Angola.Luanda · passengers and crew see two lights beside the plane

On December 7, 1966, a Transportes Aéreos Portugueses (TAP) aircraft flying from Beira, in Mozambique, to Luanda, the capital of Angola, was some twenty minutes from its destination when a passenger saw through the window what looked like two objects "escorting" the plane. He told the captain, whom the documents name as Maia de Loureiro, who went to look for himself and then reported the sighting to the Luanda control tower. According to what he told reporters after landing, the tower replied that there was no traffic in the area at the time. The occupants of the aircraft kept watching the objects until the plane was a minute from touchdown; at that point, they said, the objects vanished.

The Luanda press ran the story over the weekend of December 10 as the possible sighting of two "flying saucers." The descriptions were vague, and several witnesses, the captain among them, explained that vagueness by the high speed, maneuverability and distance of what they had seen. The captain said only that he had seen "two lights at the side of my aircraft." Other, unattributed observations added that the objects radiated an orange glow and accompanied the plane with swift dives and climbs.

On December 13 the same press reported a statement from TAP headquarters in Lisbon: citing a preliminary investigation based on the captain's report, the airline concluded that "there is no reason to consider that the phenomena observed constitute demonstrable proof of flying objects."

All of this is known through an American document. On December 23, 1966, the U.S. consulate in Luanda sent the State Department unclassified airgram A-53, copied to the embassy in Lisbon, under the subject "Unidentified Flying Objects Reported Over Angola." The airgram summarizes the local press; the consulate does not say it spoke to the witnesses and adds no information of its own. The document ended up in the files of the National Security Agency (NSA), which published it along with other State Department airgrams in its collection of declassified UFO documents, now mirrored on archive.org.

The same collection holds similar airgrams from other posts: one from the Tokyo embassy in May 1966 on a sighting at Nemuro, which cites a Department instruction of June 1962 asking posts to report such events, and one from the Monterrey consulate in February 1967 on an object that fell near General Terán, sent for forwarding to NASA. There is no record that anyone in Washington investigated the Luanda case, and the documents in the collection include no reply. The Lisbon daily "Diário de Lisboa," checked from December 2 to 15, 1966, does not mention the episode.

Everything known consists of statements to the press, collected second-hand by the consulate, and the only named testimony is the captain's, who spoke only of "two lights." The airgram itself admits the description is vague, gives no time for the sighting and does not say the consulate spoke to the witnesses. The airgram mentions no radar, photograph or technical report.

What is on record is that a passenger and the captain saw lights, that according to the captain the tower had no traffic in the area, and that TAP, after a preliminary investigation based on the captain's report, said there was no reason to consider the phenomena demonstrable proof of flying objects. No source proposes a cause. As a conjecture, two distant, fixed lights, such as bright stars or planets, can seem to accompany an aircraft that banks and descends on approach and be hidden by the horizon when the plane drops low; another possibility would be a reflection in the window. Fixed lights would not by themselves explain the dives and climbs that unnamed witnesses described. Without the exact time it is not possible to check which celestial bodies were visible.