A Flame-coloured Disc over Codroy, Newfoundland

The night was clear and the light was going. John Legge kept a store at Codroy, on the south-west coast of Newfoundland, and on 10 July 1947 he was standing outside it with William Evans. They saw a very bright disc the colour of flame. A lighter after-glow trailed behind it and made the whole thing look like a cone. It travelled from the north-west eastward at very high speed, at what they estimated as 6,000 feet. Both men said it could not have been a plane or a falling star.

A twelve-year-old boy on his way home saw it on his own. He told his mother, who passed the report on. An air raid warden at South Branch later gave a matching description, though at second hand.

What is on the record

The sighting is set down in a Final Report of Sighting by the US Army Air Forces' 1388th AAF Base Unit. A copy sits in the FBI's flying-disc file 62-HQ-83894, released by the Department of War in 2026. Newfoundland was then a separate dominion and did not join Canada until 1949. The intelligence officer judged Legge reliable. Legge had been a mine foreman and a civilian aircraft-observer volunteer. The report gives no conclusion.

The record's time is 00:30 Zulu on 11 July 1947, which is the evening of 10 July in Newfoundland. Hatch's database and Overmeire's catalogue both file the sighting under 11 July. Overmeire gives 2:20 a.m., and that conflicts with the record's "at dusk".

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. The names used here are Legge and Evans. The boy is named in the record but not here, because he was a child. No later first-hand account has surfaced to set beside the report. The grade reflects the paper trail and makes no claim about the object. What crossed Codroy that evening is not resolved here.