USS Supply Aerial Phenomenon (Schofield Report)

Theoretical Alignment

This case aligns weakly with all three standard frameworks, because its own strongest candidate explanation sits outside them entirely: a natural astronomical event (a fragmenting bolide meteor) misclassified at the time, by its own witnesses, as exactly that — not as a craft. The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis draws only marginal support from the object count, formation-like arrangement, and apparent course change, none of which requires an intelligently controlled craft to explain and all of which have been argued, with real supporting physics, as artifacts of a multi-fragment meteor entry. The Interdimensional Hypothesis has essentially no purchase here; nothing in either Schofield's or Garvey's account suggests teleportation, materialization, or non-linear motion. The Psycho-Social Hypothesis earns a modest weighting not from any contactee or media-contagion pattern (impossible in 1904, decades before "flying saucer" entered public vocabulary) but from a narrower, well-documented human-factors issue: Schofield's own published account was a composite compiled from interviews conducted after he himself arrived on the bridge too late to see the objects at all, raising a genuine, sourced question about how much of the report's more striking detail (the sustained echelon spacing through a course change) reflects three excited witnesses' memories being smoothed into one official narrative rather than three independently instrumented observations.

Background

In February 1904, the U.S. Navy iron stores steamer USS Supply was three decades into a long working life. Built by William Cramp & Sons of Philadelphia (launched 1872, in service 1874) as the transatlantic liner SS Illinois, she was purchased by the Navy Department from the International Navigation Company on April 30, 1898 for $325,000 and commissioned as USS Supply under Lt. Cmdr. R. R. Ingersoll, in time to serve as the fleet's supply ship in Cuban waters during the Spanish–American War. Recommissioned on August 1, 1902 and ordered to the Asiatic Station, she served for years as a supply ship for the U.S. Asiatic Fleet and as station ship at Guam, where she was the governor's flagship, carrying provisions, coal, and personnel across a Pacific that the Navy had only recently begun to treat as a genuine strategic theater following the 1898 annexation of Guam and the Philippines. She would remain on this Pacific station for well over a decade after the 1904 sighting, finally getting underway for the United States on November 28, 1917; after transiting the Panama Canal on January 19, 1918, she arrived at the Charleston Navy Yard and was designated flagship of the Train, Atlantic Fleet, for the remainder of the First World War — a second, entirely unremarkable career chapter with no connection to this case beyond confirming that the vessel from Schofield's 1904 letter was a genuine, long-serving, extensively documented naval auxiliary rather than an obscure or hard-to-verify hulk.

Guam itself was administered not by a civilian governor but by a serving U.S. Navy officer holding the title of Naval Governor, a practice that would continue until 1950. In February 1903 that post had passed to Cmdr. William Elbridge Sewell, an 1871 Naval Academy graduate who had fought at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish–American War (earning a personal commendation from Admiral William T. Sampson) and had previously directed the Mare Island Observatory, responsible for distributing precise chronometer time to the Pacific Fleet. As governor, Sewell pushed through a genuinely substantial reform program for the island: he legalized and taxed alcohol, revised the territory's tax and legal codes, established a court system that lasted some 30 years, and restored some of the rights of the Chamorro population to practice their culture more freely. Before becoming governor he had commanded USS Supply, which served as the Guam flagship.

In January 1904 Sewell fell seriously ill with an intestinal disorder and gave up the governorship on January 11 to return to the mainland for treatment. Lt. Frank H. Schofield, then 35 and fourteen years out of the Naval Academy, served as acting Naval Governor from January 11 to January 28, 1904, after which Lt. Raymond Stone took over as acting governor until mid-May. Nothing in Schofield's record yet hinted that in 1931 he would become Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet. He sailed for San Francisco aboard USS Supply, the ship that carried Sewell home; Wikipedia's biography describes him as commanding her at the time, but no primary source consulted for this file confirms his role aboard.

The ship's exact departure date from Guam and her route east have not been confirmed from a primary source for this file; Schofield's acting term ended on January 28, so she cannot have sailed with him before then. Sewell reached California on March 1, 1904, and died there on March 17, still in office. The sighting came on the morning of February 28, roughly a day and a half before landfall, when three people on deck saw something neither the ship's log nor the Weather Bureau's journal had a ready category for.

