The August 13, 1947 Snake River Canyon sighting — A.C. Urie and his sons watched a sky-blue, flame-podded disc hug the canyon, logged as Battelle/Blue Book Unknown No. 9 and unexplained. (thinkaboutitdocs.com — UAP/Entity Archive by Date)
THINK ABOUTIT UFO | UAP SIGHTING REPORT
1947: Disc Zooms Down Snake River Canyon, Idaho
It is one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts of the entire summer of 1947 — and it came not from a pilot or an official, but from an Idaho trout farmer standing on his own riverbank. On the afternoon of August 13, 1947, A.C. Urie and his two young sons watched a sky-blue, straw-hat-shaped object with flame-spitting side pods race down the Snake River Canyon at low altitude, hugging the contour of the terrain and setting the trees thrashing as it passed with a swish. Hours earlier the same day, a county commissioner and former sheriff had seen two circular objects near Salmon Dam, forty miles away. The Air Force’s own Battelle study would later log Urie’s sighting as one of its statistical Unknowns, and J. Allen Hynek took the family’s sincerity seriously. This is a documented, multi-witness, daylight case — the kind the archive can present with confidence — and the job here is to fix the field errors the page accumulated and pin down the one figure everyone argues about: the speed.
Date: August 13, 1947
Sighting Time: 1:00 p.m. (Urie); a separate sighting at 9:30 a.m. (Hawkins)
Day/Night: Day
Location: Snake River Canyon near the Auger Falls Trout Farm, about 6 miles west of Blue Lakes Ranch and 9 miles northwest of Twin Falls, Idaho
Urban or Rural: Rural
No. of Entity(‘s): None
Entity Type: Not applicable
Entity Description: Not applicable
Hynek Classification: DD (Daylight Disc) — metallic or colored object seen in daylight
Duration: A few seconds (in view less than a mile of travel)
No. of Object(s): 1 (Urie); plus 2 circular objects reported separately by Hawkins the same morning
Description of the Object(s): A sky-blue object shaped like an inverted pie-plate or a broad-brimmed straw hat squeezed from two sides, with pods on the sides from which flames were shooting; it followed the contour of the canyon, rising and falling over the terrain, agitated the trees beneath it, and passed with a swishing sound
Shape of Object(s): Oblong domed disc (inverted-pie-plate / compressed straw-hat profile)
Size of Object(s): About 20 feet long by 10 feet high by 10 feet wide
Color of Object(s): Sky blue
Distance to Object(s): About 300 feet, roughly level with the witness, about 75 feet above the canyon floor
Height & Speed: About 75 feet altitude; speed disputed — Urie’s quoted estimate appears in print as both “about 100 mph” and “about 1,000 mph,” while the Times-News headline and the Blue Book catalog give 1,000 mph (see Researcher’s Notes)
Number of Witnesses: 3 at the trout farm (A.C. Urie and sons Billy, 10, and Keith, 8); plus county commissioner L.W. Hawkins separately the same morning
Special Features/Characteristics: Contour-following (“hedge-hopping”) flight; visible agitation of trees beneath the object; flame-emitting side pods; swishing sound; witnesses made independent sketches the same day that became the basis for the Times-News artist’s conception; logged as a Project Blue Book / Battelle statistical Unknown
Case Status: Unexplained
Source: Twin Falls Times-News, August 15, 1947 (John Brosnan); USAF Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 (Battelle Memorial Institute study, 1955), Unknown No. 9; Brad Sparks, “Catalog of Project Blue Book Unknowns”
Summary/Description: On the afternoon of August 13, 1947, trout farmer A.C. Urie and his two young sons watched a sky-blue, straw-hat-shaped object about 20 by 10 by 10 feet, with flame-emitting side pods, race down the Snake River Canyon roughly 75 feet up and about 300 feet from Urie, following the contour of the land and thrashing the trees beneath it before vanishing with a swish. Commissioner L.W. Hawkins reported two circular objects near Salmon Dam the same morning. The case was logged as a Battelle/Blue Book statistical Unknown and remains unexplained; the recorded speed varies between roughly 100 and 1,000 mph depending on the source.
Related Cases: 1947: United Air Lines Flight 105 Disc Sighting (Idaho, July) | 1947: Kenneth Arnold sighting, Washington (June 24, the wave’s origin) | 1957: Blackfoot, Idaho Sighting
DETAILED REPORT
A.C. Urie operated the Auger Falls Trout Farm, whose waters ran through the Snake River Canyon west of Twin Falls. Early in the afternoon of Wednesday, August 13, 1947, his two sons — Billy, 10, and Keith, 8 — were crossing the river by boat from the north side. When they were slow returning, Urie walked down toward the bank to check on them, and from there, at about 1:00 p.m., he got what he called a close-up view of a flying saucer passing down the canyon roughly 75 feet above the floor and about 300 feet from him, nearly level with his vantage point and silhouetted against the far canyon wall.
