New Delhi Flying Club Cigar UFO

On the morning of March 15, 1951, at 10:20 a.m., George F. Floate — chief aerial engineer at the Delhi Flying Club and an aviation professional with extensive technical expertise in aircraft identification — noticed an unusual formation in the sky above the club's hangar. A large swirling white cloud mass approximately 700 feet in diameter had materialized at roughly 4,000 feet altitude over the airfield. From the periphery of this cloud, a structured metallic object emerged.

Floate described the craft as bullet-shaped, approximately 100 feet in length, and closely resembling the fuselage of a C-47 Dakota transport aircraft in profile — a comparison that, coming from a chief aircraft engineer with daily professional exposure to such aircraft, carries precise technical weight. The object was metallic and appeared to be self-luminous or highly reflective. It moved initially southward at a measured pace for approximately three minutes, then executed a loop maneuver over the airfield — a sustained, controlled flight path rather than a ballistic trajectory — before accelerating to the southwest and vanishing from view.

Floate immediately alerted other personnel at the club, and between 17 and 20 additional witnesses — including club staff and members present at the airfield — observed the object during the final portion of its flight. Total observation time across all witnesses was approximately seven minutes under clear daytime conditions, providing an unusually long sustained sighting window. Witnesses estimated the craft's velocity during its final acceleration at approximately 1,500 miles per hour — roughly three times the maximum speed of the de Havilland Vampire jet, Britain's most advanced operational fighter at the time, making the speed estimate consistent with a technology far beyond contemporary aviation.

The case was evaluated by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), which assigned it a credibility rating of 5 — the highest in their system — based on the quality of the primary witness, the number of corroborating witnesses, and the duration and conditions of observation. The United States Air Force Project Blue Book, which catalogued and assessed global UAP reports, formally classified the Delhi Flying Club incident as UNIDENTIFIED — one of the approximately 701 cases in the Blue Book catalogue that received that official designation after investigation.