Two Lights Beside a TAP Airliner: The Angola UFO Airgram, 1966
Passengers and crew of a TAP flight from Beira to Luanda said two glowing objects 'escorted' their plane until just before landing. The U.S. Consulate relayed the press reports and the airline's sceptical verdict.
What this record is
This is a one-page unclassified Department of State airgram, A-53, from the American Consulate in Luanda, Angola, dated 23 December 1966. It went to the Department’s science office (SCI), with a copy to the Embassy in Lisbon, and carries an instruction to pass it to OCSAF, the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Its subject line is “Unidentified Flying Objects Reported Over Angola.” Like the other State Department airgrams in this series, it survives in the National Security Agency’s files. The consulate’s information came entirely from the local press. The airgram contains no official investigation by American officials.
What it says
The consulate reports that over the weekend of 10 December the Luanda press carried stories of a possible sighting of two “flying saucers.” The witnesses were the passengers and crew of a Transportes Aéreos Portugueses (TAP) flight from Beira, Mozambique, to Luanda on 7 December. According to the press accounts, a passenger noticed objects that seemed to be “escorting” the plane when it was about 20 minutes out of Luanda. The passenger told the captain, Comandante Maia, who looked for himself and then reported the sighting to Luanda control tower. The captain told reporters after landing that the tower had informed him “there was no traffic in the area at the time.” The occupants reportedly kept watching the objects until the aircraft was about one minute from touchdown, and then the objects vanished.
The airgram is frank about the quality of the reporting. The description of the objects in the local press “was admittedly vague,” and several witnesses, including the captain, blamed this on the objects’ high speed and manoeuvrability and their distance from the plane. The captain’s only other reported comment was that he had “indeed seen ‘two lights at the side of my aircraft.’” Other statements, which the consulate notes were unattributed, said the objects gave off an orange glow and “continually manuvered in swift dives and climbs” while accompanying the airliner.
The last paragraph reports the airline’s reaction. On 13 December the local press reported that TAP headquarters in Lisbon had issued a statement. Citing the company’s “preliminary investigation based on the captain’s report,” it concluded that “there is no reason to consider that the phenomena observed constitute demonstrable proof of flying objects.”
Context
The airgram is a good example of how American posts overseas handled UFO stories in the mid-1960s. They were not asked to investigate. They passed on what was in the local papers, including any official comment, to the science office in Washington and, in this case, to the Air Force, which was still running Project Blue Book at the time. Other examples from the same series include the Buenos Aires report on Antarctica and the Montevideo eclipse slides.
On the substance, the account is thin. Two lights that pace an aircraft, seem to dive and climb, and vanish as the plane descends could be bright planets or stars seen through a moving cabin window, reflections, or other aircraft that the tower did not know about. The timing of the approach and the direction of the lights are not given, so none of these can be tested. The one named witness, the captain, reported only lights. The more dramatic manoeuvres came from unnamed sources, and the airline decided the sighting proved nothing.
Status
Unexplained but weakly documented. The record consists of press reports relayed by a consulate, the airline’s own negative conclusion, and no follow-up in the file. It was unclassified from the start and reached the National Archives in 2025 with the rest of the NSA series.
Sources
- National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/596347909
- PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/580103959/457UAP00012_released.pdf
- Series: Records from the National Security Agency Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/580103959
- National Archives, Record Group 615 UAP records: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615