The USAT Delarof Sphere, Aleutian Islands (1945)

The Delarof was not a warship. She was built as the SS Mohinkis and delivered to the U.S. Shipping Board in April 1920. In 1929 the Alaska Packers Association bought her and renamed her Delarof.

In June 1942 she evacuated Unangax̂ (Aleut) residents of the Pribilof Islands to Funter Bay. On 3 July 1942 the War Shipping Administration chartered her and assigned her to the War Department. NICAP later wrote that she "had been hauling munitions and supplies to Alaska."

It was 1945. The Delarof had passed Adak and was heading back to Seattle across open sea. The seas were fairly heavy and the winds were strong. The ship was rolling about 10 degrees. It was around sunset.

Robert S. Crawford, an Army radioman, was on the port side near the radio room. He heard shouts from some of the crew. He turned. A large round object had just emerged from the sea, about a mile from the ship.

It was a dark sphere, showing darkly against the setting sun. Crawford compared it with the width of a finger held at arm's length and estimated it at 150 to 250 feet in diameter. It climbed almost straight up for a few moments. Then it arced into level flight and began to circle the ship. It went around two or three times, moving smoothly and with no audible sound. Crawford put its speed at about 100 mph, similar to a small aircraft.

The object was in easy range of the ship's guns. The gun crews were on tight alert, but they held their fire. After several minutes it disappeared to the south or south-southwest. Three flashes of light followed.

All the witnesses felt the object was self-propelled. In winds that strong, they reasoned, anything drifting would have been visibly pushed off course. According to NICAP, 14 crewmen signed a summary when the ship reached Seattle. One catalogue says the group included the Naval gun crew, Army personnel and merchant marine crew. The captain kept the alert in force for that sector. Nothing else happened.

No military inquiry is known. The sighting came before Project Sign or Project Blue Book existed. Years later Crawford, by then a student at the University of North Dakota, told the story to Prof. N. N. Kohanowski of the Geology Department, an adviser to NICAP. In 1967 James E. McDonald of the University of Arizona interviewed him. By 1968 Crawford was a consulting geologist in Griffith, Indiana. That March, NICAP's UFO Investigator published the account and called it the most detailed of its ocean-related cases. The signed crew summary has never been found.

At first, according to one catalogue, the gun crew took the object for a balloon released for target practice. A check found that no balloon had been reported released. The witnesses ruled out anything carried by the wind. No later commentator has offered a specific explanation, and no hoax claim has surfaced. Doubts remain all the same. The account comes from one man, given long after the event. Depending on the source, the date is March, summer or July 1945.

Jacques Vallée listed the sighting as Case 54 in the Magonia catalogue of Passport to Magonia (1969): 14 sailors watching a dark sphere rise out of the ocean and circle their ship. Ivan T. Sanderson retold it in Invisible Residents (1970). It remains one of the earliest well-documented reports of an object leaving the water. A NICAP typescript of 1945 accounts that includes Crawford's is held at the University of Wyoming's American Heritage Center.