Complete Timeline

Date	Event
Feb 1903	Cmdr. William E. Sewell, commanding officer of USS Supply, becomes the 6th U.S. Naval Governor of Guam.
Jan 11–28, 1904	Lt. Frank H. Schofield serves as acting Naval Governor of Guam after Sewell, seriously ill, gives up the post on January 11 to return to the mainland for treatment.
Jan 28, 1904	Lt. Raymond Stone takes over as acting Naval Governor.
Late Jan–Feb 1904	USS Supply carries the gravely ill Sewell toward the United States, with Schofield aboard; departure date and route not confirmed from a primary source.
Feb 28, 1904, ~6:10 a.m. (morning twilight)	The officer of the deck, then two other people on deck, see three red luminous objects near the horizon "and below the clouds," approaching from northwest by north.
Feb 28, 1904, after "over two minutes"	The objects rise above the clouds at about 45° elevation and fade at about 75° in the west-northwest. A messenger brings Schofield "an unintelligible message"; when he reaches the bridge, the objects have been obscured by cloud for about half a minute, and he does not see them.
Feb 28, 1904	The ship's log records the sighting at 6:10, in an entry Brad Sparks attributes to Garvey, giving a west-northwest bearing.
Mar 1, 1904	USS Supply reaches California with Sewell aboard.
Mar 1904	Schofield's composite report, compiled from interviews with the three witnesses, reaches the U.S. Weather Bureau.
Mar 17, 1904	Governor Sewell dies in California, still in office, about two weeks after the ship's arrival.
March 1904 (Vol. 32, No. 3)	Schofield's letter, titled "Remarkable Meteors," is published in the Weather Bureau's Monthly Weather Review.
1964	Richard Hall's NICAP compilation The UFO Evidence lists the case as an early formation sighting (“Circular UFOs maneuvered near ship”).
c. 1998–2006	Barry Greenwood, in the first issue of his UFO Historical Review, argues the objects were meteors; Bruce Maccabee replies on the UFO UpDates list that being seen below the clouds, the “soaring” and the two-minute duration argue against that; and in a December 19, 2006 evaluation posted by NICAP, Brad Sparks sets out a meteor trajectory.

The Sighting: Two to Three Minutes on the Bridge of USS Supply

The event itself, as described in Schofield's letter, unfolded quickly. At about 6:10 a.m. the officer of the deck, and then two other people on deck, saw three objects that "appeared near the horizon and below the clouds, traveling in a group from northwest by north (true) directly toward the ship. At first their angular motion was rapid and color a rather bright red." The largest led, "followed by the second in size at a distance of less than twice the diameter of the larger and then by the third in size at a similar distance from the second," and "they appeared to be traveling in echelon and so continued as long as in sight." The largest "had an apparent area of about six suns. It was egg shaped, the sharper end forward. This end was jagged in outline. The after end was regular and full in outline." The other two "were round and showed no imperfections in shape," the second about twice the size of the sun in appearance and the third about the size of the sun. An apparent area of six suns implies a diameter roughly two and a half times the sun's, about 1.2° of arc; the "about 3 degrees" figure in some summaries, and an earlier version of this page, overstates it.

"As they approached the ship they appeared to soar, passing above the clouds at an elevation of about 45 deg. After rising above the clouds their angular motion became less and less until it ceased, when they appeared to be moving directly away from the earth at an elevation of about 75 deg. and in direction west-northwest (true)." The colour "became less pronounced as the meteors gained in angular elevation," and there was no change in their relative positions and no sign of rotation or tumbling. "The clouds, in passing between the meteors and the ship completely obscured the former. Blue sky could be seen in the intervals between the clouds." Schofield estimated the clouds at "not over 1 mile high" and wrote that the objects "were in sight for over two minutes and were carefully observed by three people, whose accounts agree as to details." No one timed the sighting; Brad Sparks notes that the log gives only "6:10," a round number, and that the true duration could have been nearer one minute than two or three.

