Egypt.Egypt · seven dots on a film and a light seen from a warship

Project Blue Book was the U.S. Air Force program that studied UFO reports. Its archive holds two unrelated files under "Egypt": a film sent from Cairo in 1956 and a sighting by U.S. Navy officers in October 1960.

The film arrived in July 1956. A civilian had sent it, with no written report: nothing said when or where the pictures were taken, or who took them. According to two handwritten notes in the file, it came with three negatives, two paper prints, a newspaper clipping and a slide. The surviving scan holds those notes, but not the images or the clipping.

On July 17, at the Air Force's technical intelligence center, the acting chief of its science division, Henry A. Miley, asked for an analysis. The film came with no data to help, he wrote, but the correspondence was "international" in nature and "must be given some consideration." Wilber Price of the photo section replied the next day.

Price described a 35-millimeter transparency with seven light images near the center, arranged roughly in a circle. Two were birds in flight; their wings could be made out. The other five were "probably birds also," caught in positions where the wings did not show. Inside the circle there were also three small dot-like flaws, probably caused by scratches or abrasion of the emulsion. Blue Book closed the case as "Other: birds."

Four years later, in October 1960, three officers of Destroyer Squadron 20 saw an object at 1:30 a.m. local time. It was moving rapidly across the sky from east to southwest, "accelerating and ascending." They followed it from five degrees above the horizon to forty, where they lost it at 1:38. At first it was slightly brighter than a first-magnitude star; then it faded steadily.

A message from the commander of Carrier Division 18 reported it. The officers wrote that it was "definitely not" an aircraft or a shooting star, and suggested it might be a Soviet rocket bound for Mars, since the Thursday, October 13 newspaper had reported favorable conditions for such a launch. The message gives the time of the sighting but not its date. It was sent at 3:21 UTC on October 16, about four hours after 1:30 a.m. local time, which suggests the sighting took place that same night. The card Blue Book later opened, however, dates it October 12.

The message put the ship at 23°59′ north latitude and 30°23′ east longitude, in the middle of the Egyptian desert, west of the Nile. A corrected copy went out the next day, with the correction underlined, but it only changed the way the longitude was written; the latitude stayed the same. Blue Book noted that the position fell "in middle of Egypt" and that the ship's heading was missing. Without those details it could not place the object, and it filed the case as "insufficient data."

A destroyer cannot sit in the desert. If the latitude were 33°59′ rather than 23°59′, the ship would have been in the eastern Mediterranean, west of Cyprus, but no document confirms it. The officers' idea does not fit the dates. According to Jonathan McDowell's launch catalog, the two Soviet rockets sent toward Mars that week, Mars 1M No. 1 and No. 2, lifted off on October 10 and 14. Both failed during ascent, more than a day before the sighting. A sunlit satellite, another common source of lights that cross the night sky and fade, does not fit either. A calculation made for this case with solar ephemerides puts the Sun 55 to 60 degrees below the horizon at that hour at either position, far too low to light up a satellite in low orbit.

The film shows what Blue Book could do with material that came without context. With no date, place or photographer, the analysts could only look at the image, and here it was enough that a few of the dots showed their wings. The emulsion flaws are also a reminder that not every bright dot on a film was ever in the sky.

The 1960 sighting has what the film lacked: three officers as witnesses, an exact time and a path measured in degrees. It is undone by two missing details, the ship's real position and its heading. Without them there is no way to know which way the officers were looking, and almost nothing can be checked. The available data rule out only two things: the Mars rocket the officers themselves suggested and a sunlit satellite.

Blue Book's record cards are filing summaries written after the event. When one departs from the document it summarizes, as this one does on the date, the document prevails.