Cloudy with a Chance of Saucers

At 12:35pm on Tuesday, 7 November 1950, three witnesses encountered a very strange cloud while travelling together from Bantry to Berehaven, in County Cork.

The witnesses were Captain W J Kelly, Marine Superintendent of the Irish Lighthouse Service; Mr T J Hegarty, of the Department of Industry and Commerce; and Mr W A Allen, of the Irish Lights Commission.

The sky was clear, and at a “fairly high altitude” they could see an object that was dark blue with a green-yellow centre. At first they thought it was a cloud, but it was moving very quickly.

Later, Captain Kelly was asked if it was a flying saucer. “I can’t of course be sure. Normally I would have taken it as a cloud phenomenon, but because of its speed and colours it put me in doubt; and because of the unusual interest and reports about ‘flying saucers’ recently, we naturally took a keener interest in it.

Three weeks later, Ireland had its own Roswell event, when a strange object, believed to be a flying saucer, crashed in a field in Corravilla, Bailieborough, County Cavan.

Like Roswell, the flying saucer rumours were soon scotched. According to gardaí, the object was a radiosonde  - the business end of a weather balloon - belonging to the British Meteorological Office.

There were no subsequent reports of a second crash site, military requests for small coffins, missing nurses …

Sources:

The Irish Times, 10 November 1950 and 28 November 1950