The Kuwait Oil-Field UFO Wave: Umm al-Aish, 1978

Autumn 1978. In the desert north of Kuwait City lay the fields of the Kuwait Oil Company. At Umm al-Aish stood a satellite earth station, built in 1969. It was the first satellite ground station in the Middle East. Across the Gulf, the Iranian Revolution was under way.

The night of Thursday 9 to Friday 10 November 1978. Oil-company technicians near a pumping station at Umm al-Aish watched an object come down. Accounts differ on how many men were there. The MUFON UFO Journal spoke of seven Kuwait Oil Company technicians, including one American. The French paper Le Méridional cited the Kuwaiti dailies Al-Qabas and Al-Watan and counted four employees, including an American citizen.

What they described was enormous. As big as a jumbo jet. In one telling it was cylindrical, with a huge dome and a flashing red light. In another it was discoidal, with a retractable front landing gear and a kind of cupola on top, from which a red light shone. It stayed for seven minutes.

While it sat there, all telephone calls and radio in the area were cut. An electrically operated pumping station near the landing site stopped working. A senior Kuwait Oil Company official later told American diplomats what happened. When the object appeared, the pumping system automatically shut itself down. When it vanished, the system started itself up again. The object took off vertically and at vertiginous speed.

The sightings did not stop. On 21 November another object was reported over the Al Sabriyah field near the Iraqi border. Photographs said to have been taken that day were reportedly examined but never released. In January 1979 the Arab Times printed a photo of an object over Kuwait City. Photographer Ali Shash took pictures too, and one eyewitness said he watched it from his window facing the Qadsia stadium.

The Government of Kuwait set up an investigating committee from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. It counted eight sightings from November 9 to December 14. Its report, released on 20 January 1979, rejected the notion that the objects were espionage devices. Committee representative Ratib Abu Id said the scientists did not know enough about the phenomena to say with certainty that they were not spacecraft. The committee urged the government to protect Kuwait's air space, territory and oil resources. At a press conference on 23 January it admitted it was "groping in the dark." The report never addressed the pumps.

On 29 January 1979 the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait cabled Washington: "'UFO' SIGHTINGS CAUSE SECURITY CONCERN IN KUWAIT." The cable noted that Kuwait's air defence system had been closed down for the night during the northern incidents. A KISR marine biologist, P. G. Jacob, passed information to MUFON, and Richard Hall wrote up the case for its journal.

No hoax has ever been alleged. The embassy cable recorded speculation about helicopters or hovercraft bringing refugees or money out of beleaguered Iran. No technical study of the pump shutdown was ever published, and the KISR report itself has not surfaced. Later retellings drifted. Some moved the date to 1970. Others relocated the landing to a television station. The press report of 13 November 1978 and the embassy cable still hold the core of the account in place.

In Kuwait the case is remembered as the first UFO sighting in the Arab world. The MUFON journal carried it under the cover stamp "Arabs Report First UFO in Kuwait." Like the 1976 Tehran UFO incident, it survives in American diplomatic cables.