The Argentia Transport

A light on the sea became a disc some three hundred and fifty feet across, according to the archive's tellings, and it rose to pace a Navy transport over the North Atlantic before climbing away at two or three times the speed of sound. One telling has it stop four to five hundred feet below the aircraft at a forty-five degree angle while crew members were hurt scattering in the cockpit. Gander was notified. Years later one of the officers on board said a scientist from a secret agency showed him a photograph of a matching disc and left once he had confirmed it.

The flight was US Navy R5D Flight 125 from Keflavik in Iceland to Argentia with 31 aboard. The archive's row dates the encounter to 1956 because it came from a 1966 television special. The outside record places it on 10 February 1951 about two hundred miles north-east of Argentia. The tellings also call the aircraft a Super Constellation and the officer its commander. The record has an R5D and names him as the co-pilot, Lieutenant Graham Bethune.

What is on the record

This is one of the better-documented cases of its era. Five crew members filed US Air Force Air Intelligence Information Reports, which are held in the National Archives with the Project Blue Book files. The crew were debriefed by Naval Intelligence at Patuxent and again at Wright-Patterson. Gander radar is reported to have tracked an object. The record estimates the disc at about three hundred feet across and above a thousand miles an hour.

The archive's witness list needs care. Its four claimants are Lieutenant Kingdon, Dr Mosier and a Lieutenant Joe, plus the commander with his cockpit crew. The telling itself calls the third man Lieutenant Jones. None of those names appears in the outside record. The secret photograph rests on Bethune's word alone. Aurora, a meteor and a reflection of the moon have all been put forward, and none has been accepted.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3 on four claimants from two videos on one channel. The intelligence reports exist but the archive does not yet hold them. When they enter through the document pipeline this case is a candidate for the document-corroborated tier. It is a separate event from the archive's Newfoundland tanker sighting of 1955. What rose from the water is not resolved here.