The Ghana "Two or Three Times a 747" UFO

Summer 1987. Accra, Ghana. The US Defense Attaché Office watched military affairs in West Africa. Its chief was Col. D. M. Parker, US Army. In early August, a strange story reached the office. It had already been in the papers.

On July 29, 1987, the state-owned Ghanaian Times reported an unidentified flying object seen two nights earlier. Members of the public near Accra and in the Volta Region, around Kpandu and Hohoe, had watched it. It could be seen quite clearly, they said, because of its own light emissions and the clear evening sky. Some said it was silent. Others heard explosions.

July 27, 1987. Between 11 pm and midnight. A Ghana Air Force pilot stood on the ground near Accra. A qualified jet fighter pilot. A serious professional, the cable noted, not given to flights of fancy.

A light was falling out of the sky. The first thought was a meteorite. Then the object stopped falling. And started to climb.

At about 15,000 feet it was seen most clearly. Its shape was like a very large aircraft fuselage or missile body. Its colour was metallic, aluminium-like. The pilot put it at two or three times the size of a Boeing 747 airliner.

The lights changed. During the descent, a single large yellowish light glowed at its trailing end. As it began to climb, that light disappeared. Eight smaller blue lights took its place, arranged in a circle. The pilot took them for part of its propulsion. No sound reached the pilot at any time. The object held a north to south course. It disappeared over the horizon of the Gulf of Guinea.

The pilot told the story privately on August 4 and 5, embarrassed as well as mystified. The commander of the Ghana Air Force had asked the attaché's office to help identify the object. On August 20, 1987, Parker sent Intelligence Information Report 6 835 0129 87 to Washington. Its title read simply: UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT.

In an informal note, Parker asked analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency for any feasible explanation. He also confessed a joke. Testing the sense of humour of a Ghanaian official, he had suggested the object might be an experimental missile launched by Qadhafi. The official, Parker reported, passed the test.

October 1987. A Joint Chiefs message of October 24 said precise identification was not possible. But the patterns, noise and colours strongly suggested space debris from atmospheric re-entry. UFOs, it added, remained a concern, although not heavily publicized. Two days later the DIA allowed extra terrestrial interference as a possibility. It still favoured debris from weather, communications or experimental satellites. Its closing advice: UFOs were always a terrific subject for cocktail chatter, a way into talk of air defense and surveillance.

A re-entry fits much of the story. A fireball first taken for a meteor. A long glowing body. Reported explosions. A north to south track. Ted Molczan's satobs.org table of observed re-entries lists one on July 27, 1987, at 23:11 UTC, inside the Ghana window. It appears to be the rocket stage of Cosmos 1870, a Soviet radar satellite launched from Baikonur two days earlier. Where that re-entry was seen remains unconfirmed.

And debris does not easily explain the pilot's central claim. The object stopped falling and climbed. The Black Vault argues that the space debris answer ignored exactly that.

The file surfaced decades later. John Greenewald of The Black Vault obtained it from the DIA through a FOIA request and posted it on June 30, 2021. The pilot was never named. The original newspaper article has not been traced. The object was never identified.