From Bill to Gill to Hill: Part Two--Gill.

"Gill" is the second step in the [symbolical] sequence of mainline UFOlogical hypotheses. It is representative of the claim that the technological aerial manifestations are associated [at least sometimes] with occupants, and that these occupants have a humanoid form. The illustration above recreates the main scene of the second of three nights in June 1959 when Father William Gill [an Anglican missionary] and 38 of his local associates saw a hovering disk and humanoids standing atop it. Though the painting above is as of daylight, the Sun had set and the light was dimming--in fifteen minutes it was close to what we would refer to as dark. Also, this painting is, as far as I can tell, oriented towards the ENE, whereas the sighting would have been [for the main object] towards the WNW---think of the painting as being like one of those photo illustrations that you see sometimes where the printer got the negative backwards. [at least this is what I think I am looking at]. It has some small relevance because some people have tried to get rid of this case by saying it was of astronomical bodies [you can guess who]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the summer of 1959, Father Norman Cruttwell [also an Anglican missionary ] was becoming interested in UFOs. [Cruttwell is pictured to the left]. He had begun getting reports from all manner of people along the coast of Papua/New Guinea of things from strange lights [often called "Tilley Lamps" in imitation of a hand-carried lantern of that day] on up to discoid objects. He collected these and tried to plot them on a map [see to left] in hopes of preserving the data, and maybe finding something out. We owe Cruttwell for giving us what would probably have been lost evidence of a localized miniwave occurring in a very isolated part of the world [who knows how many others of this type there have been?] Because the cases were fascinating, Cruttwell asked his friends to watch out for them and tell him when they heard of a new one. One of those friends was Bill Gill. Gill didn't think that there was anything to these things initially, and responded skeptically to a claim of a "wrong-way sputnik" by a friend [Dr, Ken Huston] at a dinner earlier in the year. He himself saw a "Tilley Lamp" light which shouldn't have been where it was, but also wrote that off. Then his main associate at the mission, Stephen Gill Moi, told him that he had seen a disk. [Everyone remarks about the similarity of Moi's middle name with Gill's. Moi was named after a famous man in the area some many years previously, as were many Papuans. He got his middle name long before Bill Gill arrived on the scene. Gill's own name is apparently a real coincidence, as he was not related to the former individual].----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What Moi saw was a disk out over the sea in the vicinity of the mission. No one else is reported as having witnessed it. Moi's crude drawing is at the top of the left paper as seen in Norman Cruttwell's notes. It is meant to represent a hovering disk with "persons" on its top surface, and projections sticking downwards. [The next drawing down is Moi's drawing of the disk from the famous sighting with Gill and the others, and, as you can tell, Stephen feels that it was the same or an identical object]. Bill Gill, still doubtful at this time, took down Stephen's report and sent it first to another missionary, David Durie, and then to Cruttwell. He listed the Tilley Lamps reports that had come to him, and then wondered if Stephen's "disk" might be just the subconscious mind filling in details which weren't there. He signed the letter "Doubting William". --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------That mindstate didn't last long. One day after he had composed his letter, "Moi's disk" showed up over the beach to the WNW of the mission, and Gill and many others saw it for themselves. Gill's drawing of that object is the lower right object in the collage to the left. What everyone ignores about this encounter is that there was a fairly comprehensive low cloud cover this first night, and the object would go up into the clouds and come back down through. As it did so, you could see the base of the clouds illuminated by the object's glow. The thing finally dropped down low enough so that the details sketched could be seen. It looked pale yellow or orange, and the outlines of the "men" were determinable. A narrow blue beam shot up at a 45-degree angle. When that beam was turned off, the "men" went out-of-sight and the disk rose through the clouds. The thing appeared again about an hour and a half later, looking the same but with the addition of bright "light panels". The projecting "legs" were then seen to number four. Smaller UFOs seemed scattered about as well, one of which was directly overhead. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It was the next night that "they" waved. This time Gill's medical assistant saw the object and ran to get Gill out to see. It was about in the same location. Four humanoid figures were again on top of the craft. They seemed to be working on something. Gill waved at them [he may have done this with a flashlight initially, as that was the custom to signal to a boat offshore---Gill was still of the opinion that this object somehow had to be an American flying machine with military onboard]. A figure waved back. A local named Ananias waved two hands, and two of the humanoids waved back. Then both Gill and Ananias waved, and all of the humanoids waved back. As it got darker, a flashlight was used to signal a series of dots and dashes. The craft seemed to respond to this also by wig-waggling in the air. Some coming and going went on on deck, and the blue beam flashed twice. As it seemed obvious that the occupants were not going to land, and having watched the action for an hour with nothing more happening [and remembering that Gill thought that this was probably American] Gill went inside to eat dinner and then to celebrate Evensong Services. After the church services, the UFO was gone.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The next evening, a UFO was seen further to the south but quite high. Three other small lights were seen as well "like tiny pretty things" which seemed to come and go. Whether these third night things were legit UFOs or not is not too relevant to the previous two evenings but they could have been a swansong.