United States.Gambell · a hunter sees a still light at sea suddenly go out

In the early hours of December 1, 1953, at about 11:10 UTC (just after midnight in Bering time, by a calculation of this file), Clifford Iknokinok was standing in front of the Gambell school, on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, about 25 feet above sea level, when he saw a light on the horizon to the west. At first he said the light was about 10 inches in diameter; later, that a circular object 5½ inches across held at arm's length would cover it. He stated that the light did not move and checked this by sighting along the school flagpole. He saw no reflection or beam, the color was similar to a flashlight's, and the light was "not bright, nor was it very dim." At 11:15 it disappeared "as though someone had turned it off." He watched it without binoculars and would not estimate how far away it was.

Iknokinok was 26, had completed the eighth grade and was an Eskimo, in the official form's terminology. He had served three years and nine months in the Gambell unit of the Alaska National Guard, had been a sergeant since January 1, 1953 and was a squad leader. He had worked for the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) at Gambell from July 1942 to April 1949, and in 1953 he made his living hunting. Two members of Flight A of the 5004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron stationed at Gambell, William W. Caldwell and Roderick M. Moore, had known him for eight months, found him trustworthy and honest and had confidence in his judgment. Two years later, in November 1955, the US press named him, by then a sergeant first class aged 28, as one of the two Eskimo guardsmen the Pentagon honored for rescuing the eleven crew members of a Navy patrol plane shot down by Soviet fighters over the Bering Sea on June 22 that year.

The weather section gives a northeast wind of about 20 miles per hour, visibility of about 20 miles and a cloud ceiling of about 2,000 feet. The night was very dark; west of Gambell there was slush ice but no heavy ice, and the ocean was calm.

On December 8, a week later, the 5004th Squadron signed an intelligence report (IR 5004-42-53) with the subject "Light Observed West of Gambell." It was prepared by Captain John V. Wright and approved by the squadron commander, Major William H. Greenhalgh Jr. Caldwell had used a lensatic compass to determine the true bearing of the light, 283°, and had checked the village to see whether anyone else had seen it: no one had. Wright writes that the witness is "apparently in error" when he says a 5½-inch disk would cover it, because a light measured that way would appear much larger than his first estimate. He adds that no land exists within a considerable distance of Gambell on a bearing of 283° true, which removes the possibility of a land-based light; from the information available no conclusion can be reached as to the origin or type of the light, and a possibility exists that it came from a ship at sea, identity unknown. The summary on the first page repeats that possibility: an unidentified ship operating in or near US territorial waters.

The enclosed map, which is schematic, draws the island's northwest tip, the Soviet coast with Cape Chaplino (labeled "Cape Chaplina") to the northwest, the International Date Line between them and the 283° bearing arrow leaving Gambell toward open sea. Measured with the map's own scale (1 inch to 13.7 nautical miles), the arrow crosses that line less than 20 km from Gambell, by a measurement of this file.

The report mentions no radar, no other witnesses and no check of shipping in the area. The case does not appear in Project Blue Book's index of December 1953 cases, and no Gambell folder for that month has been located in the digitized Blue Book files consulted. There are earlier cases from the same village. One folder gathers the flashes and explosions the Gambell station heard and saw between April and August 1951 toward the Chukotka coast; its card reads "NOT A UFO REPORT" and concludes "Gun Fire," because the Alaskan Command (CINCAL) attributed them to Soviet coastal defense batteries firing at a target not observed from St. Lawrence. The 1953 index lists a Gambell entry of March 17, evaluated as aircraft and annotated "CASE MISSING."

On March 24, 1953 two witnesses, one of them about a mile east of Gambell, watched a flickering light at 323° true for 45 minutes, which began about 5° up, faded gradually below the horizon and recurred on the 25th and 26th; ATIC (the Air Force's technical intelligence center) judged it probably Venus precisely because of the bearing, the gradual fade-out and the repetition. The December light behaved differently: it was on the horizon, it went out abruptly and the report does not say it came back.

A single witness, well identified by name, age, occupation and military service, saw a light for five minutes. Intelligence personnel who lived in the same village measured the bearing with a compass, looked for other witnesses and put it in writing a week later in an official unit report. There is no instrumental record, no second witness and no physical evidence, and the report's own wording marks the limits of what is known: the witness would not estimate the distance, gave two incompatible sizes, and the officer said so in writing.

The explanation the report leaves is an expressly stated possibility, not a conclusion: an unidentified ship. It is the one that best fits what the report records. The light was on the horizon, over a calm sea with no heavy ice, on a bearing with no land nearby; it was flashlight-colored, with no beam or reflection, it did not move and it went out abruptly, the way a light switched by hand goes out. Nobody in the document refutes it; nobody confirms it either, because the report does not say that anyone checked which vessels were west of the island that night. By a calculation of this file, from about 25 feet up the sea horizon lies about 10 km away, and a light 5 to 20 meters above the water can be seen at most 18 to 26 km away. The 1867 Convention line separating Alaska from Russia passes, according to its text, midway between the northwest point of St. Lawrence and Cape Chukotsky, which is about 85 km from Gambell. By a calculation of this file, the midpoint lies about 43 km away and the line cuts the 283° bearing about 50 km out, so a ship with its light on the horizon, 10 to 26 km away, would be on the US side of that line but outside the 3-mile territorial waters of the time, in international waters: "near" rather than "in" the territorial waters the report mentions. (The map, which is schematic, draws the date line much closer to Gambell, less than 20 km away.)

There is another coincidence the report does not mention. By a calculation of this file, at 11:10 UTC the star Enif, magnitude 2.4, was about 4° above the horizon in the direction 283.5°, less than a degree from the measured bearing; by 11:15 it had dropped to about 3.9° and drifted a little over a degree to the north, and it did not set until 11:56. That fits the bearing and a light that looks still to the naked eye. It fits the brightness less well: at 4° up, the atmosphere would leave it around magnitude 5 or 6, barely visible and twinkling, not the report's light that was "not bright, nor was it very dim." It also fits less well with a light on the horizon and with an abrupt disappearance at 11:15, which only a cloud from the report's 2,000-foot ceiling could explain, and the report says the witness checked that it did not move. The Moon was about 24° below the horizon, consistent with the very dark night in the weather section, and Jupiter, high in the south-southeast, is not on the bearing. Nor does the report explain how Caldwell converted the compass's magnetic bearing to a true one.

Gambell sits on the northwest tip of St. Lawrence, facing Chukotka: the report's map draws the Soviet coast to the northwest, and Cape Chaplino lies about 73 km away by a calculation of this file. That explains why an unremarkable light ended up in a report distributed to the Pacific Fleet. That same autumn the 5004th recorded at Little Diomede the light a boy saw on the Soviet island opposite (↗). According to the 1956 press, the Eskimo guardsmen watched from the coast and the islands facing Siberia for any unusual activity on the border, and in 1955 the downing of the Navy plane over the Bering Sea, near the Russian border, showed that this border was not a quiet one.