Encounter Atlas
On the evening of June 26, 1959, Rev. William Gill, an Australian Anglican priest running the mission at Boianai in what was then the Australian territory of Papua, said he and dozens of mission staff and villagers watched a large, glowing, disc-shaped object hovering over the sea and bay. Gill's notes describe a craft with a wide base, an upper deck and leg-like supports, a blue beam of light angled upward, and smaller lights in the sky over about four hours. On the deck, they said, figures appeared, from one up to four, moving about as if busy with some task.
The following evening the object returned. Gill said that when he and others waved, the figures on the deck waved back. He signalled with a torch, and the object seemed to swing toward them before the figures went below. Gill had previously been skeptical of flying saucer reports.
Gill's report was passed to Australian members of parliament, and a question was raised in the federal parliament. The Royal Australian Air Force interviewed Gill in December 1959, and its officer concluded the lights were probably the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars seen through moving cloud. The US Air Force's Project Blue Book also holds a New Guinea file for June–July 1959 describing a bright light with men moving on top, which it put down to misinterpreted astronomical bodies.
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek visited Boianai in 1973 and, with investigator Allan Hendry, accepted that the smaller lights could be stars and planets but argued the large object's size and steadiness ruled that out. Other suggestions include a misjudged Venus or the lights of a fishing boat. Gill did not retract his account, and the case remains one of the most cited close encounters of the third kind.