PULLMAN, WA – The police chief at Washington State College reported a strange occurrence: someone had found a saucer-shaped metal object in the Horse Heaven Hills southwest of Pullman. A possible flying saucer.

The discovery 75 years ago this month was disclosed to police chief Lt. Charles Kinzel by a Washington State Patrol trooper who’d been called to the scene. An unnamed “excited citizen” had stumbled across the object.

Kinzel shared the tale with Lt. Rolland Soule of the U.S. Navy Reserve during an otherwise mundane discussion about campus traffic issues. But the police chief didn’t know that Soule, motivated by the interests of national security, reported the information to naval intelligence.

That classified report became part of Project Blue Book, a U.S. Air Force compendium of case files on sightings of unidentified flying objects. The 1950 case in Horse Heaven Hills is just one of many Eastern Washington UFO sightings around the time included in the now declassified book.

In Soule’s telling, a U.S. Army officer from Hanford quickly arrived on scene and retrieved the object, described as about 6 inches thick and 20 inches in diameter. Despite the Army man’s stealthy arrival, he seemed to be in a chatty mood. Here’s what he told the WSP trooper about UFOs, according to Soule:

• They come in three sizes — small, like the one found in the Horse Heaven Hills, medium, and large, as big as 250 feet in diameter.
• Some “are guided missiles, others are not.”
• Some are capable of carrying payloads and some are piloted by humans.
• All are powered by atomic energy and can travel as fast as 3,600 miles per hour.
• And finally, they all launch from Hanford, the unnamed Army officer confided.

He suggested the WSP trooper consult an article in the July 1950 Reader’s Digest if he wanted more information.

As it happens, some of the Army man’s UFO information closely matched that in the article, titled “The ‘Flying Saucer’ is Good News.” Authored by Henry J. Taylor, a popular radio commentator at the time, it claimed that UFOs were a product of American ingenuity, not Russian- or Martian-made. Taylor, who later became U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, didn’t say where he got this information, but newspapers across the country reported his conclusions.

Taylor’s article was part of a wave of popular interest in flying saucers at the time, sparked by a pilot’s report of seeing nine “saucer-like” objects flying near Mt. Rainier three years earlier.

Indeed, Soule noted in his report that “Chief Kinzel’s interest in flying saucers is as high as many of the other persons in this area and he has always been on the watch for one…”

The multiple sightings across the nation led to articles, movies, and conspiracy theories. Historians say the hubbub was probably fueled by anxiety over the Cold War.

Many of the sightings contained in Project Blue Book were attributed to military aircraft in the area, or weather balloons, or the unreliability of the people making reports. In the case of Soule’s report, though, the trail goes cold. If there was a follow-up investigation or any findings on the Horse Heaven Hills object Kinzel described, they aren’t readily available.

A spokesman for the present-day U.S. Department of Energy at Hanford was also unable to shed any light, saying, “Unfortunately, our office has no information on this.”