PILOT SIGHTINGS -- The Bethune / Gandor Air Encounter

The Bethune / Gandor Air Encounter

Date: February 10, 1951

Location: Gandor, Newfoundland, Canada

Graham Bethune's testimony at the Disclosure Project Press Conference at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., 2001.

"About 300 miles outside of Argentina, Newfoundland, I saw a glow on the water. As we approached this glow, it turned into hundreds of circles of white lights on the water. We watched it for a while; when the lights went out, there was nothing on the water. The next thing that we saw was a yellow halo that was very small, about 15 miles away. It came up to 10,000 feet in a fraction of a second. I disengaged the autopilot and pushed the nose over, because I was going to go under it at the angle that it was coming toward me. The minute that I did that, it was up at our altitude and I could see nothing outside of the cockpit but this craft."


"I didn't know which way to go. Then all of a sudden I heard a racket. I didn't know what it was. And I said: 'What the hell was that?' One of the crewmen looked around and said: 'Everyone [in the plane] was ducking [down] and they collided [with each other]. They were all lying on the [floor of the plane]." 

"Then [the UFO] appeared over to the right, moved out slowly and flew with us. It was not at our altitude, but we could see the shape of it. It was a dome and I could see the coronal discharge. I went back aft, let the other pilot, Al Jones, take my seat, and went to see if the passengers were OK. They had some bumps and bruises. One passenger was a doctor so I went to him first. I said: 'Doc, did you see what we saw?' He looked me straight in the eye and said: 'Yeah, it was a flying saucer.' He said: 'I didn't look at it because I don't believe in such things.' It took me a couple of seconds to realize what he was saying. Being a psychiatrist, he couldn't believe in that kind of thing." 

"So I went back to the cockpit and said, 'Al, whatever you do, don't tell anybody we saw anything. They will lock us up as soon as we get on the ground.' He says: 'It's too late. I just called Gander control [in Newfoundland] to see if they could track this by radar.' So that's how the story got out." 

"It was obvious from the questions and demeanor of the US Navy men who debriefed us that they'd seen things out there before. When the crew returned to the Patuxant River Naval Air Test Center in Maryland, they required that each of us writes a report."