The East African Saucer Wave and the Nairobi Police Patrol-Car Pursuits

Autumn 1954. Flying saucers filled the world's newspapers, and a huge wave was under way in France. In British East Africa, the stories started too.

The first reports, according to Reuters, came from Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika on the Indian Ocean coast. Sightings quickly followed at Mombasa, at Kampala, and finally at Nairobi. An earlier report already existed. Around 13 September 1954, an unnamed civil servant near Kampala described a golden, bell-shaped light at night, seen with others.

Kenya was then under the Mau Mau Emergency. Police patrols were out in force after dark.

Scores of Europeans, Asians and Africans reported what they saw. Newspaper offices in Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika were swamped with calls and letters. The objects, as Reuters summed them up, were "stationary; zooming over the horizon; changing colour from white to red, blue and green; elliptical in shape; and elongated with upright projections at either end."

Then the lights came to the capital. "More than one police patrol car, sent to investigate, reported following the course of 'mysterious bright objects' in the sky." At the international airport, two Europeans on duty observed an "aerial object" through binoculars. None of these witnesses was named.

One witness was. G. Duncan Fletcher was vice-president of the Kenya Astronomical Association, and he had his own observatory. One evening, four friends were with him. "It was about 7:40 p.m. that I had four friends in my observatory... Very low and towards the east, there was a large light in the sky which had no relationship to anything astronomical..."

It was not one of the planes that had just landed at the airport either. The object hung at about 2,000 feet, stationary, and it "emitted a bright orange light." The light brightened to a yellowish colour. Then the object rose, dropped, and rose again, and finally disappeared through the clouds.

Fletcher had a theory. "Visitors from outer space are probably observing and mapping the Earth and have been directing their recent attentions to East Africa." They had been "interested in activities on Earth since the time of the first atomic explosion about seven years ago," he said, and "they seem to be friendly towards the people of this planet." He dismissed meteors outright. "A meteorite does not turn or hover in the air."

Reuters filed the story from Nairobi on 5 October 1954. In Paris, Combat headlined it "Flying saucers carry geographers from another world who are mapping the Earth!" France-Soir put it on the front page. The Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica, printed a longer version by Ronald Batchelor on 25 October. All of these trace back to one wire report.

No police file has surfaced, no officer was named, and the exact night was never given. Two printings put Fletcher's sighting at 1:40 a.m., and some give the height as 700 metres. A CIA compilation of foreign press reports apparently picked up the Kampala item. No official inquiry and no conventional explanation are on record, and ordinary causes such as news contagion, planets, aircraft lights or meteors have never been tested against the reports, though Fletcher himself ruled out the astronomical and the airport traffic. Today the case survives largely through the press archive of Patrick Gross.