Pakistán.Karachi · the "white metal discs" with trails (1952)

On the morning of Thursday 11 December 1952, between midnight and ten o'clock, several people in Karachi, then the capital of Pakistan, reported four objects in the sky that they took for "flying saucers". The local press carried the descriptions: to some they were white metal discs; to others, translucent circular objects. All agreed that they flew at high altitude and high speed, and that they left a white or smoke-like trail behind them. One of the reporters gave another version: according to him, the supposed saucers were really aircraft flying very high.

The news reached Washington through diplomatic channels. The US embassy in Karachi included it in its joint weekly report (the "Joint WEEKA" number 50, of 15 December), with a detail the press did not have: according to the headquarters of the Royal Pakistan Air Force, the times of the sightings did not coincide with any high-altitude operation by its aircraft, jet or piston, in the Karachi area. From there it passed into the daily intelligence summary of the Far East Air Forces command in Tokyo, dated 23 December, which distributed it to Air Force headquarters in Washington and to some twenty commands: air defence, Strategic Air Command, Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson and the commands in Alaska, Hawaii and England. In that same message, the item on the Karachi saucers appears between news of the elections in Indochina and the air negotiations between India and Pakistan.

Blue Book opened a record card with the message's data: date, 11 December 1952; local time, from 00:01; ground-visual observation; four objects; "varied" sources; no photographs. At first it wrote "Karachi, Japan" —the message came from Tokyo— and someone corrected it by hand to "Pakistan". The conclusion was "insufficient data for evaluation", the category the project used when it had nothing to work with. There is no record that anyone returned to the case or asked the embassy for more information.

It is the corpus's first case in Pakistan, and one of the few from South Asia in the early Cold War years. Karachi was then a hub of world aviation: an obligatory stop on the routes between Europe, Asia and Australia, with military and civil traffic from many countries. In 1952, moreover, the British airline BOAC had just put the de Havilland Comet, the first jet airliner, into service on routes to Asia that stopped at Karachi. A jet flying at high altitude, its aluminium fuselage glinting in the sun and a condensation trail behind it, is an almost exact description of a "white metal disc leaving a smoky trail".

The value of the case lies not in the phenomenon, which was in all likelihood mundane, but in what it shows about the information circuit of 1952. A local press story in Pakistan reached twenty US Air Force commands on three continents in under two weeks, inside a Tokyo intelligence summary and with the same priority as the elections in Indochina. It is the year of the great Washington wave (↗), when the Air Force treated every "saucer" report in the world as possible data on enemy technology, and the case shows how far that network reached.

The most likely explanation is the sceptical reporter's: aircraft at high altitude, seen in the morning with the sun glinting off the metal and a condensation trail behind. White or smoky trails fit a strange phenomenon badly and a jet aircraft very well, and the city had heavy international air traffic. The Pakistani air force's denial rules nothing out, because it covers only its own aircraft; those of other air forces and the airlines are left out. We have not been able to check the schedules of flights through Karachi that day, so the identification with a specific aircraft remains a hypothesis.

That is why the case weighs mainly on the mundane explanation, with some weight for other countries' military aircraft —the region was full of reconnaissance flights at the height of the Cold War— and a remainder of indeterminacy for the poverty of the data. The "Karachi, Japan" detail on the Blue Book card, corrected by hand, sums up the attention it received: it was filed, classified for lack of data and never looked at again.