USS Supply — Lt. Schofield Official UAP Report

On February 28, 1904, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Frank H. Schofield filed an official report describing an encounter with three luminous objects that he and other crew members of the USS Supply observed in the North Pacific, approximately 300 miles west of San Francisco. The report was subsequently published in the Monthly Weather Review, a peer-reviewed government scientific journal — making it one of the earliest UAP accounts to appear in scientific literature and one of the most credentialed historical UAP cases on record.

Schofield, who would later rise to become Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet — the highest naval command in the Pacific — described three bright red objects flying in echelon formation below the clouds. He observed them for several minutes as they approached the ship from the horizon. The objects ascended into the clouds, briefly disappeared, then re-emerged above the cloud layer, ascending to an estimated altitude of several miles before disappearing from view.

The behavior Schofield described — objects flying in controlled formation, deliberately ascending through clouds, continuing to ascend above cloud layer — is inconsistent with meteor activity, ball lightning, or the atmospheric optical phenomena routinely invoked to explain 19th and early 20th century unusual aerial reports. The formation flying specifically implies coordinated, controlled movement rather than the independent trajectories of natural phenomena.

The Monthly Weather Review publication was significant because it subjected Schofield's account to the editorial standards of a scientific publication, lending it a credibility distinct from newspaper reports or personal memoirs. The journal's editors apparently found the account detailed and credible enough to publish without editorial skepticism. Schofield's subsequent career — rising to four-star admiral and Pacific Fleet command — suggests he was not a fanciful observer prone to misidentification or exaggeration.

The USS Supply case is frequently cited as a foundational document in the history of UAP investigation because it demonstrates that professional military officers filing formal reports through official channels were documenting encounters with unidentified objects more than four decades before the modern flying saucer era began in 1947.