26–27 June 1959 / T078
Father William Gill’s Boianai sightings
Boianai mission, Papua, then an Australian-administered territory
Witness account
Anglican missionary William Gill and people at the Boianai mission reported bright objects on successive evenings. Gill described a principal object with figures on an upper surface; on the second evening he and others believed the figures responded to their waving. His account initially treated the figures as possibly human operators of an unfamiliar terrestrial machine.
Public record
Contemporaneous notes and later interviews provide a stronger record than a narrative first recalled decades afterward. Bill Chalker’s investigation describes a group of up to 38 observers, but that total does not mean every person independently recorded every feature.