radically different types of reports as people of different cultures let their locally conditioned imaginations loose?" Ufo historian David M. Jacobs, phrased things somewhat differently in 1987: "there was no precedent for the appearance or the configuration of the objects in 1947" in popular science fiction films, popular science fiction or popular culture in general. They did not resemble the fanciful rocketships or earthly space travel contraptions in the SF literature. In 1988, Martin Kottmeyer observed a colleague trying to speculate that the source of saucer imagery lay in a certain art movement. While the notion immediately struck him as wrong, he began to think about what might be a better approach. He soon began gathering together what writings he could find about the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting in 1947, typically pointed to as the start of the modern ufo phenomenon. One of the first things he turned to was a memoir given as a speech before the First International UFO Congress in 1977. His eye soon fell on a statement by Arnold that the objects he sighted "were not circular." Arnold also complained the flying saucer label arose because of a "great deal of misunderstanding" on the part of the reporter who wrote the story up for the Associated Press. Bill Bequette asked him how the objects flew and Arnold answered that, "Well, they flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across the water." The intent of the metaphor was to describe the motion of the objects not their shape. Bill Bequette would later insist the fault was not with him, but Arnold himself but, ultimately it does not matter who is to blame for it. The only salient fact is that a mistake was definitely made somewhere. Any doubt about this is eliminated by turning to the first document written by Kenneth Arnold, the report he wrote and sent to Air Force mere days after his sighting nine mystery objects speeding across the face of Mount Rainier. It includes a drawing of the shapes made by one of the objects. It certainly confirms the memoir. It isn't circular or round as a saucer properly ought to be. Shoe heel or beetle might better express the awkwardly inelegant form. The logical implications of saucers being a mistake had the feel of a paradigm shift- to Kottmeyer, like suddenly learning that one of the axioms one learned in