The Mount Kilimanjaro Sighting from an East African Airways Lodestar

February 1951. East African Airways flew a regular morning service from Nairobi West to Mombasa in a twin-engined Lockheed 18 Lodestar. On Monday, 19 February, it left at 07:00. Capt. Jack Bicknell had the controls. His radio officer was Dennis W. Merrifield, said to be ex-RAF. Behind them sat nine passengers, seven men and two women.

At 7:20 a.m., about 60 miles out, Merrifield saw it first. In Bicknell's words: "a bright object like a white star hanging motionless about 10,000 feet above Kilimanjaro." Through binoculars it became "a metallic, bullet shaped object which must have been over 200 feet long," with "a square-cut vertical fin" and "vertical dark bands." Passenger H. B. Fussell, an American, saw it too. "The color was whitish-silver with three vertical black bands down the side."

For 10 minutes, Fussell said, it remained stationary. Then it suddenly rose vertically by 5,000 ft. It hung still again. About a minute later it climbed and moved off sideways at great speed, "probably 400 mph." Bicknell timed it for seventeen minutes while the Lodestar kept to its course. "Twice it rose vertically to a final height of 40,000 feet, then, it moved east towards the coast at a terrific speed." There was no apparent propelling power. "There were definitely no vapor trail."

Cameras came out. Fussell took four frames. Three were blank. One showed "a small dark object." Charles J. Vernon, purser of the American freighter Robin Mowbray, filmed as well, but his film showed nothing. Ray Overstreet shot about 30 ft of colour cine film through a telescopic lens. Bicknell later heard that Overstreet had sailed for the United States to show it to the authorities. He never traced the man or the film. On 14 March 1951 the Natal Mercury printed a still said to come from it. CUFOS says it shows "only a tiny dot of light."

All nine passengers and the crew signed a statement backing Bicknell's report. The local meteorological office examined the mirage and balloon theories. On 28 February 1951 a Foreign Service Dispatch from Dar es Salaam reported the sighting to the State Department. The Project Blue Book record card notes: "Photos were taken but are not in file." The case was closed as insufficient data for evaluation. NICAP later gave it a preliminary rating of 5.

Dr. Urner Liddel proposed a balloon or Skyhook. Fussell had an answer. "How could a balloon hover motionless and move at 400 mph in the same weather conditions? The object was definitely metallic." Ground control suggested an Air France Super Constellation bound from Eastleigh to Tananarive, but the hovering and the speed ruled it out. A mirage was discounted by the clear air and the object's movement. In 2011 Martin Shough weighed Venus and rejected it. Venus would not rise until about 08:00, and the object sat toward Kilimanjaro, not in the east. His verdict: "What else could it have been? Who knows…?"

The story shifted in the retelling. A 1953 magazine had the object leaving westwards at "nothing short of 1,000 mph," and quoted Merrifield calling it "500 years ahead of anything we have today." The case reached Kenneth Arnold's The Coming of the Saucers, NICAP's The UFO Evidence and Cynthia Hind's UFOs Over Africa. FOTOCAT logs the photographs, though Ballester Olmos wrote that he had never seen any image. Barry Greenwood later published an article titled "Photo Located." Eleven people signed. The film that might have settled it is gone.