On 5 June 1977, the Straits Times published a report which recorded the claims of two people who believed they saw a UFO flying over Bukit Timah on 31 May that year. The two of them were a university lecturer and a Secondary Four student. The report also printed an account from an aircraft passenger to support the claims of the two eyewitnesses.
The university lecturer (who declined to be named) said that she was driving along Bukit Timah Road at around 8:45pm when she saw a fairly large and somewhat rectangular object with its long axis horizontal. She saw two broad beams of very bright light. On either side was a small light, one side green and the other side red.
According to the lecturer, a small lighted object was ejected from the large object. The small object moved downwards for about six seconds before it went out of sight. The large bright object then disappeared from the sky.
The visitor from Kuala Lumpur, a Miss E. Navarednam, was traveling on SQ 111. The plane could not leave as another plane was leaving. While her flight reascended, Miss Navarednam saw a very bright object. She thought that this was another plane. The sighting took place at around 7:45pm.
The Secondary Four student, a Y.H. Tan, was traveling along Bukit Timah Road, just opposite the Farrer Road junction, saw a bright, stationary object in the sky. There were two parallel streaks of bright light emitting from it. The time of this sighting was about 8:40pm.
The Straits Times contacted the airport control tower spokesman who said that there was heavy air traffic during that time and they spotted nothing peculiar.
Using the university lecturer's description, I asked ChatGPT to generate an image. It looks like a gigantic smartphone being charged in the sky!
The writer of this article was not mentioned. I wonder how the journalist knew about these sightings? How did the journalist manage to collate accounts from three very different sources? Why did the editor decide to print this story?
To my knowledge, this is the only article that the Straits Times ever printed about a UFO-sighting alleged to take place in Singapore. If you are aware of any other such story, please let me know.
So what should we make of this long-forgotten alleged UFO sighting over Bukit Timah? There are a few possibilities. Perhaps the three of them were hallucinating or perhaps they saw some natural or man-made phenomena and their minds interpreted it as a UFO sighting. The seventies saw a proliferation of many UFO movies and perhaps the influence of such movies caused them to see what they saw as a UFO sighting.
Of course there is also the possibility that these three eyewitnesses did observe some extra-terrestrial visitation. Only those with impoverished imaginations can assume that earthlings are the only ones who inhabit the immeasurable immensity of the universe.
Just a few months after the alleged sighting of a UFO over Bukit Timah, NASA launched the Voyager spacecrafts, two space probes that was sent to study the outer solar system. The space probes contain two identical gold records meant to communicate with possible aliens. Perhaps in tens of thousands of years to come, these Earth-made probes will be perceived as UFOs by the inhabitants of another galaxy.
Lee Yue Heng (05/01/2025)