The New Delhi Flying Club Cigar

March 1951. The US Air Force's UFO project was called Project Grudge. The name Project Blue Book was still a year away.

In New Delhi, the Delhi Flying Club had been at work since 1928. Its home was Safdarjung Aerodrome, once known as Willingdon Airfield. The people in its hangar spent their days around aircraft.

Thursday, 15 March 1951. About 10:20 in the morning, though one account gives 9:50. George F. Floate, the club's chief aerial engineer, was near the hangar with two assistants. Above them, at about 4,000 feet, a swirly white cloud appeared.

Then the cloud stretched. From its edge came a bullet-shaped object. It looked metallic. Its diameter was similar to the fuselage of a C-47. A page of the Air Force file carries the line: "It was about one hundred feet long." The three men called out to the hangar. Between 17 and 20 more people came out to watch. Later retellings speak of 25 members of the flying club.

The object flew north to south, trailing white exhaust. For about three minutes it held its course. Then it pulled into a large loop. At the top it was out of sight. On the way down it reappeared. It recovered to level flight and headed southwest. When it accelerated, the white exhaust turned black. The witnesses judged its speed at three times the cruising speed of a British Vampire jet. About 1,000 mph. Seven minutes after it began, it was gone.

The sighting reached the US Air Force as an Air Intelligence Information Report. The file, later part of the Project Blue Book records, holds a Project 10073 record card, a communication from Fournet at AFOIN-2B3, and the report itself. Its evaluation: Unidentified.

The case went into Don Berliner's list of unexplained Blue Book cases, credited to the FUFOR Index. NICAP labels it BBU 908, a number that appears to come from Brad Sparks' catalogue of Blue Book unknowns. NICAP also files it among its "Top Shelf Witnesses" and classes it as a Daylight Disc under J. Allen Hynek's system. No record of an Indian government or Indian Air Force inquiry has come to light.

No one has published a conventional explanation. No one has questioned the witnesses' honesty. What has shifted is the story itself. One retelling raises the speed to nearly 1,500 mph. Later articles have the object "hovering in the sky". The earliest accounts describe no hovering at all, only a cloud that seemed to hang in the air. Even the figure of 700 feet wanders. NICAP gives it as the length of the visible trail. Another account makes it the width of the cloud.

The case lives on in catalogues and round-ups. The Black Vault and Wikipedia's page on UFO sightings in India both carry it. Indian round-ups list it beside the Manbhum sighting of 1954 and a 1947 report from Nayagarh. The original scans sit on Fold3 and in a NICAP PDF, and no one has yet transcribed them in full. Until someone does, the metallic cigar over a Delhi hangar remains what the Air Force called it. Unidentified.