The Father Gill UFO Event

By Charles Lear

What makes a good UFO sighting report?  First and foremost, it’s good to a have a credible witness who is respected within his or her community.  Having other witnesses to corroborate the sighting is even better.  How about a sighting that lasts more than a minute or two?  What about a report that has multiple UFOs showing up on three successive nights?  On June 27, 1959, there was an extraordinary sighting by Father William Gill, an Anglican missionary, and 38 of his mission’s staff and students in Papua, New Guinea that had all of this and humanoids to boot.

Father William Booth Gill was a missionary from the Australian Anglican Church and head of a mission established in Boianai, Papua New Guinea, which was then, a territory of Australia.  On April 9, 1959, Gill was in a small boat at 6:50 p.m. after visiting an out post and about a mile from shore.  He spotted a light high up on local Mt. Pudi that looked like it was coming from a “tilley lamp”, which is a high-pressure kerosene lantern.  Gill though it odd that someone would be that high up the mountain in the dark but thought little else of it.  Five minutes later, Gill looked up and noticed the light was gone and then, five minutes after that, the light reappeared, a mile east of where it had been.  Gill felt this was too fast for a person to travel and later considered that he might have seen a UFO.  On June 21st, Gill’s assistant, Stephen Moi, saw an object shaped like an upside down saucer over the mission.  At the time, Gill dismissed the sightings as being caused by some sort of natural phenomena.  On June 25th, he wrote a letter to his close friend, the Reverend David Durie, Acting Principal of Saint Aidan’s College at Dogura, to be included with a report of Moi’s sighting.  In the letter, Gill stated that he believed people were seeing something, as he had himself, but that he needed more proof before he could believe in the “from outer-space theory.”  He signed the letter, “Doubting William.”

Before Gill got a chance to mail the letter, he had a sighting that prompted another letter and accompanying report to Durie, which he signed, “Convinced William.”  At 6:45 on Friday, June 26th, Gill was walking just outside “the house” when a “huge light” caught his eye.  He called to a student, Eric Kodawara, and asked him what he saw and he confirmed there was a light.  Gill told Kodawara to go tell “teacher Stephan Moi” what they were seeing and have him come and look.  Kodawara and Moi returned with a large group that had been collected along the way.  They all walked out onto a play field and it was at this point that Gill thought to run in and get a notebook and pencil.  He reasoned that, “if anything is going to happen, it’s going to happen now,” and if he recorded everything in his notebook he wouldn’t feel he’d dreamt the whole episode the next morning.  Because he wrote everything down in the form of a log, there are precise times recorded along with minute details.

The sky had a low, patchy cloud cover (he’d later estimate 2000 feet) and they were looking to the northwest.  Moi had confirmed that they weren’t looking at a star.  At 6:55, Gill recorded seeing an object moving “on top” that he then discerned was a “man.”  Two other figures appeared “moving, glowing, doing something on deck.”  The “men” went away and returned in various orders and numbers never totaling more than four.  At 7:10, Gill recorded four figures and a “thin electric blue spotlight.”  At 7:20 is the entry, “UFO goes through cloud.”  At 8:28 he recorded that the sky had cleared, that he saw a UFO and called “station people.”  The UFO “appeared to descend and get bigger.”  Between 8:29 and 10:50 Gill recorded clouds forming, seeing other UFOs, one over the sea and “others coming and going through the clouds” reflecting light “like a large halo on to the cloud” and that there was a “big one large and stationary” that he called a “mother ship.”  He numbered the UFOs 1-4 with the “mother ship being number one.  At 9:05, he wrote that 2, 3 and 4 were gone and then at 9:10 that 1 had “gone overhead into cloud.”  At 9:20 the entry is,  “ ‘mother’ back” and 9:30, “‘mother gone, gone across the sea toward Giwa.”  At 9:46, another UFO is recorded to reappear and hover.  This UFO remained and at 10:30 is recorded to be “very high hovering in clear patch of sky between clouds.”  At 10:50 he wrote that the sky had become “very overcast” and that there was no sign of the UFO.

The next night, Saturday June 27th, a nurse from the hospital reported seeing a “large UFO” and Gill arrived on the play field with others to observe it.  In a report on this night, Gill stated that there was daylight remaining for the next fifteen minutes and they could see the object clearly.  They saw four figures appear “on top” and Gill added, “there is no doubt that they were human.”  He then stated that there were two other “stationary” UFOs present, “one over the hills, west, and one overhead.”  Two of the figures seemed to be setting something up and one figure seemed to be looking down at them.  On an impulse, Gill waved and the figure waved back.  At this point, the Papuans began waving and soon all four figures waved back.  Because the daylight was fading, Gill had Kodawara get a flashlight and Gill used it to signal the object with a series of flashes.  The object responded by rocking back and forth “like a pendulum.”  After more waving and flashing, the object got bigger seeming to approach them and then stopped.  The figures “apparently lost interest” in the observers and “disappeared below deck.”  At 6:25, two figures reappeared and continued with their former activity and then “the blue spotlight came on for a few seconds, twice in succession.

