The Dakar Flaming Saucer

The summer of 1952 was a busy season for flying saucers. Reports came in from around the world, and in late July the Washington, D.C. sightings would dominate the headlines. French Africa had its share. On 1 June 1952, at Port-Gentil in Gabon, a merchant ship's captain and crew had reported a craft.

Dakar was then the capital of French West Africa. On 3 July 1952, the city had its own sighting.

0608 hours. Dawn. The stars were no longer visible. An eyewitness looked up over Dakar and saw an object that was flat and tapered in shape. It was emitting bluish and reddish flames, long and clearly visible. It did not linger. The object was moving southward at a great rate of speed, at an altitude of approximately 1,500 meters.

One more detail made it stranger. There were no aircraft in flight over Dakar at the time. The record does not say whether that check came from the newspaper or from an authority it consulted. The witness was never named. No age, no job. Only "an eyewitness".

The statement first appeared in France-Afrique, a Dakar weekly. The original issue has not been found. The item was reprinted in La Guinée Française, in Conakry, on 12 July 1952. From there it crossed the Atlantic.

On 2 September 1952, the CIA summarised it in a foreign-press digest titled "Unidentified Flying Objects over Morocco and French West Africa", marked as unevaluated information. No conclusion was drawn. This was press monitoring, not an investigation, and no French military or colonial inquiry has come to light. The digest was later released in the agency's FOIA UFO collection.

The Dakar paragraph shares its pages with a run of Moroccan reports from mid July. At Had Kourt, two police officers on night duty saw two elongated saucers. A yellow disk was reported at Louis Gentil. Three "white fires" appeared over Chichaoua. At Fédala, a blue-green ball vanished after 3 to 4 seconds.

The better known Oukaïmeden report, a white ball the size of the full moon that split into three, is not in this digest at all. Dakar stands apart. A different territory, an earlier date, a different witness.

No published explanation exists for the Dakar sighting. A bright meteor would fit part of the account. A fireball can trail flame-like light in blue and red, and it moves fast. If so, the 1,500 meter altitude would be a misjudgement, a common one with meteors. An aircraft catching the low dawn sun would suit the hour, but the report states that nothing was flying over the city. With one witness, no duration and no size, none of these ideas can be tested.

The case survives in a short entry on Wikipedia's "UFO sightings in Africa", in a CUFON transcription of 1952 CIA documents, and in Gérard Lebat's French translation of the whole digest in L'histoire des OVNIs au Maroc. Wikipedia speaks of eyewitnesses and an object "surrounded by flames". The CIA text describes one eyewitness, and flames coming from the object. The witness's name may still be waiting in a Dakar newspaper from July 1952.