Sighting record / 1954
September 15, 1954. An afternoon in Manbhum, Bihar. Ijapada Chatterjee, the 60-year-old manager of the Kadori mica mine, was sitting on his verandah when a disc-like object began to descend about 500 yards away. It was dull grey. About 12 feet across. It came down to roughly 500 feet with a whirring like a motor-car engine, and there it hovered. Then its sides seemed to swell. Smoke billowed from both ends. The object shot upward at an incredible speed, and a tremendous gust of wind rattled doors and windows. About 800 people in three adjoining villages were reported to have seen it. The Times of India put the story on its front page.
1954 was a year of saucers. Wire stories that October carried sightings from Germany, Belgium, Egypt, Argentina, Lebanon and Cameroon. India contributed only a handful of reports to the worldwide wave. One of them came from the mica country of Manbhum district, in Bihar.