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Hello Down There (1959; Boianai, Papua New Guinea)

There may be many alien species out there, and some of them might communicate only using gestures. Or, indeed, via the medium of dance.

I'm trying to imagine a group of Alien technicians describing the construction of a space craft (or even a kitchen table) using only the medium of dance.

Nope, not working.

INT21.
 
What I always wondered about this case is, why, as an obvious sea faring people, did no one get out a boat and paddle across to where this object was ? ...

The sightings weren't always over water, were they? It seems to me Father Gill's letters mention only one sighting definitely described as happening out over the water. The remainder / majority seem to refer to the hills, etc., as if the anomalies were sighted over land.
 
Gestures are part of human language. I would hope and expect any alien who learnt our language would also learn the accompanying body language as part of the process.

There may be many alien species out there, and some of them might communicate only using gestures. Or, indeed, via the medium of dance.
or by waving their antenna. Why do alien species have to be humanoid? Although if these were aliens they would seem to be humanoid. Time travellers seems just as likely.
 
It's the apparent indifference to the visitors that surprises me.
 
It's the apparent indifference to the visitors that surprises me.
ER...Father Gill and the others did wave back...that's not being indifferent is it..?

;)
 
ER...Father Gill and the others did wave back...that's not being indifferent is it..?

Let's not get the reported actions reversed bass-ackwards ...

Check the documentation posted earlier in this thread. Gill and others on the ground initiated the waving, and the figures aloft appeared to respond in kind (raising their arms and / or waving back).
 
By indifference I mean the observers quickly got bored and went in to tea.
 
Gestures are part of human language. I would hope and expect any alien who learnt our language would also learn the accompanying body language as part of the process.

There may be many alien species out there, and some of them might communicate only using gestures. Or, indeed, via the medium of dance.

If they were aliens, then at least this incident proves the film Arrival was bullshit and space or dimensional visitors would make an effort to communicate clearly and not make things as needlessly complicated as possible.
 
Not to beat a dead horse on this but I have a hard time believing that highly evolved space aliens would fly by a priest and some natives and return their wave at them from the 'deck' of their 'space ship'....even if waving is a customary human greeting. Why not land and exchange trinkets or something? ;)
It seems silly on the face of it. And so many of these older sightings/close encounters have that same quality of absurdity in various ways.
Again this has been written about by many including Dr Vallee in Dimensions and several other of his books.
 
Vallee was asked if he knew about top level debris from the fabric of the objects themselves as opposed to just metals ejected from them or landing traces.. He said that materials like that were given to "some aerospace company" iirc, and that he didn't have access to them. I might be able to track it down again..
Not to beat a dead horse on this but I have a hard time believing that highly evolved space aliens would fly by a priest and some natives and return their wave at them from the 'deck' of their 'space ship'....even if waving is a customary human greeting. Why not land and exchange trinkets or something? ;)
It seems silly on the face of it. And so many of these older sightings/close encounters have that same quality of absurdity in various ways.
Again this has been written about by many including Dr Vallee in Dimensions and several other of his books.
What if the humanoids were just projections?
 
What if the humanoids were just projections?
So..we then have humanoid projections waving....? I can see this getting absurd very quickly.
One can make up any speculation one wants to....where does that get us?
 
So..we then have humanoid projections waving....? I can see this getting absurd very quickly.
One can make up any speculation one wants to....where does that get us?
Terry Lovelace claimed to see humanoid forms being absorbed in a column of light, airship occupants sometime were described as a seen in a flickering light, other sightings from the '50s and other times describe shadowy humanoid shapes but nothing definite. There is an old article where large globes of light are seen and when a telescope is trained on the objects, a figure is waving enthusiatically to the point of it's companions trying to subdue it.. It just reminds me of video of humans that was taken when they saw unknown object replayed for other humans. I will admit to not understanding the weird high strangeness humanoid thing, generally, though. The variety of humanoids seen is hard to account for.
 
Not to beat a dead horse on this but I have a hard time believing that highly evolved space aliens would fly by a priest and some natives and return their wave at them from the 'deck' of their 'space ship'....even if waving is a customary human greeting. Why not land and exchange trinkets or something? ;)
It seems silly on the face of it. And so many of these older sightings/close encounters have that same quality of absurdity in various ways.
Again this has been written about by many including Dr Vallee in Dimensions and several other of his books.

The fact it is ridiculous and never replicated in any other close encounter makes it more authentic for me. I find it very pleasing, though I have no idea what really happened, and I suspect none of the witnesses did, either.
 
The fact it is ridiculous and never replicated in any other close encounter makes it more authentic for me. I find it very pleasing, though I have no idea what really happened, and I suspect none of the witnesses did, either.
Actually it has been replicated....not the 'waving' part ,but many people over the years have reported seeing 'aliens' in the windows of the saucers looking out, etc. I believe that The Hills claim they saw the 'aliens' looking at them from the ufo.
Again would advanced aliens really be looking out the window as they drive by..? Really?
 
Actually it has been replicated....not the 'waving' part ,but many people over the years have reported seeing 'aliens' in the windows of the saucers looking out, etc. I believe that The Hills claim they saw the 'aliens' looking at them from the ufo.
Again would advanced aliens really be looking out the window as they drive by..? Really?