At 6:30, the group went in for dinner.  At 7:00, Gill reported that the “number one UFO” was “still present, but appeared somewhat smaller.  All the observers went to Evensong and when they came out at 7:45, Gill reported, “Visibility very poor.  No UFOs in sight.”

The last night of sightings, Sunday, June 28th, was not so dramatic but Gill recorded first, one UFO at 6:45, and then, at 11:20 a “loud bang on the mission roof as though a piece of metal had dropped from a great height” and four UFOs “overhead.”  Gill would later state that he didn’t necessarily associate the noise with the UFOs, but included it in his report in case it had significance.

This story has been recounted in numerous books and websites.  Due to what are often brief overviews, one can easily get the impression that this was an isolated incident experienced by a missionary and Papuan natives far removed from other UFO activity and researchers.  This is not the case.  The above information comes from a report, “Flying Saucers Over Papua” written by the Reverend Norman E.G. Cruttwell of the Anglican Mission, Menapi, Papua New Guinea.  The reports Gill sent to his friend, Durie, would have first been sent to Cruttwell but Cruttwell was out “on a walkabout.”  Cruttwell was a friend of Gill’s and an active UFO researcher who had started collecting reports after having his own sighting.  He would later write to Flying Saucer Review and was asked by them to be their Papuan investigator.  “Flying Saucers Over Papua” was passed around privately and then published in Flying Saucer Review, Special Issue No. 4, August 1971.  Copies are rare and valuable (one site has one for $290) but 18 of the total 45 pages can be viewed at The Black Vault website.  Cruttwell collected reports of 79 sightings in Papua (60, with a question mark in the report, being in the area around Boianai) with witnesses ranging from government officers to native villagers.  This reads as a full-fledged flap in the area and flying saucers were likely a part of many conversations.  Gill, himself, mentioned in a talk that he’d first heard the term “flying saucer” in 1959 while having dinner with a Dr. Ken Houston (name from audio, spelling guessed), who mused that he might have seen one and that a conversation ensued among the others at the table.  Gill did get his reports to Cruttwell and that was how they came to be preserved.

Gill’s actions during and after the sightings were extraordinary and read like they came from a handbook covering “what to do if you see a UFO.”  Because of him and Cruttwell, minute details are available to researchers more than 60 years later.  Gill went further than just his logs.  After the night of the 26th, he and three witnesses, all teachers including Moi, Dulcie F. Guyorobo and Ananias Rarato, went to separate parts of a well-lit room and made drawings of the object that had the humanoids.  In addition to the drawings, he got 27 out of 38 witnesses to provide signed statements of what they’d seen that night.  In order to estimate the size and distance of the object, Gill started with the assumption that the humanoid figures were average human height.  He found a student that size and had him march across a field until he was the size of the figures seen at distance and then measured that distance.  Gill then, using his hand as a reference, in the position he had held it up while observing the object, chose a school building, which fit within his hand’s five-inch spread, had it measured and found it to be 35 feet.

The case was found by J. Allen Hynek in 1961.  Hynek was in Britain on an official visit in his capacity as a Project Blue Book Consultant and found the case file at the British Air Ministry.  They were all too happy to be relieved of it as they felt the U.S. Air Force had better funding to look into the case.  Hynek reviewed the file and tape recordings of Gill, was convinced of his sincerity and included the case in his 1972 book, “The UFO Experience.”  Hynek would later interview Gill himself.

Gill returned to Australia not long after the sightings and was interviewed by the Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society and they too were impressed.  The VFSRS joined with other civilian groups to press for a statement regarding the case from the Minister of Air, but at that point, the Royal Australian Air Force hadn’t bothered to contact Gill.  On December 29, 1959, Gill was finally interviewed, cursorily, by two officers from the RAAF, and one of them, Squadron Leader F.A. Lang, explained the sightings as being caused by planets, light refraction and varying cloud densities.

Gill died June 13, 2007 at the age of 79.  He gave a few lectures and talks regarding his experience and appeared briefly in the 1977 documentary, “UFOs Are Here.”  Most of his life, however, was devoted to teaching.