Kuwait.Kuwait · oil workers see a luminous object over the fields

In November 1978 Kuwait went through a wave of sightings. P. G. Jacob, a marine biologist at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR), wrote to MUFON, an American UFO network, that it all began on November 9 and that every sighting occurred in the fields of the Kuwait Oil Company, the country's major oil producer. That first night, employees at Gathering Center No. 24 saw an object, and staff at Center No. 15 said they had seen it too, according to the Kuwait Times of November 16.

The press and some newscasts carried the account of technicians describing a completely silent cylinder with a large dome and a flashing red light that had landed and taken off again in an oil field; they spoke of a temporary disruption of telecommunications and of a nearby pumping station that stopped working.

A team from the institute, assisted by police and army personnel, searched the area and found no trace. There were more sightings. On November 21, between 5:30 and 6:00 in the morning, an object flew over the Sabriya field near the Iraqi border, passed over a twenty-foot water tower and stayed in the area for half an hour. An employee photographed it, according to the Arab Times, and the supervisor arrived in time to see it; once again long-distance communications were cut, although internal telephones kept working.

The photographs were never released. On January 20, 1979 at least ten people saw another object over Kuwait City, and an Arab Times reporter photographed it: two blots of light that ran on the front page the next day. According to the paper, the object seemed to rotate, changing from circular to more triangular as it hovered, and then vanished at great speed in the direction of Iran.

The Kuwaiti government appointed a committee of KISR experts. Its report, released on January 20, described eight sightings between November and December 14. At the press conference on January 23 its members admitted they were groping in the dark and could neither confirm nor deny the presence of UFOs, and showed two sketches of domed discs drawn from the testimony. The report rejected the idea that they were espionage devices, did not rule on an extraterrestrial origin and recommended that the government take every possible measure to protect the country's airspace, territory and oil resources.

On January 29 the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait sent the State Department an unclassified telegram, signed by Ambassador Frank Maestrone, whose distribution list included the Secretary of Defense, the European Command, NASA, the CIA and the NSA. It summarized the KISR report, quoted its spokesman, who said the scientists did not know enough to say with certainty that they were not "spaceships", and added something the committee had not addressed.

A senior oil company official told the embassy that the object that first appeared over the northern fields had done strange things to the automatic pumping equipment, designed to stop in the event of a serious fault and restartable only by hand: it shut itself down when the object appeared and restarted by itself when it vanished. The telegram also noted that Kuwait's air defense system "did not react in any way" to the "events" in the oil company's North field because it was "closed down for the night." It does not say which night that was or whether the shutdown was routine, and it referred to a separate telegram.

The episode was recorded in three independent layers: a scientific committee appointed by the government, which held a press conference and released a report; the local press of the time, collected in the MUFON UFO Journal from the letter of a scientist at the institute itself; and an unclassified U.S. diplomatic telegram that the State Department declassified in 2014.

The most striking point, the automatic shutdown and restart of the pumping, is also the most fragile. It comes from a single oil company official, told by word of mouth to foreign diplomats, and the KISR committee did not address it. There is no technical record to back it, and a system that by the account itself restarts only by hand yet restarted on its own is precisely the kind of detail that needs checking before it is accepted. The same goes for the communications cuts: they recur in the press accounts, but there is no documentation from the telecommunications company.

The conventional explanations find support in the context itself. The first sightings coincided with the end of the long Eid al-Adha celebrations, which the telegram calls "traditionally exuberant", and the same telegram records local speculation about helicopters or hovercraft carrying refugees or money out of Iran, in the middle of the revolution across the Gulf.

The episode of November 21, an object that stayed in the area for half an hour before dawn, fits Venus, which on November 7 had passed between the Earth and the Sun (inferior conjunction) and was rising those weeks as a very bright morning star. The source, however, does not give the direction in which it was seen. It says the object flew over the water tower, but a celestial object low on the horizon also appears to sit over a nearby structure. The committee rejected espionage, but that possibility, aircraft from a neighboring country at a moment of enormous regional tension, remains more plausible than an extraterrestrial one.

The case remains largely unresolved, and the original KISR report has yet to be located. What is established is that a government took the matter seriously enough to commission a scientific study, whose committee urged it to protect its airspace,, and that the United States followed it closely.