Might be more to do with the observer than the observed, like a lot of UFO encounters.
 
Might be more to do with the observer than the observed, like a lot of UFO encounters.
Can you explain what you mean by that...?
 
Can you explain what you mean by that...?

Sure, it's like beauty being in the eye of the beholder - weirdness can be too. Think Schrodinger's Cat, observing is instrumental in what you're believing has occurred as you bring your own experience to what your eyes are taking in. Therefore if you see something unexpected, it will be filtered through that experience to frame it in your world.

So if you saw a hot air balloon and the occupants waving, you may think you're seeing a hot air balloon, but others might see it as a UFO, if that's their preferred frame of reference. I don't discount the beliefs and tendencies of the observers of weirdness in deciding what they think they have seen, rather than what was actually there.
 
You'd be rather old if you had.

P.s Corrected typo.
 
Whether you've heard of it or not, to my surprise here is a - i assume 1970s - interview with Father Gill himself describing the event.

 
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This is one of my favourite 'classic' cases.

Martin Kottmeyer came up with a plausible solution, a mirage of a squid boat (and its crew on deck, hence the figures):

https://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/2013/12/gill-again-father-gill-case-reconsidered.html

Klass thought the answer was simpler; Gill had been doing some gentle leg-pulling of his friend Rev. Norman Cruttwell, who was interested in UFOs. He didn't count on Cruttwell taking his letter seriously enough to publicise it and was then kept from withdrawing the story out of embarrassment.
 
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Papua New Guinea isn't particularly known for its UFO cases but does also have the 1953 Drury / Port Moresby film, which is a classic of the "film of object passed to authorities and allegedly returned with the best bits missing" genre.
 
This is one of my favourite 'classic' cases.

Martin Kottmeyer came up with a plausible solution, a mirage of a squid boat (and its crew on deck, hence the figures):

https://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/2013/12/gill-again-father-gill-case-reconsidered.html

Klass thought the answer was simpler; Gill had been doing some gentle leg-pulling of his friend Rev. Norman Cruttwell, who was interested in UFOs. He didn't count on Cruttwell taking his letter seriously enough to publicise it and was then kept from withdrawing the story out of embarrassment.

I should clarify my own post here. Kottmeyer didn't say it was a mirage of a squid boat, which he concluded was optically implausible, but rather a squid boat combined with a "false horizon" effect which fooled both Gill and the other 20-odd (!) witnesses. There are a few things about the appearance of the UFO that strongly suggest this.

The argument against this theory is that the UFO was supposedly seen over land for some of the sighting. However, as Kottmeyer says, "well, do you have a better solution" for what Jerome Clark called "History's best case"? A genuinely quite baffling report if taken at face value (it also has surely the best line in any witness report: "At 6.30pm, I went to dinner").
 
I should clarify my own post here. Kottmeyer didn't say it was a mirage of a squid boat, which he concluded was optically implausible, but rather a squid boat combined with a "false horizon" effect which fooled both Gill and the other 20-odd (!) witnesses. There are a few things about the appearance of the UFO that strongly suggest this.
Some 20 years back, I corresponded with Martin about this case and have located the following posting I made on the 'UFO Research List' (UFORL), which I operated at the time:

"I also have a copy on CD of Kottmeyer's 'Gill Again' article, published in 'Magonia' issue 54 and his later response to critics".

Now I need to go find... could be anywhere... :worry:

:)
 
I understand there was a report by Rev Cruttwell in the August 1971 issue of Flying Saucer Review which claimed Gill's sighting was part of a large wave or "flap".

I think Kottmeyer's explanation is pretty strong. The big question is whether the object appeared over land at any point. One correspondent to Magonia says it did, and indeed "passed behind a hill", but bases this on a talk given by Gill several months after the event, which suggests there was nothing in the original report about it.
 
http://malcolmsanomalies.blogspot.com/2012/03/ufos-over-boiani-in-father-gills-own.html

This seems to be a transcript of Gill's original report, as annotated by Cruttwell, along with other materials, including a sighting in the early hours of 21 June by Stephen Moi, one of the witnesses to the later incident.

Note also the loud "explosion" reportedly heard following one night's events, and the loud bang on the Mission roof after another - definitely veering into High Strangeness territory there.
 
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A couple more bits:


http://malcolmsanomalies.blogspot.com/2012/04/ufos-over-papua-same-night-as-father.html - here are the "confirmatory" reports collected by Cruttwell

Note that Venus is mentioned as a possible stimulus for some of them. The smaller UFOs mentioned by Gill as seen alongside the main "object" (and often left out in retellings of the case) do sound rather like misidentified astronomical objects. Were there perhaps unusual atmospheric conditions on the three nights that Gill saw the objects?

http://theozfiles.blogspot.com/2007/08/reverend-william-bill-booth-gill-1929.html

Bill Chalker's brief obituary of Gill, who gave a lecture on his sighting as late as 2003.
 
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We have a few examples of 'false horizons' on this forum
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/mirages.21020/page-2#post-2051584
as you can see, they are very convincing.
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