The Banggol Cicar Green Spinning Disc

Banggol Cicar is a village near the town of Baling, in northern Kedah, Malaysia. One version of the wire report places it near the Thai border. In December 2003 it made the news for a single reason. Its villagers said they had seen a UFO.

Mohamad Amirul Syafiq was nine years old. He saw it first. At first he thought it was a plane about to crash. "I then called my friends to look at the object which was hovering just over the top of a coconut tree behind my house."

Mohamad Faiz Alias, 12, thought Amirul was joking. Then he looked. "But we saw clearly the object in the air, emitting a bright light." Kamaruddin Othman, also 12, realised it was not a plane. It was silent.

The New Straits Times described a slow-moving, disc-like object about the size of a car. It was emitting a greenish light and spinning in the air. For about four minutes it stayed over Banggol Cicar. Kamaruddin's father, Othman Ahmad, 54, caught sight of it before it disappeared. How it left, nobody said.

The report carried one more detail. About two years earlier, a villager said he saw a UFO hovering in the air while on his way to the mosque for pre-dawn prayers. He was never named, and nothing more was recorded.

The New Straits Times ran the story on Tuesday, 16 December 2003. Agence France-Presse rewrote it for the wire. Malaysiakini published the AFP text under the headline "Villagers claim sighting of UFO: report". Patrick Gross later copied it into his online chronology of sightings for December 2003.

Then silence. No police response is on record, and no word came from the Royal Malaysian Air Force or any government office. No photograph, no video, no physical trace. The original newspaper article itself has never surfaced online. The case survives only through the wire copy.

No source offered a conventional explanation. No one called it a hoax, and no one retracted the story. Sceptics might point to a lit balloon or sky lantern, which would fit a silent, slow, glowing light that lingers for a few minutes and then vanishes. That idea has never been tested against what the boys described. The time of day was not even reported.

The Banggol Cicar disc lives on in catalogues. It sits beside other Malaysian reports of the period, like the "flying coffin" caught on CCTV over Kota Kinabalu International Airport in October 2002. It also echoes group sightings by children elsewhere, such as Ariel School in Zimbabwe and Westall in Australia, though nothing connects them.

Four named witnesses. Four minutes. A green disc turning above a coconut tree in Baling. And a story that ended almost as soon as it was told.