Frank Smythe's "Pulsating Teapots" on Everest

In the spring of 1933 Hugh Ruttledge led the Fourth British Everest Expedition to the north side of the mountain, in Tibet. Among its climbers was Frank Smythe, a professional mountaineer, author and one of the finest mountain photographers of his day. Two years earlier he had led the first ascent of Kamet.

On 1 June Smythe set out with Eric Shipton from Camp VI, perched at about 27,200 ft. Shipton fell ill and turned back. Smythe went on alone, without supplementary oxygen, and reached a record high point of about 28,200 ft. Then he turned for home.

On the way down he was still some 200 feet above Camp VI, and a considerable distance from it. He glanced toward the north ridge. In his own words, he "saw two curious looking objects floating in the sky. They strongly resembled kite balloons in shape, but one possessed what appeared to be squat underdeveloped wings, and the other a protuberance suggestive of a beak."

They were dark, silhouetted against the sky. "They hovered motionless but seemed slowly to pulsate," he wrote, "a pulsation incidentally much slower than my own heart-beats."

Smythe did not simply trust his eyes. He looked away and named the landmarks around him. "My brain appeared to be working normally," he wrote. He looked back, and the objects were still there. Then mist drifted across the north ridge and hid them, and when it cleared a minute or two later, they had vanished.

The objects were not the only strange thing on that climb. All the time he was alone, Smythe felt a second person beside him. At one point he broke a piece of Kendal Mint Cake in half and turned to hand over a share. No one was there. "The feeling was so strong that it completely eliminated all loneliness I might otherwise have felt," he wrote.

Back with the expedition, his story met good humoured disbelief. His teammates called the objects "Frank's pulsating tea-kettles," a nickname later retold as "pulsating teapots." Smythe published the full account in his 1937 book Camp Six. According to later accounts, he stayed convinced of what he had seen until his death. No government or military body ever investigated.

The expedition had its own reading. In Smythe's 1949 obituary in the Himalayan Journal, Ruttledge put it down to "apparent hallucinations in regard to cloud formations and movements." Most climbing writers since have settled on hypoxia. Smythe had spent two nights at extreme altitude without oxygen and was, by one account, "weak as a kitten." The phantom companion on the same descent seems to point the same way.

Not everyone closes the file so easily. In 1993 Champak Chatterji revisited the case in the Himalayan Journal. He stressed that Smythe had deliberately tested his own perception before looking back. And he asked whether this might be the first documented UFO sighting in the Himalaya.

Today the case holds the only 1930s entry on Wikipedia's list of reported UFO sightings. Alongside Nicholas Roerich's Himalayan sighting of the 1920s, it stands as one of the rare pre-1947 reports from a named, credible witness. Smythe's invisible companion has had a long life of its own. It is a classic early example of what is now called the Third Man factor, the subject of John Geiger's 2009 book.