Sighting record / 1949
June 20, 1949. Early evening on Bermuda's South Shore. In a garden in Paget Parish, an architect, the architect's wife and two friends watched a brilliant silver sphere speed across the sky, heading due south. Then it slowed. High in the southern sky, nearly overhead, it went straight up. Within seconds it was gone. The sighting made the front page of The Sunday Royal Gazette. US Air Intelligence studied it. The file settled on a weather balloon, launched from Kindley Air Force Base five minutes earlier. But the weather officer who tracked that balloon disagreed. Seeing it from Paget, he said, would have been impossible.
Bermuda, 1949. At the island's East End sat Kindley Air Force Base, a US Air Force installation. Its weather office launched high-altitude balloons into the upper air. One of them went up at precisely 6pm on June 20. Five minutes later, across the island in Paget Parish, four people saw something in the sky.