school forming the base of Euclidean geometric reasoning had just changed. One was not living in a Euclidean universe, but a Riemannian one where a straight line was no longer the shortest distance between two points. All those people in 1947 who reported seeing circular, disc-shaped, saucer-shaped crafts (82% of the 853 cases collected by Ted Bloecher) had based their expectations on a mistake, a rumor with journalistic credentials. They weren't seeing what Arnold saw, only what they were told he saw. Similarly the rumor shaped the ufo phenomenon for decades afterwards keeping the shape dominant throughout the culture, shaping film imagery, saucer photography, ufo illustration, contactee tales, and high strangeness abduction experiences. By one tally 82% of the craft descriptions in alien abduction reports fall into the flying saucer category. It can be found in nearly all the well-known cases: Betty & Barney Hill's interrupted journey, Herb Schirmer, Travis Walton, the Andreasson affair, Whitley Strieber Kottmeyer first reported his discovery in a letter to Saucer Smear published April 25, 1988. It was more widely disseminated when the finding was published as part of an article titled "Entirely Unpredisposed" that appeared first in Magonia in 1990. There he spelled out its full argumentative significance: "The implications of this journalistic error are staggering in the extreme. Not only does it unambiguously point to a cultural origin of the whole flying saucer phenomenon, it erects a first-order paradox into any attempt to interpret the phenomenon in extraterrestrial terms: Why would extraterrestrials redesign their craft to conform to Bequette's error?" In 1993, he offered a fuller account of the significance of the finding in a piece titled "The Saucer Error." Some ETH skeptics embraced Kottmeyer's arguments and tried to expand it with additional material concerning Arnold's writings. The cover of Arnold's 1950 memoir of the 1947 incident The Saucer As I Saw It has been pointed to as showing a more crescent-shaped craft than that drawn in the AF report. A photo of Arnold holding a sketch showing yet another subtly different shape has also been pointed to as significant. While not uninteresting flourishes to the story, one should not ignore that historical investigation always privileges the earliest documents of a case and those generated by the witness over later and second-hand journalistic quotes. Late images and writings are vulnerable to a range of doubts concerning both memory and distortions arising from revisions