Captain James Howard, Flight Officer Boyd, navigator George Allen and 17 passengers of a BOAC airliner at 19,000 feet, heading northeast toward Goose Bay, Labrador, saw a large opaque or black object with six smaller satellite objects on a horizontal line. They were constantly shifting in shape like a mirage, but were first seen at roughly a 20°-45° depression angle below the horizon. The objects' azimuth was about 5° left or south of the sun, low on the horizon, or at about 300° to 305° true as the sighting progressed. They disappeared when an F-94 interceptor approached. The sighting lasted for 22 minutes (Boyd; Allen, George; Howard, James).

Condon Report: Over Labrador, 30 June 1954, 2105-2127 LST. Weather: (at 19,000 ft.) clear, with a broken layer of stratocumulus clouds below, excellent visibility. No radar contact was made in this incident. A summary of the pilot's first-hand account of his experience reads:

I was in command of a BOAC Boeing Strato cruiser en route from New York to London via Goose Bay Labrador (refuelling stop). Soon after crossing overhead Seven Islands at 19,000 feet, true airspeed 230 kts, both my copilot and I became aware of something moving along off our port beam at a lower altitude at a distance of maybe five miles, in and out of a broken layer of Strato Cumulus cloud. As we watched, these objects climbed above the cloud and we could now clearly see one large and six small. As we flew on towards Goose Bay the large object began to change shape and the smaller to move relative to the larger....

We informed Goose Bay that we had something odd in sight and they made arrangements to vector a fighter (F-94?) on to us. Later I changed radio frequency to contact this fighter; the pilot told me he had me in sight on radar closing me head-on at 20 miles. At that the small objects seemed to enter the larger, and then the big one shrank. I gave a description of this to the fighter and a bearing of the objects from me. I then had to change back to Goose frequency for descent clearance. I don't know if the fighter saw anything, as he hadn't landed when I left Goose for London.

- The UFO was always within a few degrees of a horizontal plane containing the aircraft, thus satisfying the small-angle requirement;

- The aircraft flew at a steady altitude of 19,000 ft. for the 85 n. mi. over which the UFO appeared to "pace" the aircraft, thus the plane maintained a constant relationship to any atmospheric layer at a fixed altitude;

- The dark UFO was seen against a bright sky background within 5°-20 ° of the setting sun; nearly identical images, displaying "jellyfish-like" behavior may be commonly observed wherever mirages are observed with strong light-contrast present. The reflection of the moon on gently rippling water presents quite similar behavior.

The suggestion is strong that the UFO in this case was a mirage: a reflection of the dark terrain below seen against the bright, "silvery" sky to the left of the setting sun. The reflecting layer would be a thin, sharp temperature inversion located at an altitude just above that of the cruising aircraft. Most of the facts in this incident can be accounted for by this hypothesis. The dark, opaque nature of the image arises from the contrast in brightness and the phenomenon of "total reflection." The arrangement of the large and small objects in a thin line just above the aircraft's flight path, as well as the manner of disappearance, are commensurate with a mirage As the mirage-producing layer weakens (with distance) or the viewing angle increases (was the aircraft beginning its descent at the time?), the mirage appears to dwindle to a point and disappears. This type of mirage is referred to as a superior mirage and has often been reported over the ocean (see Section VI, Chapter 4). The principal difficulty with this explanation, besides having to hypothesize the existence of the mirage-producing layer, is how to account for the anisotropy of the mirage. Anisotropy of this sort, i.e., a mirage limited to certain viewing azimuths, is common in earth-bound mirages when viewed from a single location. But a mirage layer through which a reflected image could be seen only in one, constant principal direction (plus a few small "satellite" images) over a distance of 85 n. mi. is quite unusual.

There remains the slim possibility that the aircraft itself produced the mirage layer through intensification (by compression induced by the shockwave of the aircraft's passage through the air) of a barely subcritical layer, i.e., one in which the temperature gradient is just a little bit less than the value required to produce a mirage. This hypothesis would satisfy the directional requirement of the sighting, but the resulting scheme of hypotheses is too speculative to form an acceptable solution to the incident.

This unusual sighting should therefore be assigned to the category of some almost certainly natural phenomenon, which is so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since.

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