Papua New Guinea.Father Gill · Boianai

On 26 June 1959, around 6:45 p.m., at the Anglican mission of Boianai, on the shore of Goodenough Bay in eastern Papua New Guinea, the Reverend William Booth Gill (a 31-year-old Australian missionary holding a Licentiate in Theology) walked out of the mission house and saw a bright white light in the north-western sky, over the sea. As he later told J. Allen Hynek, on stepping out he saw Venus and, in addition to Venus, a bright white light somewhat above the planet; a mission teacher, Stephen, arrived at 6:52 p.m. and confirmed it was not a star. On a large, disc-shaped form, four humanoid-looking figures could be made out, appearing and disappearing from the upper deck as if busy with some task; from time to time a bluish beam of light projected upward. According to the signed sketch, the main object was clearly visible between 6:55 and 7:22 p.m. to 38 witnesses, Papuans of the mission who included teachers and medical assistants; at 7:10 p.m. the cloud ceiling covered the sky at about 2,000 feet, and Gill noted objects passing in and out of the clouds and casting a halo on them. The activity, with up to five lights at once, lasted about four hours, and in his notes that night Gill even wrote 'satellites?'.

The following night, 27 June, the phenomenon repeated. Gill's first note is at 6:02 p.m.: the sun had already set behind the mountains, but it stayed quite light for fifteen minutes. On the large object four figures appeared, two of them bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting something, while two smaller objects hung motionless further off. Gill raised his arm and waved; to the surprise of the group, about a dozen people, the figure did the same; another witness waved both arms, the two outside figures followed, and all four seemed to wave back. With a torch, Gill directed a series of long dashes at the object, which answered with a pendulum-like swaying and seemed to come closer for half a minute; then the figures disappeared 'below deck'. At 6:30 p.m. Gill went in to dinner; at 7:00 p.m. the object was still there, somewhat smaller, and the observers went to church for Evensong. Asked by Hynek, Gill said he sometimes wondered about this himself, and that he had thought it might be 'just a new device of you Americans'; the next day, by the same account, the local people asked a trader whether he had seen 'the American Air Force'. At 10:40 p.m. a loud explosion woke the mission, with nothing seen. The episode ended without the craft being identified.

Gill documented the case with unusual rigor for the time: he took timed notes as it happened, had three observers draw separately what they saw and obtained the signatures of 27 of the 38 witnesses, who were told to sign only if they were sure. His own report lists the possible objections, from a shared hallucination to the suggestion of witnesses subordinate to the European observer, and in it Gill scaled down his size estimates after practising the hand-span measure; but the same report says the experience took him from scepticism to the conviction that what he saw 'cannot be explained away in terms of natural phenomena', and in the letter he wrote to his colleague David Durry the day after the first sighting he stated that 'there is no doubt whatever that they are handled by beings of some kind'. The US Air Attaché in Australia forwarded the file to Blue Book in January 1960 together with the evaluation of a local agency: in December 1959 Gill told his interviewers that he was not convinced what he had seen were UFOs and would accept any logical explanation, and that the press and flying-saucer groups had distorted some of the facts. The Royal Australian Air Force replied by letter that it could reach no positive conclusions but did not believe they were manned space vehicles, and that an analysis of bearings and angles suggested that at least three of the lights were planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn and Mars, with refraction and tropical weather giving the impression of size and rapid movement; Blue Book closed the case as misinterpretation of astronomical bodies. Hynek, who spoke with Gill in Melbourne and visited Boianai with the Reverend Crutwell some fifteen years later, located six of the original witnesses, who recounted the event in great detail, and rejected the astronomical explanation for the main object: much of it was seen under an overcast sky, with objects descending below the clouds to under 2,000 feet and lighting them up; Gill put its size at about five inches at arm's length, and the second night began in daylight, when no planet would have caused such excitement. Hynek also quotes an Australian air force evaluation that the most probable cause was reflections on a cloud of a major light source of unknown origin, and records that, at the same time as the first sighting, the trader Ernie Evenett, of Samurai, saw a greenish, very bright object with a trail of white flame arrive from the north, hover about 500 feet above him and show the silhouette of a rugby football with brightly lit portholes. Even so, it should be framed for what it is: a close encounter of the third kind, extraordinary and witnessed by many, but testimonial, with no sensor or physical trace.

The Father Gill case is, in its category, the strongest that exists: a close encounter of the third kind with dozens of sober, credible witnesses (led by a university-educated clergyman) and with something almost unique in casework, an apparent interaction (the returned wave) sustained over two nights and backed by signed statements. That is why it has been cited for decades as one of the best 'occupant' reports. And that is precisely why it sharply marks the ceiling of its type: however extraordinary and witnessed by many, it remains a purely testimonial case, with no radar, photograph or material trace. It is documented folklore of very high testimonial quality, with that explicit frontier: enormous historical and human weight, zero hard evidence.