S/S Mount Vernon Victory: the expanding cloud with a light inside

The S/S Mount Vernon Victory was a 736 ft American tanker, built by Bethlehem Steel at Quincy, Massachusetts. In June 1966 it was heading approximately due east across the Pacific, away from Wake Island. Its position was 19°N, 172°E, described in the file as "400 miles east of Wake Island." The radio officer, Steffen Sorensen, read NICAP's newsletter The UFO Investigator. His shipmates knew it.

27 June 1966. About 04:00 ship's time. Donald Rominger, the watch officer on the bridge, saw something ahead of the ship, about 10° above the eastern horizon. He called Sorensen up. Something was seen in the sky that "might interest him."

By the time Sorensen arrived, "the cloud had grown to the apparent size of a golf ball held at arm's length and was moving either upward or towards the ship or both." He raised his 8×30 binoculars. He was "struck by the perfect roundness of this sharply defined line, and thought immediately how this might resemble a shock wave radiating from a point source."

At its heart, a white light flashed. Over 10 to 20 minutes the glowing cloud climbed from about 10° to about 40° and shifted some 20° toward starboard. Then the ending. "The flashing light … accelerated southward from its cloud and was lost from my view shortly afterward."

Sorensen wrote to the US Air Force and sent a copy to NICAP. He compared his sighting with one reported by the SS Carl Schwedeman in the January-February 1966 issue of the newsletter. Project Blue Book logged it as case 10693 and evaluated it as Unidentified. Major Hector Quintanilla sent a standard thank-you and asked Sorensen to fill in the report form. There is no sign of any field investigation.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek wrote personally. He described rocket exhaust spreading into a cone and flattening to a disc. "This ball is luminous, and expands with altitude." He added: "There was, as you note, a rocket launched near the right time… You were well within range." Yet the case was never reclassified. "It seems Hynek did not bother to follow this up or share this with the staff at Blue Book," a later analysis observed.

That analysis came from SUNlite, the skeptical newsletter of Tim Printy, in 2012. On 26 June 1966 at 15:34 UTC, Atlas D serial 147D lifted off from Vandenberg pad 576-B2, a Nike-Zeus target test bound for Kwajalein. About 26 minutes later, near 16:00Z, the officers saw their cloud. West of the date line, it was already the 27th on board. The ship sat on the flight path, and although it was dark at sea level, "the sun's light would probably have illuminated the booster tank and cloud of venting gas/debris." Kwajalein lies to the south. The verdict: "I consider this one 'Case Closed'."

The officers were not alone. That same night, between Hawaii and Wake, a Saturn Airways pilot and the crews of six other airliners reported that "one bright light seemed to expand like a gas bubble with a bright blinking light in the center." SUNlite tied both sightings to the same launch. Today the case survives mostly in catalogues, among them Don Berliner's 1974 summaries of Blue Book unknowns and Brad Sparks' listing. Two officers. A dark ocean. A glowing bubble rising in the east, filed for years as unidentified.