Universal York

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Flying Saucers Over York County

Flying saucer?
It seems like you hardly ever hear about flying saucers these days. The local papers used to report that local citizens saw some every now and then. Either they aren’t visiting south-central Pennsylvania anymore or people aren’t letting the media know what they think they saw.
The photo above appeared in the July 12, 1947 Gazette and Daily. The caption read:

YORK’S OWN HOME-MADE “FLYING DISC”–Some people THOUGHT they say “flying saucers” but Joseph Kemper, Dover RD 3, FOUND one in a corn field north of the city and brought it to York police headquarters.
The aluminum disc, the size of a large radio record, has several tubes, condensers, resistors and other radio paraphernalia soldered on and some rubber tubing attached. The disc has some alleged Oriental characters painted over it in red.
Says Chief Nelson L. Shultz: “If that will fly, so will a cow.”
Could be some practical joker was adding local color to a national fad, huh?

What do you think? Are those oriental characters, and, if they are, what do they say? Remember, this was 1947, and having oriental writing on your electronics wasn’t common, as it seems to be today. Think it fell off a Chinese spy plane?
And–what’s a radio record? I did a Google search and only came up with lots of radio record players or how to record from a radio plus two results in languages I do not recognize–hmmm.