Port Swettenham "Flying Cigar" Sightings

In 1954 Selangor was part of the Federation of Malaya. It was under British rule and in the middle of the Malayan Emergency. The Royal Air Force was responsible for air defence. Port Swettenham, the busy harbour on the Klang coast, would not be renamed Port Klang until 1972.

12 March 1954. A Friday afternoon at the docks. According to Malaysian researcher Ahmad Jamaludin, the time was 3:20 p.m.

Port workers saw it first. The Straits Times reported the next day that a "weird, cigar shaped object, which left a trail of white smoke, was seen in the sky." The labourers stopped and watched. The object "climbed higher and higher and eventually disappeared into a cloud." The police saw it as well.

Jamaludin later described it as torpedo shaped, seen over Klang, Selangor. "It shot straight up into the sky when it left." In another account he wrote of a cigar-shaped object "sighted by numerous witnesses flying high against a blue sky." No sound was reported. No names were recorded.

17 March 1954. Five days on, a second cigar-shaped object was reported over parts of British Malaya. This time the witnesses were residents of Port Swettenham and of Cheras, on the south-east side of Kuala Lumpur, some 35 km away. The next morning The Straits Times ran a short headline. "FLYING CIGAR AGAIN."

The story did not stay in Malaya. Turkey's Anatolian Agency filed it from Kuala Lumpur, and two Istanbul papers printed it. Son Posta carried the first sighting on 15 March. Hürriyet carried the second on 19 March. "On 12 March, labor workers at Swettenham sighted a flying object which resembled a cigar and which left a white trail behind it."

Those Turkish clippings were translated for a CIA foreign press digest titled "Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects, 19 January to 15 May 1954". The agency did not investigate. It collected the reports, alongside others from that spring, including a cigar-shaped object reported near Sare in the French Pyrenees.

Jamaludin reported that the RAF acknowledged it had no aircraft airborne in the area. Which date that statement covers is not clear. No police inquiry has come to light. No photographs, radar data or physical traces are known.

To a sceptic, a high, elongated shape drawing a white trail and climbing into cloud sounds like a jet and its condensation trail, and the RAF flew jets in Malaya at the time. The same skies offered a comparison eight months later. On 9 November 1954, twin trails of white smoke high over Klang and Port Swettenham at noon set off flying saucer talk. Under the headline "Flying saucer? No, a Vampire", the report said the RAF had two Vampire fighters over the area. For the March sightings, no such answer was ever put on record.

The case survives in Jamaludin's Summary of Unidentified Flying Objects and Related Events in Malaysia, in the UFOCAT listing and 1954 chronology kept by NICAP, and in Malaysian blogs that still recall UFOs over Port Klang in March 1954. It sits beside an earlier cigar over Singapore in April 1952, when hundreds of people said they saw a silvery object with smoke coming from its tail.