Russia.Little Diomede · a boy spots a light on the nearby Soviet island

On November 24, 1953, the 5004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron, postal address APO 942, care of the Postmaster, Seattle, dated an Air Intelligence Information Report on AF Form 112, number IR 5004-40-53, with the subject "Sighting of Light on Big Diomede, Island, USSR". The country box reads "Alaska", but the area reported on is "Big Diomede, USSR", the Soviet island now called Ratmanov. The date of information is October 8, 1953, the source is Raleigh Iyapanna, the evaluation is "C-3", it was prepared by Major Francis M. Brown and signed, as commander, by Major Richard E. Loomis. It carries the control number AF 605523 and the handwritten note "Index" of the Air Force intelligence library. It was classified Confidential, had a single enclosure, a sketch of the observation, and was distributed to the intelligence staffs of the Alaskan Air Command, the Alaskan Command, US Army Alaska, the Alaskan Sea Frontier, the Far East Air Forces, the Northeast Air Command, the Air Defense Command, the 10th and 11th Air Divisions, the Pacific Fleet and the Office of Special Investigations of the Alaskan Air Command. The list does not include the technical intelligence center (ATIC) that ran Blue Book, although the report was registered and indexed.

The source was a boy. The second page describes him as follows: Raleigh Iyapanna, 14, elementary student and hunter, born on Little Diomede Island, whom the report calls "an Eskimo of Little Diomede Island". He told what he saw to Roy N. Fowler, a member of the squadron stationed on Little Diomede. The report adds that every night during the previous week the boy had kept watch on Big Diomede on his own initiative; the report does not say why. Fowler considered him "fairly reliable" and believed the sighting "possibly true", and noted that he was in good health and had excellent eyesight; those two expressions match the letter and the number of the C-3 evaluation on the cover sheet.

According to part II of the report, at about 1025Z (the cover sheet says 1015Z) the boy saw a light on the southern tip of Big Diomede, at an estimated height of 95 feet above sea level. He had been standing for about fifteen minutes in the center of Little Diomede village, looking toward the Soviet island, when the light appeared; he saw it appear and watched it until it disappeared, several seconds later. It was the size of a nickel held at arm's length and about the color of a burning match or a dim flashlight. In the boy's opinion, it came from a large flashlight or a spotlight. As soon as it went out he ran to his house, about 25 yards away, checked the time, which was 1030Z, and went back to his spot to keep watching, but the light did not reappear. The night was dark with no overcast, the stars were clearly visible and Big Diomede was plainly outlined against the sky; the wind was from the north at about 5 miles per hour. The enclosed sketch, drawn with north pointing down and labelled "seen with the naked eye", places the witness in the village, at 25 feet elevation, and the light on the southern point of the neighboring island, 2.5 miles away at 213° magnetic.

The officer who prepared the report closed with a comment. He found the location of the light somewhat unusual because people had never been observed on that part of Big Diomede and because it is a difficult place to reach, particularly at night. He added that if anyone on the island had wanted to signal to the Alaskan mainland, the best place to do so was precisely the southern tip, from which the coast between Wales and Tin City can be seen when visibility is good. And he qualified it in the same breath: he said so "only to mention the possibility however slight it may be", because "there is no evidence to support a conclusion that this was the purpose of the light". The report records no further action.

The file's dates do not quite fit. The second page says the boy made his report on October 6, 1953, two days before the date of information, and the summary gives 1015Z where the body gives 1025Z. If the island kept Nome time (UTC−11), that region's time until 1983, the light was seen at about 11:25 p.m. on October 7 local time (own calculation). The file does not say which date is right. At that hour the Sun was almost 30° below the horizon and the Moon was also below the horizon (own calculation with ephemerides); if the right date were the 6th at 1025Z, the Sun would be about 29° and the Moon about 27° below the horizon, and the conclusion would be the same, which agrees with the dark, starry night in the report; the only bright planet above the horizon, Jupiter, was to the east, behind anyone looking at Big Diomede.

As evidence, it is the testimony of a single witness, a 14-year-old boy, about a light lasting a few seconds, which reached the Air Force through a squadron member and was put in writing in a report dated about seven weeks later. There is no instrument record, no other witness and no check on the ground, which on a Soviet island was impossible. The report itself does not describe an object in the air: it describes a light on the island's slope, about 95 feet above the sea, which the witness attributed to a large flashlight or a spotlight.

What made it interesting to air intelligence was the place, not the light. Big Diomede lay about 2.5 miles (some 4 kilometers) from an American village and was Soviet ground with a border guard. According to an Associated Press account from 2015, Soviet authorities ordered the 25 to 30 remaining inhabitants of the island to move to Naukan, in Chukotka, in 1948, and the border guard station that, together with meteorologists, occupies the island today was established in the 1940s; The Moscow Times, with the same text, dates it to 1941. A 1950 CIA report translating Japanese sailing directions of 1940 and 1943 already notes that a Diomede coastal radio station operated on the island. And a State Department telegram of February 1948 shows that the Soviets watched that sky: Moscow protested that an American four-engined aircraft had, according to its note, flown over the island on the previous December 25, and Washington instructed its embassy to reply that the aircraft, on a search mission, had passed at 5,000 feet over Little Diomede and that there was no evidence it flew over Big Diomede. When the officer wrote that nobody had ever been seen on the southern tip, he meant that end of the island, not the whole island.

The only proposed cause in the file is the witness's, which the cover-sheet summary signed by the commander, Loomis, repeats without attributing it to him: "The light appeared as though it came from a large flashlight or spotlight and lasted for a period of several seconds". It is a hand light or a spotlight, that is, a human light on the ground. The officer does not dispute it; what he declares unsupported is something else, that the light was meant to signal to Alaska. With Soviet personnel on the island, a brief light on a slope is an ordinary reading, although the report does not say who could have taken it there or why the boy watched the island every night. The document matters above all as a sample of what the 5004th squadron recorded on the Cold War border: any visible activity on the Soviet side, however small.