Greenland.Greenland · a KLM crew sees black oval shapes alongside

On Sunday, August 29, 1954, a Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) DC-4 was flying from Europe to Gander, Newfoundland, on a heading of 267 degrees magnetic, when two of its crew saw something south or southwest of Prince Christian Sound, at the southern tip of Greenland. The aircraft was between two cloud layers, above the lower one and with a second layer higher up, estimated at up to 15,000 feet, with visibility of 30 to 40 miles. The first to see it was the copilot, who was at the controls, from his seat, at the two-thirty clock position, on the north side of the track. The Blue Book card and the amplification of the telex give 1405 GMT; the first telex says 1415.

The two witnesses were the copilot, 29, with 12 years of experience and trained by the RAF, who had been at the controls for three hours after resting, and a Dutch second engineer, with two months at KLM and before that two years on the ground with the Royal Netherlands Air Force. Their names are blacked out. The aircraft commander, a former U.S. Navy pilot, certified the reliability of both. The telex adds that the copilot had taken part in a sighting over Java in 1952 and that there was no navigator aboard; even so, it gives the position of the sighting, around 60 degrees north and 43 west, as accurate within six minutes either way (the unit is hard to read).

At first it looked like a single black or dark object, lenticular in shape. Later they believed there were three or four, in formation, flying a course parallel to the aircraft's. When the objects changed position within the formation, they could tell there was more than one, and the card adds that the objects changed course. They were too large to be a single aircraft: seen from the seat, they measured an inch and a half (about 4 cm) on the windshield. They left no contrails, smoke or noise. They stayed abreast of the aircraft, between the cloud layers, until the DC-4 entered a cloud for half a minute and, when it came out, they were gone.

That same afternoon, at 1533 GMT, the 64th Air Division (Defense), at Pepperrell, had sent an emergency message to the Air Force's Directorate of Intelligence, ATIC and several commands: a few unidentified objects sighted southwest of Prince Christian, heading west, size unknown, at about 180 knots and between cloud layers, described by the pilot as "a formation of large black oval shapes". No interception was attempted and no ground control radar made contact. It asked for the flight plans to be checked in case of a correlation.

A correction arrived at 1732: the objects were in sight for ten minutes and two miles north, not south, of the aircraft's track. The crew's account was taken afterward at Gander, at about 2015 GMT (one digit of the time is hard to read), for later interrogation with KLM's offices. The amplification of 2334, now with the crew's details, speaks of a sighting of five to six minutes and of about 50 miles south or southwest of Prince Christian, and puts the distance to the objects at 20 to 30 miles. The Blue Book card records ten minutes, three or four objects, a course of "manuvered", a distance of 20 to 30 miles, no contrails, no ground control radar pickup and objects two miles north of the track. Its conclusion is "UNIDENTIFIED".

The case has a first-hand official record from the same day and witnesses the command itself rates as "very reliable": an experienced copilot, rested and at the controls, and a second engineer, vouched for by a commander with a naval aviator's background. That is its weight. There was no radar or photograph, and nobody went out to intercept the objects, so everything rests on what two people saw over a few minutes.

The telexes themselves do not agree on the essentials. The objects were two miles south of the track, then two miles north, and the amplification puts them 20 or 30 miles from the aircraft, at the two-thirty clock position, which by a calculation of this entry would place them about 19 to 29 miles from the track and not two; the sighting lasted ten minutes in one message and five to six in the next; the time is 1405 on the card and in the amplification, and 1415 in the first telex. The size figures do not settle it either: an inch and a half of windshield from the seat gives no angle without the distance from the eye to the glass, and without the distance to the object it gives no size. The file settles none of these differences.

The file offers no proposed explanation. No ATIC comment accompanies the card, and the only check requested, of flight plans to see whether some aircraft explained the formation, has no answer in the file. That the objects were black, oval and kept abreast of the aircraft for several minutes is the most striking part of the account, and also what depends most on how distance is judged against a background of clouds with no references.

The report notes that the copilot had lived through another sighting in 1952, in Java. The report draws no conclusion from it.