The Killian Case: American Airlines Flight 139 Paced by Three Lights

Tuesday, 24 February 1959. American Airlines Flight 139 left Newark at 7:10 p.m., nonstop to Detroit. The aircraft was a DC-6B. In command was Captain Peter W. Killian of Syosset, Long Island, with about 20 years of flying and more than 4 million miles behind him. Beside him sat First Officer James John Dee. Behind them, two stewardesses and 35 passengers.

8:20 p.m. About 13 miles west of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The airliner held 8,500 feet, heading west. There wasn't a cloud in the sky above. No moon.

Off the left wingtip, about 15 degrees above the horizon, Killian saw three lights in a single horizontal line. They were brighter than any star. They shifted from yellow-orange to a brilliant blue-white, dimming and brightening with no pattern, sometimes going out completely. "At first, I thought it was the Belt of Orion," he said, "but then I took a second look and saw both the Belt and the foreign objects."

The lights did not sit still. "The objects were by no means close to the plane, but one would move in at intervals, fall back again, and change its place in the formation while keeping abreast of the ship, which was traveling at 350 miles per hour." At times they pulled ahead toward 11 o'clock, then dropped back. Killian kept watch on his radar screen. It showed nothing.

He radioed two other American Airlines planes to make sure he "wasn't seeing lightning bugs in the cockpit." Both captains had seen the objects too. On United Air Lines Flight 937, Captain A. D. Yates and Flight Engineer L. E. Baney watched the lights until they crossed ahead and vanished to the northwest over Warren, Ohio. Operators in the Pittsburgh tower saw them, as did observers of the Akron UFO Research Committee, directed by George Popowitch. After some 45 minutes, Killian's crew lost the three objects in the haze.

The Air Force answer came in stages. On 28 February, the pilots "may have been seeing stars," especially Orion. Killian's reply was pointed. "Let the Air Force explain how we saw stars through clouds 5,000 feet beneath us."

By mid-March, a new explanation. A KC-97 tanker refuelling three B-47s near Bradford, Pennsylvania. Project Blue Book filed the case as a Strategic Air Command refuelling. "If the Air Force wants to believe that, it can," Killian said. "But I know what a B-47 looks like and I know what a KC-97 tanker looks like, and I know what they look like in operation at night. And that's not what I saw."

Richard Hall of NICAP and, in 1992, Willy Smith pushed back because Bradford lay north of the flight path while the lights were seen to the south. Triangulation from several crews put them about 70 miles away, converging near Akron. The pilots said air traffic control had told them no three aircraft were in the area.

Smith argued the tanker and bombers would have been recognisable as four aircraft, not three lights, and called for the case to be reclassified as "UNEXPLAINED." The Air Force kept to its record. A refuelling mission was flown in the Bradford area that night.

Then Killian went quiet. Donald Keyhoe later wrote that the captain abruptly stopped arguing, and that his wife told NICAP the Air Force had instructed American Airlines to muzzle him. The claim was never established. Keyhoe used the case as his example of airline pilots being silenced. Hall's The UFO Evidence, sent to every member of Congress in 1964, gave it a full account. No photograph of the lights exists.