The officer of the deck "sent a messenger to me who brought an unintelligible message. When I arrived on the bridge the meteors had been obscured for about one-half minute." As the letter reads, Schofield did not see the objects at all. His authority over the case rests on his role as the officer who, immediately afterward, questioned the three witnesses and wrote up the result in sober language for a scientific readership. He was also struck by what they described: "The near approach of these meteors to the surface and the subsequent flight away from the surface appear to be most remarkable," and "that they did come below the clouds and soar instead of continuing their southeasterly course is also equally certain."

Lt. Schofield's Composite Report and the Garvey Discrepancy

Brad Sparks's evaluation of the case, posted by NICAP on December 19, 2006, draws a distinction between two documents: Schofield's composite letter and an entry in the ship's deck log that Sparks attributes to an officer named Garvey. Sparks writes that "Schofield says the meteors were seen near the horizon in the NNW and disappeared in the WNW at about 75 degs elevation. But Garvey's log says they were seen in the WNW, saying nothing about the NNW," and that the log "only says 6:10." This file has not seen the log itself, and the sources consulted do not say whether Garvey was the officer of the deck (who would normally have written the entry) or another officer.

This is exactly the kind of small, honest discrepancy expected between two independent human accounts of a brief, startling event witnessed under time pressure and excitement — not, on its own, evidence that either man fabricated anything. But it matters for how confidently a modern researcher can reconstruct the objects' precise geometric path, since the north-northwest starting bearing is central to at least one detailed skeptical trajectory analysis of the case. It also means that the log entry and the letter, both written aboard within days, agree on the event's basic character, with the disagreement confined to direction and detail.

A Voyage of Mercy: Governor Sewell and the Race to San Francisco

The sighting's surrounding context is not incidental color; it explains why Supply was in this patch of ocean on this date. Governor Sewell's intestinal illness was serious enough that he gave up the governorship on January 11 and was taken to the mainland aboard the ship he had once commanded, a voyage of several thousand miles for a ship designed for about 9.5 knots. The February 28 sighting came about a day and a half before she reached California on March 1. Sewell died on March 17, 1904, still technically in office. His daughters, Helen Sewell and Marjorie Sewell Cautley, became, respectively, a noted children's book illustrator and a landscape architect — a detail with no bearing on the sighting, but one that shows how well documented the people around this minor 1904 voyage are.

The immediate practical consequence for the case file is this: neither Schofield nor any other officer aboard Supply that morning had any reason to embellish, dramatize, or invent an aerial phenomenon. The ship's attention in late February 1904 was on a gravely ill governor, not on the sky. Whatever the three witnesses saw, they saw it as an unplanned, unwelcome distraction from a genuinely grim voyage — a circumstance that, if anything, argues against any motive for fabrication, while doing nothing to settle what the lights actually were.

Publication in the Monthly Weather Review

Monthly Weather Review was, by 1904, already more than three decades old as an American scientific institution. It began publication in January 1873 (with issues later extended back to cover the federal government's fiscal year from July 1872), initially produced under the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which held responsibility for national weather observation in the journal's earliest years. In 1891, that mission — along with the journal itself — transferred to the newly created Weather Bureau under the Department of Agriculture, where it remained until well into the 20th century (NOAA took over publication in 1970, before the American Meteorological Society assumed ownership in 1974, the arrangement that continues today). Long before 1904, the journal had established a practice, common across serious scientific periodicals of the era, of soliciting and publishing short observational letters from credentialed outside contributors — ship captains, military officers, amateur astronomers — as a form of distributed citizen-science data collection, particularly for transient phenomena like bright meteors ("bolides") that professional observatories could rarely catch by chance. Cataloging fireball sightings from scattered, non-professional but trained observers was a genuine, unglamorous but scientifically legitimate 19th- and early-20th-century research activity, feeding into contemporary efforts to understand meteor streams, atmospheric entry physics, and (much later) the broader question of near-Earth object populations.

The journal's editor at the time was Cleveland Abbe, the pioneering American meteorologist sometimes called the country's first professional weather forecaster and a founding figure of the U.S. Weather Bureau itself. It would have been Abbe's own editorial desk that received, evaluated, and set Schofield's letter for the March 1904 issue — meaning the report passed through the judgment of a serious, professionally-trained scientist before it ever reached print, rather than an uncritical wire-service rewrite or a magazine editor with no scientific background.

