I saw a UFO/UAP in clear daylight in the Galápagos Islands in 1971. It was March, typically calm and cloudless. We were at the Hotel Galápagos at Academy Bay, Santa Cruz Island. I was working in the office, while in the hotel lounge seven visitors stood at the long window, admiring the view of the shoreline and azure waters to the south. Their conversation went on in English, although in accents from several countries.
Abruptly they burst into a Babel of languages, all shouting at once. I ran out from the office to see what the alarm was. Instantly I saw the brilliant orange ball flying in a helical line directed a little east of south, crossing the bay and then the peninsula that forms Academy Bay. I say it was a ball, although so brilliant that there was no shading on the shape, so it appeared as a disc like the sun. Nonetheless, it was not so brilliant as to flare out the sharp circumference (limen) defining it against the clear blue sky. The color was a luminous saturated tangerine orange. The color and brilliance dimmed slightly as it went toward the horizon, presumably from attenuation through the humid tropical air.
I saw it as perfectly round. The helical flight was as if a ball were rolling tangent to an invisible line across the sky. There was no sound, no visible ionization trail or wake of any kind. It was so fast and so bright that it left a retinal afterimage of the spiral. There was an impression of a constant altitude curving overhead and down to the horizon.
It was in my sight for about four seconds until it passed beyond the horizon. I cannot estimate the size or the altitude, but the apparent diameter was like a basketball at 40 meters.
I asked all the others what they had seen. They agreed they saw it immediately as it became visible past the overhanging roof. So other than having it in sight for maybe seven seconds rather than my four, their descriptions varied not at all from mine, nor from each other’s.
Galápagos at that time was very isolated, with less than 3,000 residents spread over four islands. There was no telephone, no roads, and no regular airline service to the one airfield. The only telecommunication was a few single-sideband amateur radios. We kept a regular radio contact schedule with a friend working for NASA outside Quito, the capitol of Ecuador. I asked him if I could have seen anything going into or out of polar orbit the previous day.
He said no and explained the tracking capabilities and internal notification policies of NASA regarding conventional rockets, satellites and space-junk, and then asked what I had seen. After my description, he told me of his own identical sighting when he was stationed at Madagascar. He was readying a tracking camera to photograph a Russian satellite. With the film in the camera and his hands on the telescope, he was lucky to get a shot of what he called “the basketball”, in this case flying horizontally. Per by-the-book procedure, he sent a print to NASA headquarters with an explanation of the circumstance and a request for identification. The only reply was a terse two-word order, “Destroy negative”.
A few years later, I told the story to a young man from New Zealand. He wept, sobbing. He had seen the same thing when he was nine years old. When he told his mother, her reaction was so forceful, “...you’re crazy, you didn’t see anything...” furiously ordering him never to mention it again. He had kept it bottled until I confirmed the truth he knew.
The unimaginable gulf between us and even the nearest stars seems an impossible leap. Yet, it is often said; sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.