Quote: 1947 - "The first sightings...around the middle of May."

When did the "flying discs" begin in 1947? 

Most sources still continue to claim it all began with Arnold's sighting on June 24, 1947. He was to blame, and all the others are responses to his tale of seeing things. They also still claim he called them "flying saucers" but that too is incorrect. He described their movements as being similar to the way a saucer skipping over the water might look (an up and down movement as it skipped).  

With all the stories already in the papers about "flying discs" and "whizbangs" and "whatsits" it was a phenomenon in search of a name. One reporter mashed them together to create the "flying saucer". It stuck but so did the other names of disc (or disk), thingamajigs, etc. 

Here from an October 1947 memorandum Brigadier General George F. Schulgen (1900-1955), Chief, Air Intelligence Requirements Division, Office of Assistant Chief of Air Staff - 2, in a "Collection Memorandum", he provides this overview:

"The first sightings in the U.S. were reported around the middle of May. The last reported sighting took place in Toronto, Canada, 14 September 1947. The greatest activity in the U.S. was during the last week of June and the first week of July." 

The problem for Schulgen - as well as others - was an inability to think outside the box of known flight principles, established construction and design concepts, and an industrial age view of machines. 

Dr. J. Allen Hynek said in an open letter to the editor of Science magazine in August of 1966: " I cannot dismiss the UFO phenomenon with a shrug. I have begun to feel that there is a tendency of 20th century science to forget that there will be a 21st century science...we suffer from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity." 

If science was suffering from "temporal provincialism" imagine the state that the military and the public might have been in. Something to think about as we review old records and cases. Were they labeled impossibles must be something else because of that attitude? As Hynek asserts elsewhere the Air Force and leaders often had a view "There is no such thing as UFO's so therefore these are not UFO's."