Schofield's letter fits squarely within that genre, and its title — "Remarkable Meteors" — is not incidental framing added later by researchers; it reflects how Schofield and, by extension, the journal's editors themselves classified the phenomenon at the time of publication. This is one of the case's most important and most frequently underappreciated features: nobody involved in 1904 described the objects as a craft, an airship, or anything artificial, even though Schofield thought their behaviour "most remarkable." The word "meteors" appears in the letter's own title, submitted for a readership of working meteorologists, not offered to a sensational press or a ufological audience — because no such audience yet existed. The reinterpretation of this case as a UFO sighting is entirely a later, retrospective act of 20th-century ufology, performed by researchers working backward from a scientific journal archive rather than forward from a contemporary "unidentified flying object" report.

Rediscovery: From Meteor Footnote to Pre-Roswell Case File

The 1904 letter sat, essentially unremarked, in the bound volumes of a specialist weather journal for decades. Its second life as a UFO case began only once organized American ufology — NICAP prominent among the early groups doing this kind of historical-archive work; Richard Hall's NICAP compilation The UFO Evidence (1964) listed it as one of the earliest formation cases — began deliberately searching pre-1947 scientific and newspaper literature for anomalous aerial reports that predated the "flying saucer" era, seeking to establish that the phenomenon (whatever it was) had a documented history stretching back well before Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting popularized the modern term. Jacques Vallee's long-running project of cataloging historical aerial anomalies, culminating decades later in Wonders in the Sky (co-authored with Chris Aubeck), reflects the same broader research tradition, even though that particular volume's own scope ends at 1879, just before this case. Within that pre-Roswell-hunting tradition, the USS Supply letter stood out for a specific, unusually strong reason: unlike most "old" anomaly reports, which survive only as secondhand newspaper paraphrase or folkloric retelling, this one is a primary document — an officer's own contemporaneous letter in a scientific journal, with a named, later-distinguished author, describing three witnesses and specific details (apparent size, duration, bearing, elevation). That combination of qualities is precisely why the case keeps recurring in serious ufological literature even a century later, and precisely why it has also attracted the kind of detailed, competing technical re-analysis (discussed fully below) that thinner, less specific reports never receive.

Key Witnesses

The letter's account rests on the testimony of the officer of the deck and "two other people on deck," who, Schofield wrote, "carefully observed" the objects and "whose accounts agree as to details." None of the three is named in any source located for this case file.

The Five Observables Assessment

The Five Observables framework is applied to the performance characteristics reported in this case:

Assessment: No instrumented lift, acceleration, or velocity data exists for this case — radar, FLIR, and modern tracking systems were decades in the future in 1904, and the only sensors available were the trained but unaided human eye and a magnetic compass. The reported course change (a "soaring" climb through cloud after a period of level approach) is the closest analog to Instant Acceleration or Hypersonic behavior in the record, but it is described as occurring over many seconds to roughly a minute, not instantaneously, and it is exactly the feature that Brad Sparks's meteor analysis treats as an optical illusion: fragments burning out and shrinking look as if they are moving away, and in his model they in fact fell almost vertically and were hidden by cloud. Low Observability and Trans-Medium travel are simply not applicable or not reported; nothing in either witness account describes the objects disappearing from radar (none existed to disappear from) or transitioning between air, water, or space.

Evidence Assessment

Why "Disputed"

