Kenya.Nanyuki · a couple see a pearly object over a golf course

On Saturday, December 2, 1950, at 10:50 in the morning, a couple staying at the Mawingo Hotel in Nanyuki, at the foot of Mount Kenya, were playing golf on the local course. Moving from the fourth hole to the fifth, the husband heard behind them a high-pitched buzz he took for a swarm of bees and called a warning to his wife, about fifteen feet away; she had heard it too and put up her arm as if to protect her head. But there was nothing to be seen. The husband followed the direction of the sound with his eyes and, as it died away, saw in the clear sky a pearly-colored object he at first took for a piece of thistledown floating high up.

Just then a bird passed about a hundred feet up, and by comparison he realized that what he was looking at was much higher. According to his account, the object was circular and seemed, at that height, about the size of an East African fifty-cent piece. It was thicker across its vertical axis, not unlike a top flattened at its upper and lower poles, and appeared to be spinning clockwise while hovering in an almost stationary position. "What's that in the sky?" he called to his wife, and then: "It's a flying saucer!" She had seen it too and replied: "Don't be so ridiculous." The color, he added, had a certain pearly iridescence and not the normal metallic look: "The saucer was absolutely clear and quite unlike anything I have ever seen before flying."

The witness stressed that they had nothing of the kind in mind: they only looked up because of the buzzing, and he did not know whether there really were bees or whether the sound came from the object. He wrote that, for simplicity, he would from then on call it a flying saucer, whether or not it was one, and closed by saying his account was an exact and true description of what he saw. His name is blacked out in the file copy.

His account appeared in the East African Standard newspaper. From there it was picked up by a U.S. Army intelligence report, "Was It a Flying Saucer?", which Lieutenant Colonel Leo J. Query wrote from Ethiopia on December 29, 1950; the information it relays is dated December 15. The report carries a C-3 rating: a fairly reliable source, information possibly true. It introduces the account as an "odd experience" the couple had on the "Nanyika" golf course (as the document spells it), which the husband describes "in his own words."

The case card was opened later, on January 2, 1952, on a U.S. Air Force form from the Project Blue Book era ("Project 10073 Record"). It records a civilian couple who saw a circular object of pearly iridescence at a "considerable" altitude, hovering and spinning, with a high-pitched buzz like a swarm of bees. A barely legible handwritten note seems to say "unidentified."

The only account of the event is the husband's own, written for the East African Standard; the file records no interview with the witnesses. The witness himself acknowledges three limits: he does not know whether the buzzing came from the object, he first took it for thistledown, and he inferred it was high only by comparison with a bird passing about 100 feet up.

Without another distance reference, a small, nearby object can look large and distant, and vice versa. One possibility that no source proposes is a seed with a pappus, the tuft of hairs it flies on, carried on a rising current: it could look pearly and almost motionless in the mid-morning sun, which according to the ephemerides was about 60 degrees high at 10:50. The buzzing may have been a swarm of bees, which is what the witness thought when he heard it.