Flying Saucers Reach Newfoundland
For a brief stretch of 1947, flying saucers were all anybody could talk about. For about two weeks in the early summer, it seemed earth had become the destination for interplanetary tourists. Flying saucers were being seen everywhere.
Across North America, South America, Europe and Asia people were looking to the skies and seeing things they couldn’t explain.
Then on July 8th, 1947 they didn’t have to look to the sky anymore — according to information received from the Army Air Force base in Roswell, New Mexico, the U.S. military had recovered a flying saucer that had crashed near the town.
The UFO craze reached a fevered pitch.
Roswell Daily Record., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Flying Saucers in Grand Falls
The day after the Roswell story broke, Constable Eric Kearsey was sitting on his porch in Grand Falls-Windsor with his wife and their friend, John Jackman. At around 10:30 that night — though some reports say it was closer to 11:30 — the three of them noticed something strange moving overhead: four glowing objects racing across the sky at tremendous speed.
Daily News, July 11, 1947, MUN DAI
Kearsey later said they looked like large, circular pieces of tin burning through the darkness. The objects flew in close formation with a strange dipping motion, casting a brilliant yellowish light as they travelled eastward. The sight left the witnesses frozen in place, staring upward in disbelief. Watching them, Kearsey admitted, “made me a little awe-struck.”
Then, about ten minutes later, while the group was still trying to make sense of what they had seen, another object crossed the sky. It looked much like the first four, though Kearsey described it as being about the size — or perhaps the shape — of a barrel head.
Whatever it was, he insisted it wasn’t a shooting star.
Kearsey seemed cautious about jumping to conclusions. His companion, John Jackman, was not.
Speaking to the Grand Falls Advertiser, Jackman gave an even more vivid description of the objects. They weren’t perfectly circular, he said. They rounded at the front and tapered slightly at the back, they resembled glowing teardrops, blazing orange against the night sky. From the narrow end glowed a light Jackman described as “heavenly.”
“...messengers sent out from some other planet”
The objects travelled side-by-side in a single horizontal line, moving with what Jackman described as a “waddling” motion. Their strange rhythm reminded him of ships propelled by alternating blasts, or a skater pushing first from one foot and then the other.
Adding to the mystery, reports of unidentified flying objects had also come out of Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, roughly an hour earlier that same evening.
To Jackman, there was no chance the objects were man-made.
As the Advertiser dramatically summarized, he believed they were “messengers sent out from some other planet whose inhabitants had beaten us to the punch in the hard-fought battle to conquer space — out of this world, in other words.”
Flying saucer, July 7, 1947, photographed by William A. Rhodes in Phoenix, AZ. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Flying Saucer Craze Burns Out
The story of the Grand Falls flying saucers spread quickly through newspapers across the island and even caught the attention of Reuters, which remarked that the saucers had now completed a “tour of the world,” with sightings reported in Japan, Holland, Chile, Britain, and Newfoundland.
Evening Telegram, July 11, 1947, MUN DAI
Across the island, people began spending their evenings staring into the night sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of something unusual.
In Grand Falls, the Advertiser claimed that “flying saucers have been seen by different people practically every night since — always between 11 and 11:30 p.m.”
But like most crazes, the flying saucer frenzy of 1947 eventually faded. People stopped scanning the heavens and the sightings slowly dwindled away. The dramatic report from Roswell, New Mexico — claiming the Army Air Force had recovered a crashed “flying disc” — was soon retracted and replaced with an explanation that the debris had come from an unmanned weather balloon. Decades later, it was revealed that the weather balloon story was a cover for a secret military intelligence project.
As for what Kearsey and Jackman saw… Well, that’s as much a mystery in 2026 as it was in 1947.
Whatever the truth may be, the summer of 1947 permanently changed popular culture and the way people thought about extraterrestrial life. Flying saucers were no longer just science fiction — they leapt off the comic book page and into the public imagination for good.
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Mystery Objects Over Grand Falls, Daily News, July 11, 1947
Flying Saucers Causing Curiosity, Evening Telegram, July 11, 1947
New Light on Flying Saucers, Grand Falls Advertiser, July 19, 1947
Flying Saucers Seen Here, Grand Falls Advertiser, July 12, 1947
Flying Saucer, Western Star, July 18, 1947
Flying Saucers Seen Over Grand Falls, Fisherman’s Advocate, July 12, 1947
Plenty of Flying Saucers at Grand Falls, Sunday Herald, August 10, 1947
Roswell Incident, Britannica
1947 Flying Disc Craze, Wikipedia
Just one day after the Roswell UFO incident made headlines, four glowing objects streaked across the skies over Grand Falls, Newfoundland and Labrador — sparking local fears that Earth might have more extraterrestrial visitors.