His description is the reason the case is remembered. The object was sky blue and shaped, he said, like an inverted pie-plate, or a broad-brimmed straw hat squeezed from two sides — oblong, about 20 feet long, 10 feet high, and 10 feet wide. Pods on the sides emitted flame. It did not fly straight and level but followed the contour of the ground, rising and falling over the hills and hollows at what he judged was a rate of control faster than a human pilot’s reflexes, leading him to suppose it was instrument-guided and atomic-powered. The trees beneath it were violently agitated as it passed, and it made little noise beyond a swish. His sons, below him and at roughly a right angle, watched it too; the boys picked it up about half a mile up the canyon, and all three lost sight of it within a mile. While the impression was fresh, the three made rough sketches, which Times-News engraver Vic Goertzen used as the basis for the newspaper’s artist conception — the side, bottom, and end views reproduced in the August 15 edition.
Urie was not the only witness that day. Tracing a rumor, the Times-News reached county commissioner and former sheriff L.W. Hawkins at his Filer home. Hawkins, who said he had been skeptical until he saw it himself, reported that around 9:30 that morning, while at Salmon Dam about forty miles southwest of Twin Falls, a sound like a motor’s echo made him look up to see two circular objects that reflected light, traveling at great speed and higher than most aircraft. He would not elaborate beyond saying there was “something in the air.” A former sheriff and sitting commissioner going on record as a UFO witness in 1947 is not a trivial corroboration, and it places two independent daylight sightings in the same county on the same day.
The single genuine point of confusion is speed, and it is worth stating exactly. The Times-News headline of August 15 declared the disc was “Flashing Down Canyon At 1,000 Miles Per Hour.” Yet Urie’s own quoted estimate in the body of the article is rendered in surviving transcriptions two different ways — some give “I would estimate the speed about a 100 miles per hour,” others “about a 1,000 miles per hour.” Brad Sparks’ Blue Book Unknowns catalog adopts 1,000 mph. Two readings are therefore in the record: Urie’s personal estimate, which may have been roughly 100 mph, and the published/cataloged figure of 1,000 mph. The honest position is that the witness’s own number is uncertain in transcription while the newspaper and the official catalog used the higher figure; the archive records both rather than silently choosing one.
What the object was has never been resolved. The Battelle statisticians who produced Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 classified Urie’s sighting as one of their Unknowns (No. 9) — cases that could not be matched to any conventional explanation even after analysis. J. Allen Hynek, who reviewed many early reports, is on record acknowledging the Urie family’s evident sincerity. No physical evidence survived, and the speed estimate is soft, but the combination of close range, daylight, multiple witnesses, contemporaneous sketches, a specific structured description, and a same-day second sighting by a credible official makes this one of the better-documented disc reports of 1947.
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
The Auger Falls Disc — Idaho 1947 and the Speed That Split in Print
- Classification rationale (DD holds): This is a clean Daylight Disc and the class stands. The object was a structured, colored craft observed at close range in full afternoon light — exactly the DD profile. The prior page undercut its own classification by listing “Day/Night: Night,” which is simply wrong: every account, including the original Times-News report, places the main sighting at 1:00 p.m. That field has been corrected to Day, removing a contradiction that made the DD label look unsupported.
- The speed discrepancy, stated plainly: The most important factual correction concerns the speed, because the case is often cited at the dramatic 1,000 mph figure. The Times-News headline used 1,000 mph and Brad Sparks’ catalog follows it, but Urie’s quoted personal estimate survives in two forms — about 100 and about 1,000 mph — and at least one faithful transcription gives the lower number. A disc roughly 300 feet away crossing a mile of canyon “in less than a mile” of visibility is consistent with a fast but not hypersonic object, which is why Urie’s own “about 100” is plausible as his honest impression. The archive does not adjudicate between them; it records that the witness’s estimate is uncertain in transcription and that the headline and official catalog adopted the higher value. This is the difference between what a witness said and what a headline printed, and the distinction matters.
- Source-chain assessment and the corrections made: This case is unusually well-sourced for 1947 — a detailed contemporaneous newspaper account with witness sketches, plus inclusion in the Air Force’s own Battelle statistical study as Unknown No. 9. The prior page carried several small errors against that record: it called the paper the “Time News” (it is the Twin Falls Times-News), misspelled the engraver as “Goertson” (Vic Goertzen), tagged the time as “Night,” and reduced the vivid straw-hat description to a bare “Oval.” Each has been corrected against the original reporting and the witness’s own words, and commissioner Hawkins’s same-day sighting has been restored to its proper place as independent corroboration rather than a footnote.
Historical context: The sighting falls about seven weeks after Kenneth Arnold’s June 24, 1947 report over Washington State launched the national “flying saucer” wave, and the Times-News article itself situates Urie’s account against that backdrop — including a candid note that a group of Twin Falls teenagers had perpetrated a model-disc hoax exposed by the Army and FBI a month earlier. That context cuts both ways: it shows the period’s suggestibility, which a careful archive must weigh, but it also shows the Times-News distinguishing a debunked local hoax from the Urie and Hawkins reports, which it treated as credible. The Battelle Unknown classification, assigned years later by statisticians with no stake in the local excitement, is the stronger validation.
