Origin of the Flying Saucer Myth The Surprising Origin of created the internet to keep its communications the Flying Saucer Myth lines up even in a nuclear strike. The legend has been used to explain why the US should control the internet domain system and not some by Natalie Wolchover international world body. The legend was recently spouted by Barack Obama who used it as proof that the On June 24, 1947, an amateur pilot named government really was important to the Kenneth Arnold was flying a small plane near development of technology. He said that the Mount Rainier in Washington state when he saw internet didn't get invented on its own. something extraordinarily strange. Directly to Government research created the internet so that his left, about 20 to 25 miles north of him and at all companies could make money off it. the same altitude, a chain of nine objects shot However, according to the Wall Street across the sky, glinting in the sun as they Journal, some in the US have conceded that it traveled. was a lot more complex than that. By the 1960s By comparing their size to that of a technologists were trying to connect separate distant airplane, Arnold gauged the objects to be beginning," Kottmeyer wrote. UFOs took the physical communications networks into one about 45 to 50 feet wide. They flew between form of flying saucers, he noted, in artist's global network. two mountains spaced 50 miles apart in just 1 renderings, hoax photos, sci-fi films, TV shows While the Pentagon's Advanced minute, 42 seconds, he observed, implying an and even the vast majority of alien abduction Research Projects Agency Network did work in astonishing speed of 1,700 miles per hour, or and sighting reports for the rest of modern this direction, it was not about maintaining three times faster than any manned aircraft of history, up until the present day. communications during a nuclear attack, and it the era. However, as if controlled, the flying "Bequette's error may not prove to be didn't build the internet. objects seemed to dip and swerve around the ultimate refutation of the extraterrestrial Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA obstacles in the terrain. theory for everyone. But it does leave their program in the 1960s, sent an email to When the objects faded into the advocates in one helluva paradox: Why would technologists in 2004 saying that what Arpanet distance, Arnold flew to Yakima, Wash., landed extraterrestrials redesign their craft to conform had was not an internet. An internet is a and immediately told the airport staff of the to Bequette's mistake?" Kottmeyer wrote. connection between two or more computer unidentified flying objects he had spotted. The [Read: Could Extraterrestrials Really Invade networks and that was nothing like Arpanet. next day, he was interviewed by reporters, and Earth, and How? ] Taylor said that the full credit should go the story spread like wildfire across the nation. to Xerox PARC labs, where he worked in the "At that time there was still some For the birds 1970s. It was there that Ethernet was developed thought that Mars or perhaps Venus might have to connected different computer networks for a habitable surface ," Robert Sheaffer, an author Though he didn't see flying saucers, most of the first time. of UFO books (and a skeptic), told Life's Little Arnold's contemporaries believed that he really Xerox PARC researchers realized that Mysteries. "People thought these UFOs were had seen something that day. The Army report waiting for the government to connect networks Martians who had come to keep an eye on us on the sighting states: "[If] Mr. Arnold could was like waiting for Godot because ARPA was now that we had nuclear weapons." write a report of such a character and did not see too slow and bureaucratic. As time would prove, this was but the the objects he was in the wrong business and Xerox, having invented the internet, first of many outlandish theories behind visits of should be engaged in writing Buck Rogers missed a major trick. It was only interested in an extraterrestrial nature. The era of UFO fiction." His account was very convincing. selling photocopiers so its interest in Ethernet sightings had begun. So if he did see something, what was it was only important because it meant a printer exactly? could be shared. It was Ethernet technology Reporting error One theory holds that it was a fireball — which connected networks together. a meteor breaking up upon entry into the The real internet came along when Arnold's sighting was "such a sensation that it atmosphere. If a meteor hit the atmosphere at a Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the made front page news across the nation," UFO- shallow angle to the Earth, its pieces would internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee logist and author Martin Kottmeyer wrote in an approach the surface traveling almost created hyperlinks. [] article ("The Saucer Error," REALL News, horizontally. Furthermore, the pieces of meteor 1993). would travel in a chain like the one Arnold saw, "Soon everyone was looking for these would shine very brightly, and would travel at HUMAN new aircraft which according to the papers were thousands of miles per hour. saucer-like in shape," Kottmeyer continued. But most historians think the objects TRAFFICKING "Within weeks hundreds of reports of these weren't from outer space at all: "It was probably AND flying saucers were made across the nation. pelicans flying in formation," Sheaffer said. While people presumably thought they were "Probably Arnold misjudged the distance and SLAVERY seeing the same things that Kenneth Arnold thought they were huge objects at a great IS A CRIME. saw, there was a major irony that nobody at the distance but they were actually much closer." time realized. Kenneth Arnold hadn't reported After all, the boomerang shape that seeing flying saucers." Arnold drew in a picture of the objects he had If You Know Of Human In fact, Arnold had told the press that the seen looks very much like a bird with its wings objects had flown erratically, "like a saucer if outstretched. [] Trafficking and Slavery, you skip it across the water." They were thin and .72 E%2<;=? .? flat when viewed on edge, he said, but crescent- US realizes the Pentagon shaped when viewed from the top down as they MODERN DAY turned. Nonetheless, a reporter named Bill did not invent the net SLAVERY Bequette of the United Press interpreted Arnold's statement to mean that the objects he TechEye.net REPORTING CENTER saw were round discs. According to Benjamin at Radford, UFO expert and deputy editor of the Skeptical Inquirer, "It was one of the most It seems that over the pond, the US press is www.mdsrc.org significant reporter misquotes in history." finally admitting that its glorious government "The phrase 'flying saucers' provided the did not really invent the internet. Thank You. mold which shaped the UFO myth at its For years the US has trotted out what amounts to an urban legend that the Pentagon