TWA Constellation and Boston tower white-disc sighting (Captain Charles Kratovil)

Tuesday, June 1, 1954. A TWA Lockheed Constellation was nearing the end of a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York. In command was Captain Charles J. Kratovil of Port Washington, New York, a TWA pilot since 1935 according to the French press. Co-pilot W. R. Davis sat alongside. Flight engineer Harold Raney completed the crew.

About 9:30 a.m. The airliner was cruising at roughly 10,000 feet, some 10 miles north of Boston, heading southwest toward Idlewild at about 300 mph into the headwinds.

The crew saw something overhead. "A large, white-colored disc-like object." It sat high above them, perhaps another 10,000 feet up, and now and then vanished behind the cloud layer before returning. It held the same course as the airliner, flying, the crew said, at about 275 miles an hour ahead of the plane. They could not close the distance, and it stayed with them for about ten minutes.

Kratovil radioed Boston airport tower. The controllers looked up and saw it as well. Eight tower employees, by one account. They alerted the military. Jets were scrambled.

The crew learned the rest only after landing at Idlewild, in a message passed on through the airline's Boston office. The Air Force said the jets had seen the object. They were at 10,000 feet. The object seemed to be 10,000 feet above them and rising fast. It was probably a weather balloon.

Kratovil was not convinced. "If this was a weather balloon, it's the first time I ever saw one traveling against the wind." Frank Edwards, who reported the case on the Mutual Broadcasting System that same day, quoted the captain going further: "It sounds like a cover-up to me."

Project Blue Book opened a file. It holds a record card, an ATIC letter to the captain and technical information sheets filled in by Kratovil. The official answer was a large research balloon launched at 04:30 from Grenier AFB in Manchester, New Hampshire. Grenier had been sending up high-altitude Moby Dick balloons that spring. The French paper Var-Matin described the balloon as about 33 metres across, climbing to around 24,000 metres.

James E. McDonald disagreed. The upper winds blew from the southwest, from the surface to above 20,000 feet. Any balloon from Grenier, McDonald argued, would have been carried nowhere near the TWA crew. In ten minutes at Constellation speed, the airliner moved about 50 miles through the air, so keeping a balloon in sight that long would have been impossible. NICAP listed the case among its "white disc paced airliner" reports.

Sceptics drawing on Tim Printy's SUNlite answer that this was no small weather sonde but a big research balloon. Five ground observers, they note, watched through binoculars, as you might watch a large object far away. By one reading of the Blue Book form from August 1954, Kratovil had by then learned of the Grenier launch and seemed to agree with the explanation. The critic concluded the case should be labeled "probably a balloon".

Brad Sparks still lists it as case 1038 in his catalogue of Blue Book unknowns. The details refuse to settle: ten minutes, or five to eight; eight controllers, or five. There were no photographs and no radar contact. Only a crew, a control tower and a white disc that would not fall behind.