The article below was published in the daily newspaper The Daily Missoulian, Missoula, Montana, USA, page 1, on July 7, 1947.
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The mighty flying discs which have mystified and worried the nation came crashing Sunday, in the firm belief of a Missoula resident.
He is Bob Johnson, veteran pilot, who announced calmly to a Missoula reporter that he had not only solved the mystery, but had captured one of the discs.
It was nothing, he said, but the parachute-like seed of a common wild plant, the milkweed.
Here's his story. Sunday morning, he and employee of the Johnson Flying service, which Mr. Johnson operates, saw several silver-colored discs racing through the air over Hale field. The objects flew with an irregular motion but generally on a straight course, catching and reflecting the sun brilliantly.
So far, everything checked with newspaper accounts from all over the nation.
Illusion Vanishes
But as Mr. Johnson and other veteran pilots and mechanics watched, some of the discs came close enough to be seen clearly, and the illusion of great distance and speed was destroyed—the flying discs had feet of clay.
Mr. Johnson explained it this way: "A good scale model of an airplane can be so deceiving that anyone would swear it was a normal size airplane, flying at normal speed at a great distance, instead of a small model much closer.
"It was the same way with the milkweed seeds. They looked for all the world like large aluminum discs dipping and spinning through the air, until they got close enough to be seen clearly."
(A veteran airline pilot who saw "flying discs" in the air over Idaho declined to estimate the size and speed of the objects because, he said, "you can't tell unless there is something to compare with.")
((The Boise, Idaho, flyer who first reported seeing "flying discs" reported their size and speed. Nearly everyone who looks at the more receivers a different illusion of its apparent size, from that of a dime to a bushel basket. And even a jet airplane at 10,000 feet seems from the ground to be moving slowly.)
"Disc" Deceptive
Mr. Johnson said a close inspection of a captured "disc" showed how the milkweed seed could fool most of the people most of the time. It is flat and circular, about the size of a dollar, and composed of many silvered, fuzz-covered spikes radiating from a common bulb. Dependent from the bulb is a slender, neutral-colored snarl supporting the actual seed of the plant.
Held up to the light, Mr. Johnson said, the dependent shaft becomes almost invisible and the flat circular part gleams as though made of aluminum.
Mr. Johnson's explanation of the nation's great mystery gained some weight with the words of Dr. Joseph Kramer, associate professor of botany at the State University.
Dr. Kramer said there are many plants in the area which propagate themselves by means of parachute-
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type seeds, but added that one which has a large, flat, silvery disc is sometimes called Goat's Beard, or drapogon pratensis.
This plant, he said, came from Europe but is now found in nearly every part of the United States.
He added that these plants are now ripe and the seeds loose and ready to begin their aerial journeys to reproduce the species.
Pilot Johnson said he has often seen such parachute-type seeds thousands of feet in the air, borne aloft by thermal air currents or updrafts which follow rugged mountainsides.
"If they run this thing down, they'll find their flying discs are nothing but seeds," Mr. Johnson declared.
