The principal counterargument advanced to save the ETH is that flying saucers were seen before Kenneth Arnold's story hit the headlines and those could not have been shaped by the rumor. Many of these reports were never published, let alone investigated, before Arnold became news and so are vulnerable to errors of memory and suggestion. Even if any are eventually found with a satisfactory pedigree, the argument overlooks that Hynek and Jacobs only offered the questions they did because saucers are the dominant shape of ufos after 1947. No amount of research is ever go change the fact that saucers make up only a trivial percentage of things seen in the sky before 1947 and will never be proven to be dominant. The fallacy of this approach is demonstrated by imagining what a Hynek-like thinker, immersed in the reports of the airship era (1896/7), asked and answered, "Why cigar-shaped and not globes or cubes?" and "then" was told that reports of a slow, low-flying cigar-shaped object in 1347 A.D. meant he had not found the source of the problem. He would clearly dismiss the report as irrelevant – the implicit issue is explaining the dominance of the shape. The rumor generated by Arnold's report is the clear answer to Hynek's question, regardless of minor cases that were exceptions to the dominants of their own era.