Researcher Jerome Clark describes the account as "surely the most outlandish story in early UFO history [and] also one of the most obscure".
[2] A retired railroad worker in his 70s, Thompson claimed that on the evening of March 28, 1950, while driving to his home in Centralia, Washington, he came across a large flying saucer in the woods.
They were from Venus, he learned, and had stopped at Earth despite the fact that other Venusian saucers had been shot at by Earth-based military forces.
Afterwards, pilot Kenneth Arnold — whose 1947 flying saucer sighting had sparked widespread public interest in UFOs — interviewed Thompson.
Clark speculated that Thompson had had a visionary experience, which was inspired by, and which drew from, UFO folklore and Biblical stories.