外来入侵者
　　　Invaders from Elsewhere

June 24, 1947: Afternoon skies over the still-unspoiled Washington Cascades. Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot from Boise, ID, takes in the view. Suddenly, he sees nine silvery, crescent-shaped objects flying in tight formation. Later, he estimates their size at 40 to 50 feet wide, their speed at a fantastic 1200 miles per hour. Yet they're moving like no jet, no airplane, would ever move rhythmically, as if you were to skip a saucer across water, he tells the newspapers. A headline writer garbles the quote and coins a snappy tagline "flying saucers." And Kenneth Arnold earns his footnote in history.

*still-unspoiled：尚未被破坏的。“spoil”意为“损坏”，另外还有“宠坏，溺爱”的意思，比如：She spoiled her son by giving him too much money. 事情发生在50多年前，还未怎么被人类破坏的华盛顿喀斯喀特山脉上空。
*crescent-shaped：新月形的。Crescent是“新月、月牙”的意思，“-shaped”表示“有……形状的”，前加名词，比如“pear-shaped”就是“梨形的”。
*saucer：碟子、茶托。与plate（盘子）不同，saucer指比较小、比较浅碟子。阿诺德描述，他所看到的不明飞行物有节奏地移动，就象平投在水面跳跃的碟子。
*garble：曲解，篡改。一位头版作家对阿诺德的话断章取义，并造出了我们熟悉的“飞碟”这个词（文中的coin是“造字”的意思）。于是，阿诺德在历史上也算占有了一席之地。

Of course, people have been seeing strange things in the skies for a long time, globes, cigar-shapes and saucers, you bet; old English accounts mention Yorkshire peasants spotting a silver disc in the heavens in the Year of Grace 1290. Dozens of more recent stories can be pulled from the historical records, from the large saucer seen by a farmer near Dallas in 1878 to the "ghost rockets" reported over Scandinavia in the '30s and '40s. But in June 1947, the phenomenon achieved critical mass, God knows why. A philosopher of history once remarked that it steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time, and 1947 manifestly was Saucer Time.

*spot：这里作动词，是“发现、认出”的意思。比如：I spotted him at once as an American.（我一眼就认出他是美国人。）Spot这个词有丰富的含义，例如你妈妈做的苹果派很合你口味，就可以说：Mother's apple pie always hits the spot with me.（这里spot是名词。）
*manifestly：明显地。曾有位历史哲学家认为，“蒸汽机”标准着“蒸汽时代”的到来，而1947年就迎来了“飞碟时代”

After Arnold's initial report, UFO sightings in our skies exploded. On June 26, four witnesses including a doctor saw a "huge silver globe" moving along the rim of the Grand Canyon; two days after that, an Air Force pilot reported a flight of six discs over Lake Meade, NY. Within days, reports were pouring in from localities as widely separated as Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Louisiana, Quebec and Prince Edward Island in far-north Canada.

*initial：这里是“最初的”意思，另外还有“词首的、初始的”登意思。在阿诺德的最初报道之后，UFO现象便开始沸沸扬扬。
*Grand Canyon：即美国著名的大峡谷。 .