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gill's [and the 38 others] sightings were reported by Cruttwell to the newspapers. Gill himself had said to his friends that he had become much changed in his views after thinking over the events of those evenings, and now was seriously contemplating Cruttwell's "visitation" theory [i.e. the ETH]. The newspapers were happy to publicize the story. Australian UFO researchers went to Gill's Australian residence [he was just transferring when the events happened] and got another set of interviews. Finally the RAAF created a file on the incidents. The papers were impressed with Gill's qualities, so were the UFO researchers and the government. Most people ignored the native Papuans, although Cruttwell did not, and Gill had asked them to sign a paper briefly describing what they had seen. With all the testimony, and with the character of Gill, the only way around the case was to find some kinds of mistaken identity type alter-explanations. The RAAF tried first but, although they felt they might write off the "little UFOs" as mistaken stars or planets, the big disk with the people was far beyond that. The RAAF essentially gave up. Gill, with a fair amount of reluctance, gave several interviews and talks about the events and steadfastly refused to speculate about the ultimate nature of the objects that he and his associates had seen. He also refused to allow patently wrong debunking "explanations" to stand, feeling that neither position was an appropriately honest theory. He was always happy to answer a specific question about the encounters, even from irritating persons like Menzel. To his death, Gill remained cooperative, conservative, civilized, and intelligent. We couldn't have asked for a better guy.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To make this a truly multi-witnessed case, one needs to really interview the local population that participated rather than just say that they did. [this happens all the time in UFO research: writers claim that a case is multi-witnessed when in fact all information comes from just one person]. Fortunately, the Papuans were interviewed by both Cruttwell and later by Allen Hynek. [This shows how impressed Hynek was by the case--a trip to Papua to interview locals is quite a commitment]. I have no direct transcripts of Cruttwell's work in my files, but I do have some of Hynek's. It's quite hilarious in a way. Hynek tries through an interpreter [Ananias] to quiz the folks about this case and others in true western professorial style---they have no idea what he's talking about. It took Hynek forever to understand that they were talking about several different cases, and that he had to be very specific. [there were people pointing in all different directions when he'd ask them where they saw the UFO.] [Also he didn't take in that with a moving UFO they would point to where they saw it first; which would differ with different witnesses]. Speed meant nothing. When Hynek tried to get a duration by trying to get them to slowly draw their finger across the sky, they just went whoosh in the air. Finally he began to get it and determined that they were all talking sense afterall, and it was him that was screwing the works up. Thankfully, the picture emerges that what they signed the original paper [for Gill] about was essentially confirmed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cruttwell did a longer term and better job of following up on a variety of things: talking to the main witnesses [Daisy and Annie, I think their names were, above; plus Ananias, Louie, Montaigne--and, I assume Stephen]. He took photos of the area, and tried to picture Bill Gill's method of estimating the sizes. Gill asked Ananias or someone like him to walk along the beach until he presented to Gill's eye the approximate size of the figures that they'd seen on-board. Assuming that Ananias was approximately the same height as the humanoids [yes, a guess, but not an unclever one] he could get a crude guess at the distance the UFO was away at its closest. That guesstimate was 300-500 feet away---a figure if anywhere at all in the ballpark makes for a very close astronomical body indeed. At that point, one needs to defeat the entire story practically to have any chance of debunking it. At a minimum one needs to say that no "men" existed and no "waving" happened. Menzel of course felt that he was easily up to the task. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Menzel and later Klass [in cruder "Klass-less" ways] began by slurring the witnesses. Gill had terrible vision Menzel said and spent the whole hour forgetting to put his glasses on. Yep. That surely happened. The "natives" were "children" psychologically and worshipped the "great white father" and would agree to anything he said---Gill laughed at that. Although they got along well, he said that it was far more likely that they'd agree with nothing he said on such a matter. Stephen was a Gill worshipper, as he even named himself after him---we've seen the error of that already. Gill was a whacko in that he stopped watching [after an hour] and left for dinner and church services---Klass could not imagine such a thing [I can easily imagine Klass lacking imagination, especially when it comes to a clergyman wanting to get dinner before presenting his church service.] Klass, then decided [and he stands precisely alone in this among any allegedly serious investigators] that Gill was in fact a liar. He made it all up to "please" Cruttwell. Well, one need not honor such garbage with any more commentary. The only semi-intelligent attempts to debunk the case have been Menzelian-style astro-smeared-out-mistakes. Venus is of course our object of choice, but the Menzels of the world have tried several other planets as well. As you can see from the illustration: James McDonald tried his hand at seeing if any of that could make sense, and found "no". Menzel decided that Gill must have had little discontinuities on his eyelashes which fooled him into believing that he was seeing little men waving at him. There was really no shame too great for Menzel to come up with. Weirdly Allen Hynek tried his best Menzel on this too [strongly aided by Allan Hendry, who rarely believed in anything despite being "analyst" of CUFOS] and thought that all the little UFOs could be explained, but, grudgingly, not the big one. Exactly why this was even approached this way, given sighting details and low cloud cover boggles me, but I guess if you're a scared-to-death academic you have to do even the absurd to dare to speak about it later. The bottom line is: There have been no explanations. Recently, a modern debunker has tried to resuscitate the old magnified mirage of the rump end of a brilliantly lighted squid boat as his own new idea. Pathetic bunk of a desperate mind. The disk was at thirty degrees elevation and higher. The miraged boatsmen saw the Papuans and responsively waved. What are these guys talking about? What motivates them? They are terribly afraid, but of what?------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Below is one of the covers of the IURs of CUFOS in 1977 which reviewed the Boianai case. Despite Hendry and Hynek's occasional loss of common sense, they are pretty good issues and even admit that the big disk with the guys on top is unassailable. McDonald of course saw the same thing. In his interview with Gill, during his Aussie trip, Big Mac found out that the whole outline of the disk, including the occupants, had a dark area around it, which had a glow around the outside of that--as if the object had a field of some kind separating it from the space around it. This field/glow changed shape with the movement of the humanoids, maintaining its distance outlining all the elements associated with the craft. Very high strangeness stuff, and my favorite case of our whole pile of encounters.