Francis Chichester's Airship over the Tasman Sea

In 1931 Francis Chichester was 29, a navigator and pilot attempting the first solo east-to-west flight across the Tasman Sea. His aircraft was a Gipsy Moth seaplane named Madame Elijah, registered ZK-AKK. The final leg ran from Lord Howe Island to Jervis Bay, New South Wales.

It was a hard day. He passed the steamer SS Kurow in rough seas and turned north-west to skirt a storm front. Then came about 30 minutes of sextant sights in calmer air, the engine backfiring. Visibility was so bad, he later told officers, that at times he flew "within a few feet of the sea."

Somewhere off the Australian coast, the sky changed. "Suddenly, ahead and thirty degrees to the left, there were bright flashes in several places, like the dazzle of a heliograph." One later analysis places him about 80 miles east of Sydney, around 2:30 pm, flying roughly towards the sun.

Then the shape. "I saw a dull grey-white airship coming towards me. It seemed impossible, but I could have sworn that it was an airship, nosing towards me like an oblong pearl." He glanced at the flashes. When he looked back, it was gone. He swung the plane about to check his blind spots. Nothing.

"Then, out of some clouds to my right front, I saw another, or the same, airship advancing." It drew closer, to perhaps a mile away. It vanished. It reappeared. And it did something no airship could. "It came on, but instead of increasing in size, it diminished as it approached." When quite near, "it suddenly became its own ghost." For a second he could see through it. Then it was gone. The flashes stopped too. Soon after, he sighted the coast.

He landed at Jervis Bay at roughly 3:30 pm, beside the seaplane carrier HMAS Albatross. In Seaplane Solo (1933) he called the object "a diminutive cloud formed perfectly to the shape of an airship and then dissolving." The same leg played another trick. The land itself disappeared, and "a long purple-hued cloud lay on the sea."

In 1950 the flying-saucer craze revived the story. The Aeroplane reprinted his account. The Ashburton Guardian in New Zealand added flashes "moving erratically, coming and going with astonishing speed." In 1954 Harold T. Wilkins embellished it further in Flying Saucers on the Attack. Chichester's own narrative contains no such movement. He told the full story in The Lonely Sea and the Sky (1964). In 1968 he said the sight "seemed to tally with many things people have seen since." He still did not believe in flying saucers.

Chichester's own verdict was a cloud. The Aeroplane raised fatigue and hallucination. Jerome Clark, in Strange Skies (2003), saw "obvious UFO-like features" beside "some features that sound purely hallucinatory," noting how the object shrank as it approached. A mirage near the horizon would fit the false landfall. On Metabunk, Z.W. Wolf proposed a lower tangent arc, light refracted through ice crystals into an oblong glow brightest on top and sides, like the gleam on its "nose and back." A sub-sun and wet goggles have also been suggested.

Even the date drifted. Many sources give June 10, an error Keith Basterfield traced in 2018 to a map label in The Lonely Sea and the Sky. Newspapers of the day confirm Saturday, June 6. What remains is a careful account by a celebrated navigator, later knighted for sailing alone around the world, written down years before the saucer era claimed it.