Was The “Father Gill” Sighting A Classified Aircraft?
Many readers may know about the classic Papua, New Guinea sighting of 1959 when an Anglican priest and some native islanders observed a hovering, discoid object and figures who waved in answer to simliar gestures from the witnesses.
For those who don’t, here’s a recap from Australian Ufologist Bill Chalker:
William B. Gill, an Anglican priest with a mission in Bosinai, Papas New Guinea, observed craft-like UFOs — one with Humanoid figures on top — on two consecutive evenings, June 26-27, 1959. About twenty-five natives, including teachers and medical technicians, also observed the phenomena. They “signaled” the humanoids and received an apparent response. This was one of sixty UFO sightings within a few weeks in the New Guinea area.
What many may not know is that this event took place about 1200 miles from the United States military installation in the Kwajalein atoll, located in the Marshall Islands, which has been a semi-secret missile and rocket test facility since, coincidentally enough, 1959. Now, 1200 miles may seem like a long way, but in the geography of the immense South Pacific, as well as the distances covered by high speed aircraft and of course rockets, it’s a stone’s throw. New Guinea is also the nearest land that isn’t a micro-island in that area of the South Pacific (with the possible exception of Guam) which suggests that the object and apparent “crew” may have picked it in case they ran into any serious trouble with their equipment.
If you lend any credence to stories of unconventional aircraft (of the anti- or electro-gravitic type) and rumors about captured technology just after WWII, Gill and his fellow witnesses may have seen some sort of test flight stopover. Why the crew bothered to hover right over a beach in New Guinea in front of scores of witnesses is a question that remains unanswered.
Gill’s own account stresses the almost mundane nature of the encounter. There were no high-G or other strange movements made by the object. It apparently hovered over the small church complex and then slowly disappeared into the clouds. (There were two sightings on subsequent evenings.) During the second event, Gill went inside before the craft had left. While some investigators have expressed surprise that anyone would leave in the middle of such an extraordinary sight, Gill and his companions had been looking at the UFO for over four hours just the night before. After returning hand gestures and moving the object in answer to a flashlight, the “crew” had apparently lost interest in the witnesses as well, and repeated attempts to make it land were unsuccessful.
In Gill’s own words:
You must also keep in mind that there was nothing eerie or other worldly about any of this. It was all so ordinary, as ordinary as a Ford car. It looked a perfectly normal sort of object, an earth made object. I realised, of course, that some people might think of this as a flying saucer but I took it to be some kind of hovercraft the Americans or even the Australians had built.
The figures inside looked perfectly human. In fact, I thought they were human, that if we got them to land we would find the pilots to be ordinary earthmen in military uniforms and we would have dinner with them.
There is no good info I can easily find on exactly what was going on at Kwajalein during the late 1950s, but it would be a perfectly isolated location to stage tests of unconventional aerial platforms. The place is still shrouded in mystery, as the US Military has released little information on it, other than the fact that rockets are launched and tested there. It is currently home to the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.
Yes, my theory may contain more holes than a swiss cheese, but the fact that we hear so little about Kwajalein, and its location, thousands of miles from any major population center or indeed any other sort of civilization, makes me wonder if we will ever find out all that has transpired there.
This entry was posted
on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 1:21 am and is filed under Alien Encounters, Close Encounters, Conspiracies, Eyewitness Accounts, Government Projects, History, UFO Sightings, UFOmystic Exclusive, Wake Up Down There. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response or trackback from your site.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit BlinkList Google Ma.gnolia StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! Help
- Related News Stories:
- Father William Gill Video »
- Father William Gill 1928-2007 »
- Area 51 Has A New Name »
- UFOs in Brazil »
- Aliens Think We Taste Good »
- The UFO Hunter »
- UFO Record Album! »
- Flatwoods Monster News »
- Howard Hughes and UFOs »
- Cigar UFOs »
|
Sep 05 2008 
September 5th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Well, that would mean the US Air Military had possession of an unconventional aircraft with a flight autonomy of at least 1200 miles since 1959. That’s pretty impressive.
And this reminded me of your last post about the interview with an MIB, that claimed he was born on the South Pacific, and that the US enlisted their agents in the South Pacific because that’s where an alien base was located
September 5th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Logistical issues would seem to argue against Kwajalein as an advanced aircraft development and testing center, when plenty of other remote territory was (and is) available closer by, e.g., the Nevada Test Site. However, it IS handy for things like missile tests, with warheads potentially hundreds of miles off-target zooming in from Vandenburg.
But assuming that they REALLY demanded the utmost in secrecy and remoteness for this program, it strikes me as completely bizarre that the test crew would then be permitted to engage in this public hand-waving spectacle, over multiple evenings, some 1200 miles off the reservation! Could have saved a lot of trouble and just done flight testing at a mainland airbase.
September 5th, 2008 at 11:49 am
The explanation makes a lot of sense to me. I think a lot of UFOs have in fact been black aircraft. And not that many of them U2s or “stealth” aircraft, as the government’s current line would have us believe, since a lot of UFOs display much different flight characteristics.
