The modern UFO era turns 60 this year, marking the anniversary of two famous incidents.

It all started June 24, 1947. According to UFO Magazine and other sources, businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his CallAir-2 airplane from Chehalis, Wash., to Yakima, Wash. Over the radio, Arnold heard that a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane had crashed near Mount Rainier. He changed course, heading for the mountain to help with the search.

As Arnold was cruising along at an altitude of more than 2,000 feet, a series of brilliant flashes caught his attention.

He checked to make sure that the flashes weren’t from his eyeglasses, the windows or the mirror. The flashes of light continued.

Arnold saw nine unusual aircraft, the largest being crescent-shaped, flying from Mt. Rainier to Mt. Adams. He estimated that the largest craft was bigger than a DC-4 and traveling at a speed of 1,700 miles-per-hour, twice the speed of sound.

Unable to follow the strange craft, Arnold flew onto Yakima and landed his plane. He reported the sighting to the airport staff and left for Pendleton, Ore.

Newspapers learned of Arnold’s sighting and reporters met him at the Pendleton airport. Arnold repeated his account and described the unusual way the craft moved through the air “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.”

One of the reporters used the term “flying saucer” and the name has been used ever since.

A prospector mining on Mt. Rainier later told authorities that he’d seen nine strange-looking aircraft. A Tacoma housewife made a similar report.

After Arnold’s initial report, many “flying saucer” sightings were reported all across the United States. Newspapers and radio newscasts were filled with stories about unidentified flying object sightings for a few weeks until something happened at Roswell, New Mexico, a small town in the American southwest, whose claim to fame was that the nearby Army Air Force base was home to the 509th Bomb Wing – at that time, the only atomic bomb-equipped military unit in existence.

On July 8 of that same year, newspapers from the local Roswell Daily Record to the Sacramento Bee carried the story of the Army Air Force “capturing a flying disc” near a local ranch.

A few days later, the AAF claimed that it was a weather balloon and years later the recovered UFO would be described as a then-sophisticated spy balloon and a military experiment involving parachute test-dummies.

No one knows what Kenneth Arnold saw that day flying near Mt. Rainier or what happened near Roswell. But modern culture hasn’t been the same since.