This case earns a Disputed stamp because it sits at a genuine, still-unresolved fault line between two credible, technically-argued positions, rather than because the underlying testimony is weak. On the corroboration side, it compares favorably to many far more famous cases: three witnesses whose accounts, Schofield wrote, agreed in detail, a log entry made aboard, and a compiling author whose subsequent career — rising to command of the entire United States Fleet — is about as strong a credibility signal as a 122-year-old case can offer. Weighed against that is the plain fact that the report's own author and its own original publication venue classified the phenomenon as meteoric, not anomalous, and that meteor explanations by Barry Greenwood and Brad Sparks account for the reported geometry with real physical plausibility, Sparks reading the "below the clouds" wording as "below the angular elevation" of the clouds, since the clouds "completely obscured" the objects. Yet that meteor account has not gone unanswered: physicist and UFO researcher Bruce Maccabee's rebuttal raises specific, unresolved objections — the multi-minute duration, the sustained echelon spacing through an apparent course change — that no subsequent researcher on either side of the debate has cleanly closed. Add to this the total absence of any physical evidence or instrumentation (unavoidable for the era), the discrepancy between Schofield's letter and the log entry, and the fact that Schofield's authority rests on compiling others' testimony rather than on his own observation, and the result is a case that is neither confidently explained nor confidently anomalous — the textbook definition of Disputed.

Sensor & Instrumentation Detection Profile

No instrumented sensor of any kind — radar, camera, spectrograph, or otherwise — existed aboard a 1904 Navy stores ship, and none captured any part of this event. The only recording "instruments" available were the trained human eye, the ship's compass (Schofield gives true bearings), and the ship's clock for the logged time; the duration was an unaided estimate. It is worth noting, as a point of institutional context rather than direct evidence, that precise maritime timekeeping was itself a serious, recently-modernized Navy discipline in this exact period: Governor Sewell's own prior posting had been directing the Mare Island Observatory's chronometer-distribution service for the entire Pacific Fleet, though that background has no direct bearing on how this event was logged, and the sighting's directions and timings remain unaided human estimates.

Environmental & Geospatial Context

The sighting occurred over open ocean, roughly a day and a half's steaming from San Francisco (the ship's position is not given in the sources consulted), with a broken cloud deck reported at an estimated ceiling of around one mile and genuine blue sky visible through the gaps — conditions consistent with typical late-February North Pacific weather along the shipping lane between Hawaii and California, and unremarkable in themselves. No storm activity, fog, or other unusual meteorological event is reported in any source consulted. At about 6:10 a.m. the Sun was roughly 6° below the horizon (civil twilight) and the Moon, about 90% illuminated, had set in the west-northwest (NASA JPL Horizons, for an assumed 39.7°N, 128.3°W). No major annual meteor shower has a recorded peak near February 28; this is not evidence against the meteor hypothesis, since the great majority of large, dramatic bolide fireballs recorded throughout history are "sporadic" meteors unconnected to any named annual shower, entering the atmosphere from essentially random directions at essentially random times. The vessel's position, roughly a day and a half's steaming from San Francisco, places the sighting on a Pacific steamship route to California, though no other vessel or independent corroborating sighting from a different ship is recorded for this date.

Observer Credibility & Occupational Profile

The first witness was the ship's officer of the deck, standing a formal watch; the other two are described only as "two other people on deck" — still a materially different credibility profile from a random civilian sighting. Naval watchstanding of this era already required basic training in estimating bearings, distances, and durations for navigational and lookout purposes, and the Officer of the Deck bore direct professional responsibility for accurately logging anything unusual observed during a watch. Lt. Schofield's own subsequent career provides the case's single strongest credibility data point: a Naval Academy graduate who went on to serve as executive officer of USS Hawk during the Spanish–American War, later commanded the destroyer USS Perry and the battleship USS Texas, served on the Navy's General Board, headed the War Plans Division of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (1926–1929), the office responsible for the Navy's interwar planning, including War Plan Orange for a potential Pacific war against Japan, was promoted to Rear Admiral in 1924, and ultimately served as Commander-in-Chief, Battle Force (1930) and then Commander-in-Chief of the entire United States Fleet in 1931–1932 — at the time, the single highest active seagoing command in the U.S. Navy. He was awarded the Navy Cross for his World War I service on the staff of the commander of U.S. Naval Forces in European Waters and for his Peace Commission work, retired in 1933 after 47 years of total service, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. This is not the record of a man given to careless or sensational reporting; if anything, it argues that whatever Schofield wrote down in 1904, he wrote down carefully.

