Canada.Prince George · two guards see a light come down and stop

From June 1953 the U.S. Air Force's 918th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron ran the Baldy Hughes radar station, about 36 kilometers south-southwest of Prince George in the interior of British Columbia, as part of the Pinetree Line watching North American airspace. At 0315 Zulu on November 8, 1953, which in Prince George was 7:15 p.m. on Saturday, November 7 (own calculation, with Pacific time eight hours behind Greenwich; the Blue Book record card also gives the date as November 7), two airmen of the squadron were guarding a B-29 bomber at Prince George Airport: Technical Sergeant Arvel Lee Daniel, the provost sergeant, and Staff Sergeant John Junior Bricker, an air policeman. The report rates both as "reliable" and says there were no civilian witnesses.

What first caught their attention was what looked like a falling star, about 15° above the horizon, at an azimuth they did not record. According to the report, the light came down to within about 150 feet of the ground, stayed there motionless for about 30 seconds, rose straight up about 300 feet, stayed still for nearly 10 seconds more and left toward the west, climbing, until it was lost to sight "due to distance and altitude". The observation lasted about four minutes, with the naked eye and from the ground. They describe a round object, a single one, the size of a basketball held at arm's length, a white light with a blue tint blinking rhythmically in one-second flashes, with no visible details, no tail or trail, and a humming sound they heard for about two seconds. The elevation at disappearance is given as "approximately 135°", which only makes sense if the light passed overhead and was lost about 45° above the opposite horizon, or if the figure is a typing error (own reading).

Captain James F. Mitchell, the squadron intelligence officer, signed the report on November 13 "for the commander", under regulation AFR 200-2 of August 26, 1953, and sent it to the Director of Intelligence at Air Force headquarters, Air Defense Command, the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson, the Western Air Defense Force and the 25th Air Division at McChord. The stamp on the back records its receipt at headquarters on November 18. The weather entries say the night was clear and dark, with no moon and the stars clearly visible; ceiling, visibility and cloud cover are given as unknown, the report from the nearest weather station is not recorded ("Unknown") and there were no thunderstorms. The report records no other unusual activity, no physical evidence, no interception or identification action and no air traffic in the area at the time. The observation is entered as ground-visual and the report mentions no radar return. Mitchell's closing comment comes down to two words: "Cause unknown".

In the case's Blue Book file, filed under number 6982415, the report is copied with the airmen's names blacked out, and someone underlined and circled by hand the 135° elevation, with a question mark above it. The record card, written on a Foreign Technology Division form dated September 1963, and so written no earlier than that date, almost ten years later, summarizes the blinking white and blue light, the descent to 150 feet, the climb to 300 and the westward departure, and concludes "AIRCRAFT", with the comment "Description, duration, and flight consistent with a/c analysis". The file also holds, filed by mistake or by date, a Hydrographic Bulletin note on a meteor seen by an American ship at 0440 local time on November 8, 1953, around 2020Z on the 7th (own calculation from the local solar time), some seven hours before the sighting, at 33°50' N 124°57' E, west of the Korean island of Jeju, thousands of kilometers from Prince George and unrelated to the case.

The record leaves two official readings that contradict each other. The officer who gathered the data within days, with the witnesses at hand, wrote that the cause was unknown and that there was no air traffic in the area; the Blue Book record card, written almost a decade later with no new data in the file, put the case down to an aircraft. The card's conclusion is a fact about the case, not its resolution: it does not say which aircraft or where it came from, and it does not answer the absence of traffic the report records, nor the light hanging motionless that the airmen describe, something a fixed-wing aircraft does not do; a helicopter could hover and rise vertically, but the report records no air traffic ("Location of any air traffic in the area at the time of sighting - None") and the airmen heard the hum for only about two seconds, with the light some 150 feet up. In its favor, an aircraft approaching head-on at night can seem to stand still for a while, the distance of a light with no silhouette in a dark sky is very hard to judge, and the 150 and 300 feet are the witnesses' estimates by eye; the two-second hum and the westward, climbing departure also fit an engine. The proposal is weak and disputed, but the record does not refute it: the report does not say that the night's flights were checked, only that there was no traffic.

Other data weigh little either way. The moon was not in the sky: it had set at 0016Z, almost three hours earlier, and was at new phase, 2% illuminated (own calculation from ephemerides), which agrees with the witnesses' "no moon". The Sun was about 25° below the horizon (own calculation), so it was full night. The only bright planet above the horizon was Jupiter, about 6° high toward the east-northeast (own calculation), a fixed point that does not explain a light that comes down, stops and leaves toward the west. The size they give, a basketball at arm's length, is about 20° of arc, some forty times the diameter of the full moon (own calculation, with a 24-centimeter ball 65 centimeters from the eye), an enormous apparent size for a light with no silhouette, which suggests either that the comparison was not meant literally or that the light looked far larger than a point source.

As evidence, it is the testimony of two airmen who saw the same thing together, at the same guard post, and it counts as one; both are identified by name, rank, service number and unit, and their account was put in writing in an official report from their unit five days later, signed by the intelligence officer and received in Washington a week and a half after the sighting. There is no instrumental record: the squadron was a radar unit, but the report classifies the observation as visual and does not say that its Baldy Hughes station saw anything. Regulation AFR 200-2, of August that year, required units to forward these reports, and this one follows the form item by item; what the file does not contain is any later check, either of that night's flights or of the witnesses, before the card put the case down to an aircraft.