The Stopped Clocks of Santa Maria Airport and the Matosinhos 'Flattened Balloon'

Early July 1965 was a busy month for strange skies. On Deception Island, in Antarctica, Argentine, Chilean and British personnel had reported unknown objects. In France, the Valensole landing filled the papers. Then, in the second weekend of the month, two reports came out of Portugal.

AP, Reuters and UPI carried them side by side, and AP noted how closely they resembled the Antarctic accounts. The two incidents were about 1,450 km apart. What linked them was interference, a radio in one case and a bank of clocks in the other.

Saturday, 10 July 1965. Dawn, in the Reuters version. Manuel Fernandes, an employee of the Fishermen's Union, and his wife were at home in Matosinhos, near Porto. At first they took it for "some sort of luminous flattened balloon."

"The thing was very luminous, and had orange coloring and was nearly red at times," the couple said. As they watched, Fernandes said, "it looked like a plate turned over." At times, green rays shot out from one side. While it circled over a forest near the house, heavy interference broke up the music on their radio. Then it stopped, at rather high altitude near the coast, for about three minutes, before speeding towards the north.

Mid-afternoon on Santa Maria island, in the Azores. According to a later account, the first to notice was António Loureiro, a correspondent for the Portuguese news agency ANI. Airport staff, the deputy airport manager among them, watched a white cylindrical object moving slowly across a clear sky. They put its height at 8,000 to 10,000 metres. It was heading north-west, and it seemed to follow a predetermined route.

At 15:45 the object was directly above the air terminal. At that moment, all the electromagnetic clocks of the airport stopped. They were run by a single central device, and ten minutes later they started again on their own. A plane of SATA, the Azorean airline, went up after the object, but it disappeared before the aircraft could reach its altitude. "We are completely puzzled," a spokesman for the weather bureau at Vila do Porto said.

Aeronautical experts called the sightings balloons, but the Azores weather service said it had launched no weather balloon that day. Portuguese, French and British ships anchored at the island said they had launched nothing either. AFP, reporting the stopped clocks, allowed itself one dry line: perhaps a coincidence. The airport director later blamed an electrician who had been repairing the system while the object was overhead. A UPI follow-up found the clocks had restarted only after the object left.

On 15 July the Montreal Gazette reported that technicians at the Northern Electric Company in Quebec said a company research balloon had been lost nine days earlier. That balloon, though, was painted fluorescent red, while the witnesses described something white, even transparent. One observer did say it "sometimes looked like a balloon," and a slow drift high over the island is what a high-altitude balloon would do. The US Air Force was reportedly unimpressed, and no Project Blue Book evaluation is known. For Matosinhos, no conventional explanation was offered at all.

The stopped clocks entered NICAP's catalogue of electromagnetic effect cases, and the APRO Bulletin covered the case in its September to October 1965 issue. In 2018, author Joaquim Fernandes revived it in his book Ficheiros Secretos à Portuguesa as "the strange case of the stopped clocks at Santa Maria." The book adds one more detail. The object was photographed. No copy of that photograph has been found.