Garvey's individual credentials cannot be assessed beyond Sparks's identification of him as the author of a log entry, since no source consulted preserves his first name, rank, role that morning or later career. This is a genuine documentary gap, honestly reported rather than filled in with invented biographical detail. The officer of the deck and the two others likewise remain unnamed; the officer of the deck's status as an on-duty watchstander is a modest positive credibility signal.

Physical & Material Assays

No physical trace evidence of any kind was collected, reported, or is known to exist for this case — unsurprising for a distant, brief, over-water sighting from a moving vessel in 1904, decades before any systematic UFO physical-evidence collection protocol existed. There is nothing to test, and no claim in any source consulted suggests otherwise. See Material Analysis below for a fuller discussion of what this absence does and does not imply.

Historical Precedents & Archive Matches

The USS Supply sighting sits in an unusual gap in the broader history of American aerial-phenomena reporting. It postdates the famous 1896–97 "Great Airship Wave" — a much larger, more culturally prominent episode of mystery cigar-shaped "airship" reports across the American Midwest and West, chronicled in detail by UFO historian Loren Gross — by roughly seven years, and it predates the pre-World War I "phantom airship" or "scareship" waves that would sweep Britain and continental Europe between roughly 1909 and 1913 by half a decade. Unlike either of those episodes, which were driven substantially by newspaper sensationalism, hoaxes, and a cultural fascination with the still-hypothetical technology of powered flight, the USS Supply case was never reported to a general audience at all in 1904; it appeared only in a specialist scientific journal, framed entirely as a meteor observation, and reached a wider public only decades later through deliberate ufological archive research. This makes it a genuinely different kind of historical artifact than the tabloid-driven airship reports of the same general period — a data point that argues, if anything, against treating all "pre-Roswell" aerial reports as belonging to one undifferentiated cultural phenomenon.

Within this site's own catalog, the case's closest analogs are two other credentialed-military, contested-conventional-explanation cases: the Thomas Mantell Crash (1948), in which a trained Air National Guard pilot died pursuing an unidentified object later attributed, with real but incomplete supporting evidence, to a Skyhook balloon; and The Foo Fighters (1944), in which multiple Allied aircrews independently reported small, maneuvering lights that remain formally unexplained. All three cases share a structural pattern this site has documented repeatedly: a credentialed military observer, a sober contemporaneous document, no surviving physical evidence, and a conventional explanation that is plausible without being conclusively proven.

Material Analysis

There is no physical or trace material evidence associated with this case — no recovered fragment, no soil or seawater sample, no metallurgical or spectrographic assay of any kind. The only "material" artifact the case produces is documentary: Schofield's published letter and the ship's own deck log entry. That absence is itself informative, and cuts in a specific direction depending on which hypothesis one favors. If the objects were genuinely artificial craft engaged in some kind of maneuver, the total absence of any debris, radar contact, or subsequent corroborating report from any other vessel along a busy shipping corridor is a real evidentiary gap. If the objects were, as their own witnesses believed, a fragmenting meteor, then the complete absence of any recovered meteorite fragment is entirely unremarkable — the overwhelming majority of even large, bright fireball events observed from the ground (or from a ship, with no ability to search a debris field on the ocean floor) never yield a recovered specimen, since most either burn up completely or fall into inaccessible or unsearched terrain, and a mid-ocean impact site would be functionally unrecoverable by any 1904-era or, frankly, modern technology.

The Conventional Explanation Candidate: Bolide Meteor Fragmentation

The leading, and effectively only seriously argued, conventional explanation for this case is that the three lights were a single large meteor breaking up in the upper atmosphere — a "bolide." It is the explanation the report's own author reached for first, before any UFO framework existed. Barry Greenwood argued it in the first issue of his UFO Historical Review: the objects only appeared to be "below the clouds" because they were first seen at a great distance near the horizon and only through gaps in the cloud; their red colour came from atmospheric reddening at low elevation and faded as they climbed in the sky; a single meteor can break into three; meteors do not always leave trains; and very long fireballs are known (he cited a 100-second fireball in 1972). Brad Sparks's 2006 evaluation adds a simple model: a meteor broken into three parts appears near the horizon at about 60 miles altitude some 700 miles away and approaches "almost directly headon" at a "very slow" 10 miles per second, so its angular elevation rises even as it drops in height; it slows, falls almost vertically while burning out "after about 70 seconds visibility," and is last seen at about 75° elevation, perhaps 10 miles away and 40 miles high. On this reading the "echelon" is simply three fragments on parallel paths, the apparent "soaring" is the illusion of burning-out fragments shrinking, and the sighting ended when clouds hid them. Sparks argues that the key phrase "below the clouds" means below the clouds' angular elevation, since Schofield also wrote that the clouds "completely obscured" the objects.

