Portland, Oregon Sighting

UFO History

a bunch of historical (ish?) events that relate to the UFO phenomenon

A number of flying disks were seen around the city of Portland.

Portland, Oregon Sighting

1947 July 4th

In his book The Report on UFOs, Edward Ruppelt provides the following account:

The week of July 4, 1947, set a record for reports that was not broken until 1952. The center of activity was the Portland, Oregon, area. At 11:00A.M. a carload of people driving near Redmond saw four disk-shaped objects streaking past Mount Jefferson. At 1:05P.M. a policeman was in the parking lot behind the Portland City Police Headquarters when he noticed some pigeons suddenly began to flutter around as if they were scared. He looked up and saw five large disk- shaped objects, two going south and three going east. They were traveling at a high rate of speed and seemed to be oscillating about their lateral axis. Minutes later two other policemen, both ex- pilots, reported three of the same things flying in trail. Before long the harbor patrol called into headquarters. A crew of four patrolmen had seen three to six of the disks, “shaped like chrome hub caps,” traveling very fast. They also oscillated as they flew. Then the citizens of Portland began to see them. A man saw one going east and two going north. At four-thirty a woman called in and had just seen one that looked like “a new dime flipping around.” Another man reported two, one going southeast, one northeast. From Milwaukie, Oregon, three were reported going northwest. In Vancouver, Washington, sheriff’s deputies saw twenty to thirty.