Bermuda.Paget · a silver sphere crosses the Bermuda sky

On the afternoon of Monday, June 20, 1949, still in daylight, an architect in Bermuda was in the yard of his home in Paget parish with his wife and two women friends, one from Jackson Heights, New York, and one from Philadelphia. At about 6:05 p.m. local time, give or take five minutes, he saw in the sky a brilliantly silver sphere about 45 to 50 degrees above the horizon, due north. It looked about the size of a medium star. The other three saw it too and, according to the military report, agreed with his account.

According to the description the architect himself gave military intelligence, the sphere moved south and its apparent size grew slightly. At about 6:10 it began to lose speed and, when it was about 80 degrees above the horizon, almost overhead and to the south, it vanished within seconds, going straight up. The Blue Book card gives a duration of five to ten minutes; the newspaper said fifteen. Because of the object's shape he could not estimate altitude or speed. Comparing it with the cumulus clouds in the sky, he worked out that it was at least 10,000 to 15,000 feet above the sea and, in a very rough estimate, 30,000 feet or more.

Bermuda Base Command, at Kindley Air Force Base, collected that account, a hand-drawn map of the object's heading and the front page of the Hamilton "Sunday Royal Gazette" of July 3. The paper's headline read "FLYING SAUCER" SEEN OVER BERMUDA; it said four people had seen the object and that U.S. authorities at Kindley were looking into it. The lead, only partly legible, adds that checks of Air Force equipment and meteorological apparatus had not identified the object. The Intelligence Division of the Military Air Transport Service signed the report on July 11, three weeks after the event.

The intelligence report records the fact on which the Blue Book card's "BALLOON" conclusion rests. The base weather detachment had released a radiosonde balloon at 6:00 p.m. the same day, five minutes before what the architect saw. The weather officer worked out its track in a memo of June 27, using "first degree approximations" and "without benefit of protractor". The balloon would have gone from east to west along the island, at about 1,200 feet near the base and 3,000 to 4,500 feet farther west, until it burst over Great Sound; the instrument would have hit the water between one and four miles from the place of the observation, to the west or northwest. His written conclusion is that the balloon could not have been seen from Paget.

The intelligence report adds another caveat: the balloon's track as told by the newspaper differs from the one the weather officer plotted. On the attached map, the dashed line of the object, from north-northeast to south, crosses the balloon's line near the 4,000-foot mark. With the climb rate of about 1,040 feet per minute given in the winds extract, a calculation of this entry puts the balloon between about 5,000 and 10,000 feet between 6:05 and 6:10 p.m., while the weather officer's track reaches 4,500 feet at its end and the witness estimated at least 10,000 or 15,000 feet: the figures overlap only at the high end. The card nevertheless repeats in its summary that observation of the balloon from Paget "would have been impossible", and concludes "BALLOON" all the same.

The card closes the case as a balloon and the same file holds the calculation saying that balloon could not have been seen from Paget. Both cannot be true at once, and the intelligence report does not reconcile them: it only notes that the newspaper's track does not match the plotted one. The weather officer's calculation is rough, done by hand with approximations, and does not explain what makes it impossible to see a balloon whose instrument, by his own figures, came down between one and four miles away. So it does not refute the explanation, but it does not leave it firm either.

What the witness describes is compatible with a balloon lit by the sun on a clear afternoon: a silver sphere, the size of a star, that recedes slowly and is lost upward. The time fits too, with the release five minutes earlier. The heading does not: by the map the balloon was going west, and the architect saw the object cross from north to south. A balloon that rises carried by different winds at each altitude can trace paths that a person without reference points judges differently, but the file does not allow a decision.

It was a single group of people who saw the same thing together, with no photograph, no instrument and no other independent witness; the witness's name is blacked out in the report and the report came three weeks later. The newspaper, which headlined "flying saucer" two years after Kenneth Arnold's sighting, is a secondhand source for what was seen. What there is, is the trail of the investigation: air intelligence asked for the weather data, plotted the balloon's track, compared it with the press and filed the case as a balloon, although its own material disputes that this balloon could be seen from Paget.