The USS Supply "Remarkable Meteors"

In the winter of 1904 the USS Supply was crossing the Pacific. The old iron steamer, built in 1873 as the SS Illinois, served as the Asiatic Fleet supply ship and the station ship at Guam. She left Guam on 29 January carrying the gravely ill Governor William E. Sewell, coaled at Honolulu from 15 to 20 February, and turned for San Francisco. Lt. Frank H. Schofield was in effective command. He would one day become an admiral.

28 February 1904. About 6:10 a.m. Dawn at sea, roughly 300 miles WSW of San Francisco.

The officer of the deck and two crewmen on watch saw three luminous objects of different sizes. They were bright red. The one in the lead was egg-shaped. The other two were round. The largest had "an apparent area of about six suns."

"When first sighted, they were not very high. They were below clouds of an estimated height of about one mile." The objects came from the NNW, traveling in a group directly toward the Supply. Then they changed course. They soared up through the clouds at an angle of about 75 degrees, keeping their formation, and departed toward the WNW. It was over in two to three minutes. No sound was reported.

Schofield did not see the objects himself. He wrote up the observations of his three men, and the U.S. Weather Bureau published his account in the March 1904 Monthly Weather Review under the heading "Remarkable Meteors." That was the only official verdict. There was no investigation. Government UFO programmes were decades away.

Many later retellings put Schofield on deck. Jan Aldrich, in his catalogue of reports from seagoing services, corrected the record. Schofield is "often erroneously listed as a witness, but he did not see the objects."

In 1919 Charles Fort reprinted the report in The Book of the Damned, right after the 1893 lights seen from HMS Caroline, and dated it "Feb. 24, 1904," most likely a slip. He wrote, "They fled, or they evaded, or they turned. They went up into the clouds below which they had, at first, been sighted. Their unison of movement." From there the case entered the canon. Richard Hall listed it in NICAP's The UFO Evidence, and it sits in Jan Aldrich's NavCat as an early naval report.

The men on watch, their commander and the Weather Bureau all called them meteors. A bright fireball breaking into three red fragments would account for the number, the colour, the unequal sizes and the tight formation. The Great Meteor Procession of 1913 later showed that fireballs in formation lasting minutes do happen.

Physicist Bruce Maccabee reportedly argued otherwise. In his view the objects flew too low, changed direction too much and stayed visible too long to be meteors. One retelling even moved the position to the Korean coast, apparently by confusing east and west longitude.

No photograph exists. What survives is a deck log, a single page in a weather journal, and three unnamed men who watched red lights climb into the clouds at dawn.