Santa Maria Airport Occupant Encounter

On the night of Tuesday, 21 September 1954, at approximately 22:45 local time, Vitorino Lourenço Monteiro — a civilian security guard on duty at Santa Maria Airport on Santa Maria Island in the Portuguese Azores [img:nara-airfield] — was alerted to the presence of an object by a humming or whirring sound, which he later described as similar to the noise of wind passing over wire cables or telephone lines. An oblong craft, roughly 10 feet long and 5 feet in height, descended toward the guard post. The object levelled off, hovered a few feet above the ground, and settled down approximately 30 feet from where Monteiro stood. [img:bsaa-apron] No landing gear was visible. [ref:1][ref:3]

The craft was of a light metallic blue color, its overall form likened by later investigators to a pecan nut or an American football, though without as pronounced a point at either end. A forward section of blue plexiglass-type material contained the pilot, who was seated at a slight backward slant from the vertical. Four pole-like appendages — two at each end — supported parallel aerials along the craft’s flanks. An orange light was mounted in the nose. [ref:1][ref:3]

A door in the plexiglass section opened and a man stepped out. He was blond-haired, about 5 feet 10 inches tall, and otherwise indistinguishable from an ordinary human being. He walked to within arm’s length of the guard and spoke briefly in a language Monteiro did not recognize; the Air Force report records only that “attempts to converse failed.” [ref:1] According to the Portuguese investigator’s account forwarded to the USAF, Monteiro then tried to address the visitor in French, the dominant foreign language taught in Portuguese secondary schools in that era, but the attempt was unsuccessful. After perhaps a minute of this attempted exchange, the visitor patted Monteiro on the back of the shoulder in what the guard described as a friendly gesture. [ref:3]

The headlights of an automobile then appeared at the intersection near the guard post — a junction of roads leading to the airport and to Vila do Porto, the island’s only port. The visitor broke off the encounter, returned to the craft, fastened a safety belt across his middle together with some shoulder straps, and appeared to push a button. The object rose briefly nose-up at a few degrees from horizontal, travelled a short distance, levelled off, and then accelerated almost straight upward into the night sky. The whole encounter had lasted two to three minutes. [ref:1]

The occupants of the car — passing motorists — stopped at the guard post to ask what the strange light above it had been. Monteiro told them part of what he had seen. He then decided not to report the incident to his superiors, fearing he would not be believed, but the motorists began to spread the story around the small island community. Confronted by circulating rumors the following day, Monteiro made an official report late on the 22nd. [ref:3]

The inquiry was conducted by Lt. Henrique da Costa Pessca, Commander of Santa Maria Airport. Pessca interviewed Monteiro on three consecutive days and received the same account each time. He kept a folder of witness statements and drawings in his safe, including a rough sketch of the object that he displayed to the reporting USAF officer. Asked for his personal view, Pessca said, “I personally don’t believe.” Pressed on the consistency of the guard’s detailed recollection across multiple interviews, however, he shrugged: “I don’t know; maybe it is true. It is very strange indeed.” [ref:3]

Pessca’s file was transmitted to 1st Lt. Robert D. Gammell, USAF Wing Intelligence Officer at Lajes Field on the island of Terceira, who interviewed Pessca personally. Gammell filed the case through the USAF reporting chain as IR-225-54 / AF 640037 under Air Force Regulation 200-2, the format in use from 1953 until the Condon Committee revision in 1966. The report — submitted on AF Form 112, dated 18 October 1954 and based on a 13 October investigation — was routed to Air Force Intelligence headquarters, and thence into the Project Blue Book archive, where it became case 8726899 (BBU 3224). The Blue Book evaluation was recorded as B-6, and the case was classified UNIDENTIFIED. [img:project-10073] [ref:1]

Related sightings in the Santa Maria area, September 1954

Gammell’s report included two further witnesses whose testimony was logged on the same evening:

• Mr. Correira, a Portuguese national employed by Pan American Airways at Santa Maria, reported to the Azores Air Transport Station Intelligence Office that he had been on the opposite side of the island at approximately 22:30 UTC on the same date and had seen “some strange white lights above the island.”
• Local fishermen returning to Santa Maria’s harbour at roughly the same time reported seeing “some strange lights above the field.” [ref:1]

Mr. Owen Gowman, FAA Director at Santa Maria Airport, separately told Gammell that several of his American employees had observed strange lights above the airfield during the latter part of September 1954. Gowman also personally vouched for a related sighting one week later, on 28 September 1954, when Pan American DC-6B Captain Freeman, [img:pan-am-dc6b] having departed Santa Maria at approximately 03:20 and flying at 15,000 feet under exceptionally clear conditions, sighted a large area of “abnormal brilliance” above the ocean that remained stationary as the aircraft continued toward Lisbon. Captain Freeman, an experienced transatlantic pilot, reported that the lights were “much brighter than any he has ever seen” and were emphatically not those of ships at sea. The Freeman sighting was published in the Terceira newspaper Diário Insular on 3 October 1954 and quoted in full by Bloecher. [ref:7][ref:3]

Documentary lineage

The case has travelled through the UFO literature along two parallel lines that diverge on the calendar day of the event:

• The Portuguese press / Vallée / Magonia line records the date as 20 September 1954. Its root is an article in Diário Popular (Lisbon) dated 3 October 1954, [ref:8] cited thirty-five years later in the appendix to Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia (Regnery, 1969), entry 150, p. 210. Vallée’s terse abstract gives the craft’s dimensions in metric units (3.5 m × 1.5 m), interprets the object as a disc rather than an oblong, and lists the witness as Vitorino Lourenço Monteiro — a name he supplied from a personal (unpublished) source. Downstream Magonia-tradition compilations inherit both the date and the metric dimensions from Vallée. [ref:2]
• The official reporting line records the date as 21 September 1954. Its spine is Pessca → Gammell → AFR 200-2 → Project Blue Book → HUMCAT → Hatch U → PORTUCAT → NICAP UFOCAT. Every primary document in this chain dates the event to the 21st. The witness’s name does not appear in this line at all; it enters the literature only through Vallée. [ref:1][ref:4][ref:5][ref:6]

The question was resolved by Ted Bloecher in his June 1981 MUFON UFO Journal article “UFO and Occupant at Santa Maria Airport, Azores,” the first publication of the full Air Force version. Bloecher (who, with Richard Hall, had examined the Blue Book file at the Air Force Office of History in 1974) writes directly: “So far as can be determined, there is only one published source for the Azores case: a brief abstract can be found in the Appendix of Jacques Vallée’s book, Passport To Magonia (Regnery, 1969, p. 210), where it is misdated as September 20, 1954. Vallée has identified the witness as Vitorino Lourenco Monteiro (his name is not included in the Air Force report).” [ref:3] Bloecher’s Humanoid Study Group assigned the case Serial #0252, Type B — the category for entities observed entering or exiting a UFO — and HUMCAT’s 1954 index lists it as entry 54-25. [ref:4]

Vallée’s metric measurements are not a contradiction but a unit-conversion: 3.5 m × 1.5 m = 11.5 ft × 4.9 ft, the same object as the Blue Book’s “10 feet in length by 5 feet in height,” interpreted by Vallée as a disc rather than the oblong pecan-shape described in the official report. [ref:1][ref:2] The original Portuguese-language article in Diário Popular is not currently held in the visitations.org corpus; resolving whether it preserves the “neither Portuguese nor French” language formulation in its root form remains an open question for a future research pass. [ref:8]