R. J. Childerhose's disc photograph from an RCAF Sabre, Alberta, 1956

R. J. "Chick" Childerhose flew the F-86 Sabre for the Royal Canadian Air Force, serving from 1951 to 1956. Later biographies call him "a record holding Sabre pilot, award winning journalist, and author." His books include Wild Blue, a memoir of flying Sabres in Canada and Europe.

27 August 1956. About 7:20 in the evening, Mountain Daylight Time. A formation of four aircraft flew nearly due west at 36,000 feet over the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, near Fort Macleod, Alberta. Childerhose held the No. 2 position. Nearby rose a thunderstorm he remembered as the most intense he ever saw in North America, its cloud pillars climbing above 12 kilometres.

The sun was setting behind the mountains, hidden from view. Through a break in the clouds, far below the jets, Childerhose saw it. A bright light. Sharply defined. Disc-shaped. It sat above a lower layer of cloud, beside the thunderhead, against a dark purplish background. In his words, it was "like a shiny silver dollar sitting horizontal," and "considerably brighter than the sunlight." It hung perfectly still.

Childerhose reported the object to his flight leader. Then he photographed it through the canopy. As the formation pressed west, the light slid back along his line of sight, to eight o'clock low. Then cloud covered it. Accounts of how long it lasted range from 45 seconds to three minutes.

The result was one 35 mm Kodachrome slide, shot with a 50 mm lens. It shows a uniform white light with none of the reddening expected so close to sunset. No radar data or physical traces were ever reported, and no official RCAF investigation file has been found. Childerhose later provided an affidavit, and his private communications from 1958 to 1988 fed into the analysis that followed.

The photograph's first known publication came in 1968. Philip J. Klass printed it in UFOs Identified as support for his theory that UFOs are atmospheric plasmas. That same year, Martin D. Altschuler cited it in the Condon Committee report, in a section on ball lightning. The photo, he wrote, "seems to confirm" that ball lightning forms inside severe thunderstorms at altitude. He put the object at "at least 15 to 30 meters" across.

Bruce Maccabee disagreed. He worked through the optics of the slide and calculated an output of about 1.8 to 2.5 gigawatts if the light lay 6 km away, and 24 to 30 gigawatts at 20 km. Known ball lightning does not match that power, or a lifetime of 45 seconds or more. He also rejected a sundog, the sun reflecting off a lake, and a brightly lit cloud. The light was equally bright on its sunward and shadowed sides, and parts of it outshone the brightest cloud.

Maccabee submitted the analysis to Applied Optics in 1984. The editor rejected it, reportedly because the object could not be identified as a known phenomenon. It appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1999.

No source has accused Childerhose of faking the picture. The argument has always been about what the light was. Maccabee concluded it was a real, very bright light source that remains unidentified.

The case still circulates. Chris Rutkowski listed it among the strangest Canadian UFO reports in 2015, though his version gives a different date and a different flight. Richard F. Haines kept a folder on it, now in his papers at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. One pilot. One slide. One light over a storm.