THINK ABOUTIT UFO | UAP SIGHTING REPORT

1951: Newfoundland, Canada Sighting

CROSS-REFERENCE — DUPLICATE ENTRY.

This is the same event as the canonical report: 1951: UFO Sighting Over the North Atlantic (Cmdr. Graham Bethune / Navy R5D). See that page for the full treatment.

This entry and the North Atlantic report describe one and the same encounter — the February 10, 1951 near-collision between a U.S. Navy R5D transport and a large glowing disc over the open Atlantic west of Greenland, witnessed by Navy pilot Graham E. Bethune and his fellow airmen. The two pages grew from different source chains and so differ in small details, but the date, the pilot, the flight, the 300-foot reddish-orange disc, the near-collision, and the Wright-Patterson follow-up are identical. To avoid logging a single sighting as two separate events, the full report is consolidated on the North Atlantic page, and this page is retained as a cross-reference for readers browsing by Canadian / Newfoundland location.

The unique details this entry contributed, preserved here for the record:

Date: February 10, 1951

Reported Position: About 49–50° N, 50–03° W, roughly 90 miles (150 km) west of Gander, Newfoundland, out over the Atlantic; aircraft on a course of 230° true

Aircraft / Unit: U.S. Navy, Atlantic–Continental Air Transport Squadron One, NAS Patuxent River, Maryland; outbound from Keflavik, Iceland

Flight Number Note: This entry gives “Flight 125”; Bethune’s own account and the canonical entry give Flight 124. The discrepancy is unresolved; Flight 124 is the figure the witness used

Radar Note: This entry attributes the radar tracking to “DEW Line ground radar at Goose Bay, Labrador,” within five miles of the aircraft; the canonical entry cites Gander tracking in excess of 1,800 mph. Both are secondhand. Note also that the DEW Line was not built until 1954–57, so the “DEW Line” label cannot be literally correct for a 1951 detection — the ground-radar correlation is real in substance, but the naming in the source is anachronistic

Object: Circular, reddish-orange on its perimeter, at least 300 feet in diameter; first seen as a glow 1,000–1,500 ft above the water, observed 4–5 minutes before the crew alerted the others, then closed at an estimated speed over 1,000 mph before reversing course and departing

Source: Dominique Weinstein, Aircraft/UFO Encounters Catalog (Special Report #2, Canadian East Coast Cases), via Don Ledger; Timothy Good, “Above Top Secret” (1988); Larry Hatch, “U” UFO Database; the case also appears (under the pseudonym “George Benton”) in Keyhoe, “Aliens From Space” and “Flying Saucers: Top Secret”

Annotated drawing: The cockpit-sequence sketch on this page is by Graham Bethune and is the same witness drawing reproduced on the canonical entry

Case Status: See canonical entry — Unexplained