The article below was published in the daily newspaper Var-Matin - République, France, on June 3, 1954.
New York, June 2. -- A white, disc-shaped flying object was seen about 16 km north of Boston by an American pilot, Captain Charles Kratovil, employed since 1935 by Trans World Airlines, who commands a four-engine aircraft on the Paris–New York route.
Captain Kratovil told journalists upon his arrival at New York International Airport that it could not have been a weather balloon, a radio message about which, he said, had been reported to him over the area.
"It would be the first time," he said, "that one of those devices flew against the wind."
The pilot recounted that he first saw the object flying parallel to his aircraft, then disappearing into the clouds. He asked his co-pilot to keep an eye on the sky. A few moments later, the object reappeared. The flight engineer also saw it.
It was, he said, a translucent spheroid the size of a basketball.
Alerted by radio, eight Boston control tower employees replied that they too could see it and informed the military authorities. A squadron of jet aircraft took off.
The pilot, co-pilot, and engineer of the four-engine plane saw the "object" for ten minutes.
Captain Kratovil stated that he later received two messages from military authorities. The first indicated that as the fighters approached it, the object gained altitude.
It was about 3,000 meters above them, even though they had reached 15,000 meters, and it continued climbing rapidly. The second message informed him that a weather balloon had been launched from the Crenier airbase at 4 a.m. local time and was at 10:19 a.m. above Boston Airport, having reached an altitude of 24,000 meters.
It approximately matched the description given, and its diameter was about 33 meters.
