In June 1947, Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine strange objects flying at high speed over Mount Rainier in Washington. He described their bizarre flight pattern as dipping up and down, and compared the motion to saucers skipping on water. Two days later, newspapers misquoted him and described the objects as flying saucers, thus introducing the term into mainstream culture. This was the first major UFO sighting in the modern era, and it kicked off what’s now known as the 1947 flying disc craze. Following Arnold’s story, people all over the country reported seeing flying saucers too, and by mid-July there had been over 1,000 sightings across the U.S. Through the 1950s, flying saucers continued to appear in doctored photos from present-day Zimbabwe, Italy, and France, and were the go-to for how alien spacecraft were imagined in that decade of Science Fiction. The Flying Saucer is still a spaceship cliche, and it all started with one little typo.