Three Airline Crews and a Battleship-Sized Object over Portugal

Friday, 30 July 1976. A British Airways Trident 2 was flying the London to Faro route at 29,000 feet, heading 195° at about 500 knots. The sun had just set. At that height the crew described a clear sky, a crescent Moon and "daylight to all intents and purposes."

In command was Captain Dennis Wood, 42 years old, with 20 years at the airline. Beside him sat a first officer who had spent 12 years as an RAF fighter pilot, and a second officer with a physics degree.

About 40 miles south of Lisbon, the crew heard Lisbon Control call a TriStar and ask it to confirm reports of a UFO. The reply: "Yes, we have this UFO in sight."

Wood looked out to starboard. "There was this brilliantly white, incredibly bright object." It sat about 30° up, "rather like an enormous headlamp in the sky." He told the cabin: "If you look on the starboard side, you will see what we believe to be a UFO." One passenger with binoculars saw the light as something like "crinkled silver paper."

About two minutes later, something else arrived. Wood described "a long cigar-shaped, or sausage-shaped brown affair" below and to starboard of the light. "It just materialised, just appeared there." A second followed beside it, and Wood thought a third appeared beneath the second but "couldn't swear to it." The objects seemed stationary, and the bright light remained visible for eight minutes as the Trident turned to descend.

Lisbon reportedly said it would scramble fighters. The radio traffic "completely blocked the 'air'." A Portuguese TAP Boeing 727 was also involved. On the return flight, the Trident's own radar showed "a very large radar blip," elliptical and at least three times the size of a big tanker. A later newspaper version speaks of two cigar-shaped returns within seven miles that then vanished.

Back at London Airport, the crew filed UFO report forms with air traffic. Otherwise they kept quiet, fearing ridicule. Wood was firm. "There is no way this is a star or planet." The first officer agreed: "It was not a star, planet or satellite." The second officer called the light "several orders of magnitude brighter than any star."

Omar Fowler interviewed the flight crew for Flying Saucer Review in November 1976. Charles Bowen later reprinted the account in Encounter Cases from Flying Saucer Review. On 14 May 1977, the Natal Daily News ran it under the headline "UFOs As Big As Battleships."

The debate came later. An analysis on caelestia.be noted that Venus sat in that part of the sky, but only 7° up, which clashes with the crew's estimate. It suggested a sunlit high-altitude balloon for the light and a mirage of cloud tops for the dark cigars. A submarine-launched missile was considered and largely set aside. Wood called such alternatives "quite unacceptable to us."

No photographs exist, and no official finding has surfaced from Britain or Portugal. Yet NICAP's 1976 chronology called it "the most important in the past decade." Weeks before the Tehran jet incident, three airliners were caught up in one strange evening over Portugal.