The Moroccan UFO and King Hassan II's Request to the United States

September 1976. The telephones were ringing at Morocco's Royal Gendarmerie. The calls came from Agadir, the Marrakech area, Kalaa-Sraghna, Essaouira, Casablanca, Rabat, Kenitra, Meknes and the Fez region. These places were hundreds of kilometres apart. Every caller described the same thing.

It was the night of 18 to 19 September, between 0100 and 0200 hours. Some saw "a type of silver colored luminous flattened ball (disc-shaped)." Others saw "a large luminous tube-shaped object." It gave off intermittent trails of bright sparks and fragments. Observers put it at about 1,000 meters. And there was "absolutely no sound from the UFO."

Major Mohamed Lissaoui of the Royal Gendarmerie saw it himself at about 01:15, on his way back from Kenitra. It was flying parallel to the coast "at a relatively slow speed, as if it were an aircraft preparing to land." At first it looked like a disc. As it came closer, it became a luminous tube. Several witnesses made drawings. Lissaoui was one of them.

On 23 September, Col. Housni Benslimane, Commander of the Royal Gendarmerie, met the American Ambassador. He came at the request of King Hassan II, who was personally interested. Did the United States have any information? The reports, Benslimane said, were "remarkably similar." The next day Lissaoui briefed the U.S. defense attaché and let him see the drawings.

The Ambassador's cable, RABAT 5209, was signed "ANDERSON." It ended on a candid note. "I frankly do not know what to make of these sightings, although I find intriguing the similarity of descriptions reported from widely dispersed locations."

On 5 October 1976, the State Department replied under the name of Henry Kissinger. The reply said it was "difficult to offer any definitive explanation." It cited the 1969 study by the Condon Committee. It knew of no US aircraft or satellite activity in the area. "There is no USG agency studying this matter." It warned that witnesses usually guess heights too low. It compared the event to an August 1972 fireball over Alberta. It leaned towards a spectacular meteor. Or, given the slow speed, the silence and the burning fragments, "a decaying satellite part, of which there is no precise re-entry record."

The story came back decades later. On 5 October 2012, the Canadian amateur satellite tracker Ted Molczan posted his findings to the SeeSat-L mailing list. He matched the sightings to object 1976-074C. It was a motor assembly of about 700 kg, cast off by the Soviet rocket that put Molniya 1-35 into orbit. Decay calculations suggested it came down in the early hours of 19 September. Its track ran southwest to northeast along the coast. From all eight Moroccan locations it would have been well above the horizon. James Oberg's case summary credits two amateur satellite trackers with solving the case.

In 2013 WikiLeaks published the cables and the story spread worldwide. Foreign Policy, Le Desk, CNews and Yabiladi all covered it. Some retellings claimed the King himself had seen the object. The cable never says so. Others tied the object to the Tehran UFO incident, which happened the same night. What remains is a rare moment in the record. A monarch. A Gendarmerie flooded with reports. And an American ambassador who admitted he did not know what to make of it.