1947-1972 Looking Back: Past July UFO Cases Reprinted

摘要

1. On the first, the steamship Llando-very Castle, bound for Cape Town, South Africa, was passing through the Straits of Madagascar. The time was about 11 p.m., when the lookout and some of the passengers noticed a brilliant light approaching rapidly, overtaking the ship and losing altitude as it did so. The light lost speed and descended to within 50 feet of the water. Then it beamed down a brilliant searching light that cast a diminishing circle on the surface of the sea as the object matched its speed with that of the ship. Suddenly the searchlight beam went out... and then the object itself became visible. All aboard the vessel who saw the thing agreed that it was a gigantic cylindrical craft of some sort, apparently metallic and about five times as long as its diameter. It looked, said the witnesses, like a huge steel cigar with the end clipped. No windows or portholes could be seen. From the ease and precision with which it matched its speed to that of the steamship and from the use of the searchlight, it was quite apparent that the craft was under intelligent control of some sort. The size of the craft was nothing less than gigantic; some witnesses estimated that the thing was three to four times as long as the steamship, which meant that it would have been at least 1,600 feet long and about 300 feet thick. After cruising along beside the Llando-very Castle for perhaps a minute, the gigantic structure began to rise silently until it was about 1,000 feet above the water, then great orange streamers of flame shot from the rear of the craft and it leapt forward, rising rapidly to lose itself in the night sky. The incident was duly recorded in the ship's log, and promptly forgotten except by those who saw it. (Strange World by Frank Edwards; Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space by Coral Lorenzen).