The BOAC 'Flying Jellyfish': Captain James Howard and the Stratocruiser Centaurus

The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser Centaurus left Idlewild at 17:03 local time on 29 June 1954. BOAC Flight 510-196. New York to London, with a refuelling stop at Goose Bay, Labrador. In command was Captain James R. Howard, 33, a former RAF Bomber Command Squadron Leader with more than 7,500 flying hours. On board were 11 crew and 51 passengers.

It was 01:05 GMT on 30 June. The airliner was at 19,000 feet, roughly 150 nautical miles southwest of Goose Bay. The sun was setting. Off to port, Howard saw one large object and six smaller ones. Black silhouettes, with no lights and no vapor trails, "on a track roughly parallel to ours and keeping station with us."

The small ones "dodged about", sometimes three ahead of the large one and three behind, sometimes two ahead and four behind. The large one never held its form: wedge, dumb-bell, sphere, arrow, a "giant telephone receiver". It was "continually, slowly, changing shape, in the way that a swarm of bees might alter its appearance."

At about 01:20, the pilot of a fighter sent by Goose Bay reported he was approaching. The small objects appeared to converge on the large one and enter it. "It didn't go forward or back, just got smaller until it disappeared." It was 01:23 GMT. In another telling, the main object "sheered away… at terrific speed".

Howard was not alone. Stewardess Daphne Webster saw it "one minute like a cigar, then an orange, then a mushroom." First Officer Lee Boyd was "willing to swear that what we saw was something solid, something maneuverable, and something that was being controlled intelligently." Navigator George Allen called it "a base ship of some kind with a number of satellites linked with it." According to James E. McDonald, about 20 passengers watched from the port windows.

At Goose Bay, USAF intelligence questioned the crew during the refuelling stop. Howard said they "seemed totally unsurprised", as there had been several others in the Labrador area recently. Fighter control had "nothing else on his screen but us." Howard told his story on the BBC's In Town Tonight on 3 July, and his sketches of the shifting shape appeared in newsreels and in FATE. In 1967 he filled in a sighting report for the Condon Committee.

In 1968 the Condon Committee's G. David Thayer wrote: "The suggestion is strong that the UFO in this case was a mirage: a reflection of the dark terrain below seen against the bright, 'silvery' sky to the left of the setting sun." A superior mirage, he concluded, so rare it had apparently never been reported before or since.

James E. McDonald disputed it, pointing to the objects' performance and shape changes. Brad Sparks argued the geometry ruled out a mirage: a depression angle of about 20 to 25 degrees, against a maximum of about half a degree. Howard doubted an inversion in that heat. In 2010 Martin Shough, writing for NARCAP, concluded it "might well have been an unusual mirage".

The case was cited in the House of Lords UFO debate on 18 January 1979, and Timothy Good retold it in Above Top Secret. A later claim that radar at Cartwright, Labrador, had both the airliner and the object on screen has never been corroborated. FATE called it "BOAC's Flying Jellyfish". Seven dark shapes, one sunset, and an argument that has never quite closed.