In fact, if anything but a balloon or balloon serial crashed near Roswell in 1947, I suspect it was a US black aircraft. I used to believe the government line until they proved unable to keep their lies straight; friends of mine in the defense community - who profess no inside knowledge of the incident - say the Air Force’s and USG’s response to the crash bear all the classic signs of a CYA operation. That makes sense to me too.
September 5th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
The hand-waving of the crew, if we assume they were American test pilots, doesn’t strike me as odd even in the case of a super-secret project. It seems a very human reaction; I mean, what are you going to do if you have all those people who already saw you and are waving at you? Why wave back of course!
They would have already assumed that people would catalog this incident in the “bizarre events” box (i.e. they wouldn’t be believed). Also, they wouldn’t know in 1959 just how many decades the Military was intending to keep something like that under wraps.
Maybe the pilots thought all people would be flying on saucer-like crafts by the 1960’s, just like The Jetsons
September 5th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Strange story. Father Gill thougth it to be a normal crew in a brand new flying device, so it was…it could be another type of aerial object, even a UFO. Or a flying Dragon…it (the phenomena)seems to have some kind of strong psychic interaction with observers. If you think it to be a duck, so it will be a duck (African Encounters - late Cynthia Hind)…
September 6th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Good point Marcio, clearly the UFO phenomenon often seems to play or “project” itself based on the psychological expectations of the observers. It would be interesting to research if Father Gillis, prior to his encounters, had an interest in Aeronautics and Aircraft development. Maybe he was a “Popular Mechanics”suscriber…
September 6th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Greg: I bet Downes would be down on rounding up the UFO swat team for a sortie of sorts.
September 7th, 2008 at 7:04 am
This event has always been closer to a ‘Capt Nemo’ -Great Airship mystery to me -iow a ‘private enterprise’ event ….i surmise Mormon missionaries before secret military mission on this one, seriously ….
m
September 7th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Time to unearth those secret alien language tablets so I can start a new religion (and make some secret spacecraft in the meantime).
September 8th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Greg, I wished I had looked a little
more closely when you first posted
this. I lived on Kwajelein from 1962
to 1964. My father was with Western
Electric ( which is nowadys Lucent
Technology, I believe. ) and one of
the people in charge of installing
secure telephone equipment. Though I
was quite young at the time, ( I was
born in 1958 ) my memories of the
island are quite vivid. The island
was part of what became the SafeGuard
Anti Ballistic Missile program. I
wasn’t at the airport all that often,
but given the size of the Island, it
was hard to miss the globemasters and
WarningStar Constellations as they came
and went. An ariel view of the island
will show you that the landing field
covers close a third of the center of
island, and divides the cilvian and
military housing at one end from the
radars and missile launch site at the
other. In keepeing with the Greek
mythological themes current in the
programs of the time, the launch site
was a large mound called Mt. Olympus.
It occurs to me that I could ramble on
about Kwaj for hours, without really
adressing any specific concerns-so if
you have any specific questions, just
fire away. I can either check my own recollections, or ask one of my brothers, who were some ten years older
than I, and more likely to remember
any mysteries…
September 8th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
RPJ,
That’s what reminded me of the Kwajalein facility.
When you start thinking about captured anti-grav tech, lots of things become fair game.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
SunMesa,
That’s just what they WANT you to think!
Seriously, this is why I wrote that the theory had “more holes than a swiss cheese.” I just wanted to put the idea out there to see what people said. The readers are responding much as I thought they would.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Victor,
I agree with the CYA explanation, which sort of buttresses Nick’s theory in Bodysnatchers In The Desert, unless that’s another CYA.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
RPJ,
Good point about the hand-waving, and the “too bizarre to be believed” element makes sense too.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Marcio,
Hadn’t thought of that, but it would fit with the other “woo-woo” stuff I’ve expounded (favorably) upon elsewhere on the site.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
mouseonmoon,
Another good point! Not about the Mormons, though, since they apparently didn’t follow through…
September 8th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Craig,
Wow! You LIVED there? You’d know what I’d like to ask your brothers, I bet. Any strange lights at night? Anything in the air other than transport planes? Any strange, unexplained events, barely remembered? Etc.
September 9th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Greg-
It will probably be this weekend before
I can call them, but I’ll ask. The most
unusual thing I can remember seeing was
watching a octopus crawling across the
bottom of the old submarine pen on the
Ocean side of the island.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:54 am
Full of holes or not, this is still much more plausible than a previous attempt at a (non-witness) “explanation” that I read many years ago - that was something along the lines of the object being the planet Venus, viewed by Gill while not wearing his glasses (and having astigmatism)…
September 11th, 2008 at 10:38 am
La Lune P,
Yes, and it was found that he WAS wearing his glasses. I talked about this with Paul Kimball last night. He repeated the other part of the fundamentalist skeptic argument that the other witnesses (the islanders) were just going along with Gill because he supposedly knew better. I always found this insulting to their ability to tell stars and other astronomical phenomena from things that were not.