The Drury Film: A Silver Dart over Port Moresby

In 1953 Port Moresby lay in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, then administered by Australia. Tom Drury worked there as Deputy Director of Civil Aviation. He owned an EMEL C.93 movie camera, fitted with a telephoto lens and loaded with colour 8mm film.

Sunday, 23 August 1953. Around midday. The weather, he wrote, was cloudless. Then, in the south-western sky, he noticed "a cloud building up as though formed by vapour trails". It grew for several minutes. Drury filmed it.

"Suddenly an object appeared from one side of it and climbed very fast in roughly a north-westerly direction." To the naked eye it was slightly bigger than a pin head. He later called it a "silver dart", "sharp in front but apparently truncated behind". It flashed in the sunlight and left a dense, white, billowing trail. It was also silent. In 1982 he told researcher Bill Chalker it was "completely noiseless, which staggered me." "It moved in a dead straight line traveling towards the north west up at an angle of 45 degrees and didn't deviate. It just disappeared."

His wife Marjorie saw it too. "I saw it from the start as a bullet, not in a cloud," she said in 1967. Their son Paul, about 8 years old, watched with them. Drury told the South Pacific Post it was "a guided missile, because nothing else would fit the description."

On 31 August the Department of Civil Aviation's regional director wrote: "We do not know of any aircraft of the operational performance implied by this observation operating in the area." Air traffic control had reported no aircraft moving nearby. On 22 September the film went to the Department of Air, which made 94 prints. By late November, the film or a copy was with USAF headquarters "for technical processing".

The Minister for Air, William McMahon, said the projected film showed "a very small light-coloured object moving across the sky." In July 1954 the Department of Air reported it could establish nothing more than "a blur of light". In Project Blue Book's files the case carries the label "Aircraft", with "Insufficient data" also shown.

Drury said the film came back with the best frames, "those that showed the 'rocket'", snipped out. Only the cloud and the vapour trail were left. In 1966 a confidential RAAF paper hunted for the "excised" frames. The frames, it concluded, either still existed in the archives of the Directorate of Air Force Intelligence, had been destroyed, or "(perish the thought) have been lost." The surviving print is about 11 inches long. It shows a Papuan man spear-fishing, then a contrail-like streak. No clear object. Drury's nephew gave it to Chalker in 2000.

Drury always believed he had filmed a guided missile. The RAAF ruled out missile firings from Woomera. A meteor would not climb. A balloon would not move that fast. The lone, fast-growing cloud stayed unexplained. Keith Basterfield added a caution: the climb "may have been simply an increase in angular elevation."

Then came the right-angle turns. Edgar Jarrold of the Australian Flying Saucer Bureau described them in 1955. Chalker noted that "no one else, who either saw the film or prints, made such claims." Drury himself said the object "never slackened speed or changed direction".

The affair helped prompt the Directorate of Air Force Intelligence to ask physicist Harry Turner of Melbourne University for a classified scientific appreciation of UFO reports. The official answer has never gone beyond a blur of light.