PAPUA — It is now 50 years since a 31-year-old Aus­tralian Angli­can mis­sion­ary William Gill, and 37 parish­ioners and staff made the best attested and least explained UFO sight­ing. Gill, who was priest in charge at Boianai, a large vil­lage on the moun­tain­ous north coast of Milne Bay province wrote “There had been quite a num­ber of reports over the months from reli­able witnesses.”

(credit: Brooke­smith And )
The pecu­liar thing about these most recent reports is that the UFOs seem to be sta­tion­ary at beau­ti­ful Boanai or to travel from Boianai.” “I myself saw a sta­tion­ary white light twice on the same night.” Gill wrote, “Then the fol­low­ing night, on April 10, 1960, we at Boianai expe­ri­enced about four hours of UFO activ­ity, and there is no doubt what­so­ever that they are han­dled by beings of some kind.” “At times it was absolutely breath­tak­ing. We saw a bright white light appear­ing in the north­west­ern sky, approach­ing the mis­sion sta­tion, then hov­er­ing about 100 meters in the air.

Gill, Moi, another teacher, Ana­nias Rarata, and 35 other peo­ple who all later signed a con­firm­ing doc­u­ment, watched what they described as a large, disc-shaped, solidly con­structed object, with a wide base taper­ing up to a higher deck, and with what appeared to be four legs beneath, and four brightly lit pan­els in the side. It occa­sion­ally emit­ted a shaft of blue light at a 45 degree angle. Then what they described as men emerged on to a deck on the top, four at most, but in var­i­ous con­fig­u­ra­tions. Artist’s impres­sion of the encounter by Aus­tralian mis­sion­ary Father Gill. Clouds, which were at about 600m, then even­tu­ally, obscured the ves­sel as it drifted higher. It had been sta­tion­ary through most of the 25 min­utes of this encounter. Gill then wrote his let­ter to Durie. That evening, the vis­i­ta­tion returned in an extra­or­di­nary man­ner. He first saw it at 6.02 pm, as the sun was set­ting. Gill’s account states: “We watched fig­ures appear on top — four of them — no doubt that they are human.“Two smaller UFOs were seen at the same time, sta­tion­ary; one above the hills west, another overhead.“On the large one, two of the fig­ures seemed to be doing some­thing near the cen­tre of the deck … were occa­sion­ally bend­ing over and rais­ing their arms as though adjust­ing or set­ting up something.“One fig­ure seemed to be stand­ing look­ing down at us (a group of about a dozen). I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our sur­prise the fig­ure did the same.

“Ana­nias waved both arms over his head then the two out­side fig­ures did the same.“Ananias and self began wav­ing our arms and all four now seemed to wave back. There seemed to be no doubt that our move­ments were answered. All mis­sion boys made audi­ble gasps (of either joy or sur­prise, per­haps both).

“As dark was begin­ning to close in, I sent Eric Kodawara for a torch and directed a series of long dashes towards the UFO. After a minute or two of this, the UFOap­par­ently acknowl­edged by mak­ing sev­eral waver­ing motions back and forth.

“Wav­ing by us was repeated and this fol­lowed by more flashes of torch, then the UFO began slowly to become big­ger, appar­ently com­ing in our direc­tion. It ceased after per­haps half a minute and came no further.

“After sev­eral min­utes the fig­ures appar­ently lost inter­est in us for they dis­ap­peared below deck. At 6.25pm two fig­ures reap­peared to carry on with what­ever they were doing before the inter­rup­tion. The blue spot­light came on for a few sec­onds twice in succession.“The sit­u­a­tion remained unchanged, so Gill returned to his reg­u­lar rou­tine and went to have his din­ner at 6.30. By 7pm, the main object had moved slightly away and the observers went into the vil­lage church for even­song, as usual. By the time they emerged, at 7.45pm, vis­i­bil­ity had become very lim­ited with the sky cov­ered in cloud. At 10.40 pm, Gill wrote, an “ear­split­ting” explo­sion woke up the mission-station inhab­i­tants. Gill said it did not feel like a thunderclap.

Later, Gill said, he was always asked why he had reverted to his usual rou­tine when there was a fly­ing saucer appar­ently hov­er­ing over­head. This was partly because, he said, “There was noth­ing eerie or other-worldly about any of this. It was all so ordi­nary, as ordi­nary as a Ford car.“It looked a per­fectly nor­mal sort of object, an Earth-made object. I real­ized, of course, that some peo­ple might think of this as a fly­ing saucer, but I took it to be some kind of hov­er­craft the Amer­i­cans or even the Aus­tralians had built. The fig­ures inside looked per­fectly human.”

Gill’s report caused quite a sen­sa­tion at the time. The Defence Min­istry deployed two RAAF offi­cers to inves­ti­gate. Although they found Gill “a reli­able observer”, they attrib­uted the sight­ings to “nat­ural phe­nom­ena”. Thanks to Bob Chap­man, Rowan Cal­lick and The Aus­tralian Newspaper: