The first appearance of the term “saucer” was in 1878 , nearly 70 years before the famous Arnold sighting . On January 24 of that year, John Martin, a texas farmer, who lived just south of Denison, saw a dark disc-shaped object sailing high in the heavens “at a wonderful speed”. When relating what he saw , he described the thing as a saucer. * Two giant luminous wheels estimated as about 130 feet in diameter were observed spinning above the surface and then slowly descending into the waters of the persian gulf by the crew of the ship vulture on may 13 1879.
The following year a british east company steamer, Patna sighted wheels of a similar sort in the same part of the ocean. Years later other reports added to the mystery. Again in the persian gulf a huge rotating wheel was observed by the S.S. Kilwa on April 10 1901 and in the gulf of Oman a giant wheel was observed by a british steamer. These semi- aquatic spinning wheels have been thought by some to originate in the oceans or possibly be submersible spacecraft. * On the morning of august 12 1883 Senor Jose A.V. Bonilla director of the Zacatecas observatory in Mexico was studying sunspots when he noticed a whole succession of luminous bodies crossing the sun in the same direction. In two hours he counted 283 bodies and the next day 116 of these UFOs . Bonilla was convinced that these mysterious bodies were ” travelling in space near the earth, but not so far as the moon”.