Case · UFO Afrinews No 4, March 1991
More Light on the Mount Kilimanjaro Case
1951 ยท near Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanganyika, Hind's introduction places the case in Kenya; the account itself says near Kilimanjaro, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Tanzania
Outside the region. Hind reprinted this case from elsewhere; it has a file here but no place on the map.
What was reported
Richard Heiden of Milwaukee supplied a much fuller account of the sighting first mentioned in Afrinews 1. On 19 February 1951 nine men and two women aboard a Lodestar flying near Kilimanjaro signed an affidavit describing a bullet-nosed metallic object, whitish-silver with three vertical black bands and perhaps a row of round windows, watched for seventeen minutes in a clear, cloudless sky. Radio operator Merrifield saw it first; Capt. Bicknell timed it as it twice rose vertically to about 40,000 ft and then sped east towards the coast. Fussell, with powerful binoculars, rejected a balloon because it hovered ten minutes then moved at about 400 mph. Fussell took a still with a miniature camera and Overstreet shot 30 ft of colour cine film through a telescopic lens, then could not be traced on his way to America. Reporter James Moseley says the USAF found only a bouncing light on the film.
What Hind made of it
Moseley's claim that the USAF found the film to be little more than a bouncing bit of light neither disproves nor proves what the eleven witnesses saw; Hind notes Bicknell and Merrifield later called it an aircraft or a machine 500 years ahead of its time ('Familiar words, Ed.') and appeals for Durban readers or ex-Kenyans who might trace Bicknell, Merrifield or, most important, Ray Overstreet.
Explanation offered
Balloon (rejected emphatically by Fussell); the cine film was said by the USAF to show little more than a bouncing bit of light; the crew later thought it a machine far ahead of its time
In their words
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How could a balloon hover motionless and move at 400 mph in the same weather conditions?
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The film exists; it was examined by the (US) Air Force. It was found to be little more than a bouncing bit of light
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The object must have been immense, two or three times the size of the largest passenger plane.
Cross references
- UFO Afrinews No 1 (July 1988), page 5
- Natal Mercury, Durban (story and photograph from Overstreet)