The Duration and Trajectory Objections

This explanation has not gone unchallenged. Physicist and longtime UFO researcher Bruce Maccabee, a U.S. Navy research physicist by profession, replied to Greenwood on the UFO UpDates list that three things in the report sit badly with meteors: the claim that the objects "did come below the clouds," estimated at about a mile high; the statement that they "did soar instead of continuing their southeasterly course"; and the duration of "over two minutes." He read the report as describing objects that travelled roughly horizontally below the clouds toward the ship, then climbed through the cloud layer and moved away at a constant elevation of about 75°, and noted that Greenwood himself had conceded that objects truly below the cloud cover would be unlikely to be meteors unless they had impacted nearby. Long-duration fireballs do occur, but a two-minute bolide would be exceptional, and the sustained near-horizontal approach below the clouds, if taken literally, is a very different picture from a meteor's brief streak.

The two sides read the same sentences differently. Maccabee notes that Schofield's "moving directly away from the earth" cannot be taken literally, since a radial departure would put the objects at 90° elevation rather than 75°; he reads the phrase as a steady climb away from the ship. Sparks argues that Schofield's own words undercut the climb: Schofield "implies they disappeared due to this 'soaring' away but belies that impression when he states that 'when I arrived on the bridge the meteors had been obscured for about one-half minute,'" so the objects were last lost behind cloud, not seen rising out of sight. Sparks, who has argued elsewhere that many UFO reports have no reasonable conventional explanation, concludes of this one: "But not here." Neither writer had access to the witnesses, and both are working from the same short letter and a log entry, which is why the case remains Disputed rather than resolved.

Human Factors: What the Compiled Account Can and Cannot Tell Us

A second, independent consideration cuts across both the meteor and the anomaly readings without fully resolving either. Because Schofield's own published account was compiled from witness interviews conducted after the fact — rather than from his own continuous, direct observation of the full event — some portion of the report's most specific, physically-loaded detail (the precisely maintained echelon spacing through an apparent course change, the exact elevation angle of disappearance) necessarily passed through the imperfect filter of excited memory, verbal recounting, and one officer's editorial compilation before reaching print. This does not mean the sighting was invented or the details fabricated; Schofield wrote that the three witnesses' accounts "agree as to details," which argues against wholesale confabulation. But it does mean that a modern researcher attempting to reconstruct the objects' precise geometry to the degree of confidence either the meteor hypothesis or a genuine-anomaly reading would require is working with secondhand, retrospectively-compiled testimony for the majority of the event's duration, not a continuous instrumented or even continuously-observed record — a real, honest limitation on how far any conclusion, in either direction, can be pushed.

Related Cases

Further Reading — Recommended Literature

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Essential Viewing

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A reasonable search turned up no video content genuinely, primarily dedicated to this specific 1904 case from a reputable source. The results found were either low-effort, generically-narrated clickbait channels that do not meet this site's video-sourcing standard, or broad multi-decade "pre-Roswell" compilation videos that are not primarily about this specific case. For a case this obscure and this old, the absence of quality dedicated video coverage is an honest and unsurprising outcome rather than a gap in research effort.

