What happened
Early on 28 February 1904 the US Navy stores ship Supply was steaming from Guam toward San Francisco when the officer of the deck, Acting Boatswain Frank Garvey, saw three red glowing bodies appear low on the horizon beneath the clouds. They travelled in a tight echelon straight toward the ship, then seemed to soar, passing up through the cloud layer at about 45 degrees. Above the clouds their apparent motion slowed and stopped, and they appeared to be climbing directly away from the Earth until lost from view, their colour fading as they rose. The largest looked egg-shaped, with a jagged leading edge, and about six times the area of the Sun; the other two were round. Three crewmen watched for over two minutes. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Frank H. Schofield, later Commander in Chief of the US Battle Force, filed a formal report that the Navy's Pilot Chart editor passed to the Weather Bureau. Monthly Weather Review printed it in March 1904 as 'Remarkable Meteors'.
The original account
The meteors appeared near the horizon and below the clouds, traveling in a group from northwest by north (true) directly toward the ship. At first their angular motion was rapid and color a rather bright red. As they approached the ship they appeared to soar, passing above the clouds at an elevation of about 45°. After rising above the clouds their angular motion became less and less until it ceased, when they appeared to be moving directly away from the earth at an elevation of about 75° and in direction west-northwest (true).
Lt. Frank H. Schofield, USN, 'Remarkable Meteors', Monthly Weather Review vol. 32 no. 3 (March 1904), p. 115 (US government publication, public domain)
The official explanation
Schofield himself called the objects meteors, and the Weather Bureau published the report under that heading. A large fireball breaking into fragments, seen nearly head-on as it travelled roughly along the observers' line of sight, can appear to hang, change apparent speed and fade, and judgments of whether something is above or below a cloud deck at dawn are notoriously unreliable. Ball lightning has also been suggested by some writers. No physical evidence or further investigation followed.
The anomalous case
This is a formal written report by a career naval officer who later rose to command the US Battle Force, based on three corroborating witnesses and filed with precise position and time. Schofield explicitly stressed what made it remarkable: the objects came below the clouds, then rose up through them instead of continuing on a falling course, their angular motion ceased, and they appeared to recede away from the Earth. Meteors do not reverse a descent and climb. The objects held fixed relative positions in echelon without tumbling, and Schofield noted they could not have been large given their behaviour near the surface. A trained navigator estimated the cloud base at under a mile, so the objects passed close to the ship. In the modern vocabulary this is a multiple-witness naval encounter with luminous objects showing controlled formation flight.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- 'Remarkable Meteors' by Lt. Frank H. Schofield, Monthly Weather Review, March 1904 official, archive.org
- Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 9 March 1904, p. 1 ('Observed Three Meteors') newspaper, loc.gov
Sources
- Monthly Weather Review, vol. 32 no. 3 (March 1904) Internet Archive
- Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 9 March 1904, p. 1 Library of Congress, Chronicling America
- Frank H. Schofield Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.