The Bellingham Bay Splashdown

The time is given in the archive's telling as 3.39 in the morning and in the wire-service report of the day as 3.45, and the place is Bellingham Bay south of Lummi Island, near Carter Point in Washington State. According to the account the archive holds, a large flaming object throwing sparks came down into the water. It was seen from more than one vessel, and the Coast Guard is recorded as confirming the event. Military and Federal Aviation Administration tracking is recorded as finding nothing.

Five months later, the account continues, a private dive team located an object on the bay floor, described as metallic and gold in colour and roughly ten feet by thirty. A diver is said to have stood on it, sensed a humming, and afterwards suffered decompression sickness and reddish residue. A ship is recorded as anchoring over the site overnight, and the object as being gone the following day.

What is on the record

Five claimants are resolved. They include Dominic Papetti and Richard Dale Hartman along with the crew of a tugboat, which the archive names as the Delores; the contemporary report names Hartman's vessel as the Steeva Ten and places a second tug at Anacortes that saw the flash. Mariners on the water at night are good witnesses for something coming down into it, and multiple vessels reporting the same splashdown is the strongest element of this file.

The two halves of the account are not equally supported. The splashdown was reported at the time and the Coast Guard searched, leaning in its own account towards a meteorite. What the divers found rests on the dive team's own description, and the contemporary version of it is a teacup-shaped object rather than a gold slab of stated dimensions. The archive holds no Coast Guard log and no dive footage. There is no photograph of the object and nothing identifying the ship said to have anchored above it.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3, the archive's tier for multiple independent claimants describing one connected event. The witnesses on the water carry it there. What came down in the bay is not resolved here.