Frank Smythe UFO Sighting — Mount Everest

On June 1, 1933, British mountaineer Frank Smythe was making a solo attempt on the upper reaches of Mount Everest as part of the 1933 British Mount Everest Expedition, one of the most celebrated prewar Himalayan endeavors. At approximately 28,000 feet — an altitude at which hallucination due to hypoxia is a legitimate confounding factor — Smythe noticed two objects hovering in the sky above the Himalayan peaks.

Smythe described the objects as pulsating and roughly pear-shaped or balloon-like, moving in a way that distinguished them from any meteorological phenomenon he recognized. He was an experienced mountaineer and expedition photographer with multiple Himalayan climbs to his name, not prone to fanciful reporting. He documented the sighting in his expedition account and later wrote about it in his published memoir, identifying the objects as something genuinely anomalous.

The sighting occurred during daylight, and Smythe was using his camera at or around the time of the observation. The location on the Himalayan plateau places it in one of the highest and most remote observation points accessible to humans in the 1930s, where the thin atmosphere and extreme altitude produce conditions unlike anywhere else on Earth.

Modern assessors debate whether the extreme hypoxic conditions at 28,000 feet without supplemental oxygen could produce the kind of structured visual phenomena Smythe described. His account is nonetheless taken seriously as an early example of what Jacques Vallée and others have identified as the Himalayan UAP corridor — an area with a disproportionate historical density of anomalous aerial observations, later corroborated by Indian Army and CIA-linked reports from Ladakh and Sikkim in subsequent decades.