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Case · C-012

Port Moresby 1953: the film by a civil aviation official

Port Moresby, Territory of Papua (today Papua New Guinea) · Papua New Guinea · Aug 23, 1953

In flight Civilian witnesses Video

Disputed explanation

What happened
Around noon Tom Drury, deputy director of the Australian Department of Civil Aviation for New Guinea, saw a cloud form at high altitude to the southwest of Port Moresby, from which a small object emerged and rose rapidly toward the northwest leaving a trail, and filmed it with a color movie camera fitted with a telephoto lens. The film went to the Department of Air and the RAAF, was sent to the United States for technical processing and then returned; the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book had also requested a copy. Drury later complained that he had received the film back without the frames of the object. In 1966 a search in the Air Force archives failed to find them and concluded that they might still be in the archives, destroyed or lost; the Department of Air reported that the 1953 case file with its copies of the film and the assessment had been destroyed through normal archive procedures. Basterfield and Dean (2017) doubt that parts of the film were ever removed; those who have seen the film or the prints describe the quality as poor.
Proposed explanation
The Project Blue Book (USAF) card classifies the case as “aircraft,” noting insufficient data; the Australian Department of Air wrote that the film showed only a moving patch of light. Drury, who had ruled out civil flights in the area by consulting air traffic control, thought of a missile, a hypothesis that the researchers Keith Basterfield and Paul Dean (2017) consider ruled out; the two consider a very bright daytime meteoroid plausible.
Official investigation
Department of Civil Aviation and Department of Air/RAAF (Australia); Project Blue Book (U.S. Air Force)

Official documents

  1. [Intelligence - General] - Reports on flying saucers [UFO's] and other aerial objects - October 1953 - April 1955 · Department of Air (Australia) - National Archives of Australia, A705, 114/1/197 · 1953

Sources

  1. Keith Basterfield, Paul Dean, Cold case review of the 23 August 1953, Port Moresby visual sighting and colour movie film (2017) (analysis)
  2. Keith Basterfield, UAS files located in the Australian Government's records systems (2011, updated 2016) (analysis)

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