Sources

• Schofield, Frank H. "Remarkable Meteors" (letter). Monthly Weather Review, Vol. 32, No. 3 (March 1904), p. 125. journals.ametsoc.org
• American Meteorological Society. Monthly Weather Review, Volume 32, Issue 3 (1904) — journal issue archive. journals.ametsoc.org
• Sparks, Brad. "Evaluation: Feb 28, 1904 USS Supply case," December 19, 2006, posted by NICAP as "1904 Feb 28 USS Supply." nicap.org
• Maccabee, Bruce. "The USS Supply Sighting of 1904" (from UFO UpDates, Toronto), reproducing the text of Schofield's letter and summarizing Barry Greenwood's UFO Historical Review argument, via Netowne.com. netowne.com
• Stronghold Nation. "The USS 'Supply' Sighting." UFO Case Studies. stronghold-nation.com
• Alien Hub forum. "Remarkable Meteors?... No UFO's.!!" (discussion thread quoting and summarizing Brad Sparks' case evaluation). alienhub.com
• UFO Evidence. "Formation of round UFOs maneuver near ship in 1904 — Pacific Ocean off San Francisco, California." Case 640. ufoevidence.org
• Wikipedia. "Frank Herman Schofield." en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia. "USS Supply (1873)." en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia. "William Elbridge Sewell." en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia. "Monthly Weather Review." en.wikipedia.org
• MacAlpine, Richard S. "The Schofield Letters – Yates County's Admiral." Life in the Finger Lakes. lifeinthefingerlakes.com
• Naval History and Heritage Command. "Supply II (Supply Ship)." Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. history.navy.mil
• National Archives. "Navy Deck Logs Available in the National Archives Catalog." archives.gov
• TIME. "Army & Navy: Schofield for Chase" (on Schofield's 1931 appointment as Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet). content.time.com
• Wikimedia Commons. "File:USS Supply 1873 in dock.jpg" (U.S. Navy photograph, August 1902, public domain). commons.wikimedia.org
• Greenwood, Barry. Article on the USS Supply sighting, UFO Historical Review, no. 1 (c. 1998), as summarized by Maccabee (above). Not read directly.
• Hall, Richard (ed.). The UFO Evidence (NICAP, 1964), “1904: Circular UFOs Maneuvered Near Ship,” as reproduced by UFO Evidence (case 640, above).
• Vallee, Jacques & Aubeck, Chris. Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2010. (General historical-catalog methodology context.)
• Gross, Loren E. The UFO Wave of 1896. Fremont, CA: self-published, 1974. (Comparative context for the preceding American "airship wave.")
• Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1998. (General reference cross-check.)
• NASA JPL Horizons, Sun and Moon observer ephemerides for an assumed 39.7°N, 128.3°W, February 28, 1904, 14:30–15:30 UTC (queried October 2026).

Corrections (October 2026)

A fact-check against the text of Schofield's letter (as reproduced by Bruce Maccabee), Brad Sparks's 2006 evaluation and Richard Hall's 1964 summary found that the earlier version of this page misdescribed the sighting and its witnesses. It placed the event in the evening; Hall and Sparks give 6:10 a.m., and Horizons puts the Sun about 6° below the horizon then. It counted five witnesses, including Schofield and Garvey as corroborating officers; the letter names three observers, Schofield says he arrived after the objects had been obscured for half a minute and so did not see them, and Garvey is known only as the author of a log entry cited by Sparks. It described the lead object as "pear-shaped, broad end forward" with a "sharp point and ragged edge," and as about 3° across; the letter says "the sharper end forward," "jagged in outline," with an apparent area of six suns, about 1.2° across. It described Sparks's model as fragments receding away from the ship; in his model they approached head-on and fell almost vertically, hidden by cloud.

Following this review, the rating was changed from Disputed 46 to Disputed 40 (October 27, 2026), because the higher rating had rested partly on claims corrected or removed above.

Other corrections: the account of Governor Sewell's illness has been corrected (he gave up office on January 11 and did not "resume" it; he died on March 17, 1904; Mare Island hospital, the January 29 departure and the Honolulu coaling dates could not be confirmed and have been removed); the claim that SS Illinois carried Russian Jewish refugees in 1882, Guam's "first telegraph cable" credit, the "later that year" USS Perry command, the TIME quotation and the "principal architect of War Plan Orange" description could not be verified and have been removed or softened; the position "300 nmi WNW of San Francisco" is now marked as an assumption; Barry Greenwood's meteor argument and the dates of the Greenwood, Maccabee and Sparks exchanges have been added; and the hand-calculated Moon phase (92%) is replaced by a JPL Horizons value (about 90%).