The Snake River Canyon case is the kind of 1947 report that rewards being told carefully: a close-range, daylight, multi-witness sighting with a specific structured description, contemporaneous sketches, a credible second witness the same day, and a place in the Air Force’s own roster of Unknowns. Told straight, it needs only that its errors be cleared — the sighting was at one in the afternoon, not at night; the paper was the Times-News and the artist Vic Goertzen; the shape was a flame-podded straw-hat disc, not a bare oval; and the famous 1,000 mph belongs to the headline and the catalog, while the farmer himself may have said a hundred. With those fixed, it stands as the record left it: a Project Blue Book Unknown, unexplained.
Source
Diagram of UFO from Project Blue Book Special Report 14.
Diagram / drawing of UFO and headline from the newspaper Time News, of Twin Falls, Idaho, USA, on August 15, 1947.
Flying Saucer Reported Flashing Down Canyon At 100 Miles Per Hour – Two Others Seen
Twin Falls Times News
By John Brosnan
August 15th, 1947
Just as Magic Valley and the nation were starting to let go of lampposts after reeling under a weiter of flying saucer reports, two more Twin Falls county men revived speculation on the mystery with vivid descriptions of discs they saw.
From A. C. Urie, who operates the Auger Falls Trout Farm, six miles west of Blue Lakes Ranch to Snake River Canyon, came perhaps the most detailed account of any of the fast flying objects the nation has yet produced.
The flying saucer Urie saw was skimming along through Snake River Canyon at a height of about 75 feet at 1:00 pm Wednesday. At 9:30 am the same day, L. W. Hawkins, Twin Falls county commissioner and former county sheriff, also saw two circular objects soaring along at great speeds near Salmon Dam 40 miles south west of Twin Falls.
Here is Urie’s eye-witness description of the flying discs, seen by him and his son, Keith, 8, and Billy,10:
“I obtained a close-up view of the flying saucer as it passed the trout farm at 1:00pm August 13th going down Snake River Canyon at a height of about 75 feet from the canyon floor. I would estimate the speed about a 100 miles per hour.”
Urie explained that the incident occurred while the two boys were coming across the river from the north side in a boat. He had become concerned about what was delaying them, and walked toward the river to see if they were all right.
“I had a side view of a distance of about 300 feet and almost was level with the thing,” he continued. “Two of my boys, Keith and Billy were below me and they also saw it at about a right angle. They both a lower and a side view, and we and we were staring at it from the north side of the facing toward the north. The boys saw it coming from about a half a mile up the canyon, and we all lost site of it in less then a mile.”
While the the impression was still vivid in their minds, the three all got together and made rough sketches of what they had seen. These in turn were the basis of the artist conception of the strange affair by Vic Goertson of Twin Falls for the Times-News.
“The canyon floor underneath at that particular point was that it rode up and down over the hills and hollows at a speed indicating some type of control faster then the reflexes of man. It is my opinion it is guided by some type of instruments and must be powered by atomic energy, as it made very little noise-just a s-w-i-s-h when it passed by.”
Urie described the size as about 20 feet long by 10 feet high and 10 feet wide, giving it an oblong shape. It might be described as looking at an inverted pie-plate, or broad-brimmed straw hat that been compressed from two sides.
Pressed for his opinion of just what it was, he said he was convinced there was something to this “flying saucer” situation. “I know a number of people who have also seen them, and I know now that they’re not just imagining seeing these things or trying to get their names in the paper.
“I do know that it scared the boys, and made me feel uneasy,” he added.
Tracing down a rumor that county commissioner Hawkins had seen an unusual object in the air on the same day as Urie’s experience, the Times-News called him at his Filer home.
“Yes I did,” he replied without hesitation. “I’ll have to admit, I’ve been skeptical all along until I saw it with my own eyes.I can’t say what it was, but I can say there is something in the air.”
Hawkins related that while at Salmon dam Wednesday morning, a sound resembling that of an echo of a motor caused him to look upward, and there he saw to circular objects that reflected light. They were traveling at a great speed, and higher then most airplanes, according to Hawkins.
Aside from this, he declined to add details, except to say, “there’s something in the air.”
His general description however, corresponded closely to hundreds of persons who reported seeing “flying saucers” after Kenneth Arnold, Boise business man, touched a deluge by telling of coming upon nine disc-like objects while he was flying in his private plane in Washington.
Thereafter the nation became increasingly “flying saucer” conscious creating a state of mind for four teen age Twin Falls boys to cause a mild sensation when they built a model flying disc and tossed in a local yard July 10th. The was subsequently revealed as a hoax, following the investigation by the army and the FBI.
There after the saucer reports tapered off into a few scattered incidents until the question was revived by this weeks occurrences.
Speculation has ranged from mention that the discs could be army navy guided missile experiments, or they could be experiments by some foreign country, to something out of this world.
Whatever they are, a lot of people have seen something.
