On New Year’s Day, 1957, a white light appeared from the west and flew beneath 1st Lt. Ted Brunson’s aircraft while he was flying over open ocean near Guam.

Brunson, a member of the 41st Fighter-Inteceptor Squadron at Andersen Air Force Base, gave chase.

“He pursued the light; he went after it,” said Ty Brunson, the pilot’s son, in a recent interview.

During the pursuit, Ty Brunson said, his father inverted the aircraft to ensure the light was real and not just a reflection off the plane’s canopy.

“That was a negative; it was definitely an object out there,” said the younger Brunson.

Despite his efforts, Ted Brunson couldn’t catch the mysterious object. He put his plane, an F-86D Sabre, into afterburner, giving the plane some extra thrust. Even then, it wasn’t enough.

“As he thought he was closing in on it, he said the light began to run circles around him,” Ty Brunson said.

Ted Brunson continued to maneuver his plane in an effort to catch the mystery craft, to no avail.

That was surprising, his son said, given that the F-86D Sabre “was about the fastest thing in the sky that the Air Force or anybody had at the time.”

“So whatever this was, he said, was extremely fast. Way beyond our technology,” said his son.

Ty Brunson said his father told him there weren’t any other aircraft that he knew of in the sky at the time, certainly not anything that could perform with the speed and agility of the light.

“He said it would do circles around him and then go over and above and below and circle him the opposite way, just kind of toying with him,” said Ty Brunson.

Eventually, the pilot started running low on fuel and a call made to base for backup was denied. Ted Brunson broke off and returned to the base.

There’s little reason to doubt the pilot made up the story. The Air Force called Ted Brunson “very reliable” in a report submitted to Project Blue Book, which collected 12,618 reports of UFO sightings from 1947 to 1969.

For each sighting, the Air Force created a file and each file ended with a specific conclusion about what the witness likely saw, be it a meteor, aircraft or, in some cases, birds.

Only 701 cases — just over 5 percent — were classified as “unidentified,” according to a report by the Air Force Times.

Ted Brunson’s was one of them.

“I think it was pretty cool,” said Ty Brunson. “My father was an extremely honest person. I mean very, very, very honest.”

Not unheard of

Though strange, reports of UFO sightings in Guam aren’t entirely unheard of.

At The Black Vault website, UFO enthusiast John Greenewald has posted a treasure trove of files related to unidentified flying object reports, collected through decades of Freedom of Information Act requests filed with federal authorities, the Air Force Times reported.

Among the site’s 1,600 pages received from the FBI are two pages referring to a 1947 sighting in Guam.

The report, “Reports of flying discs” was sent to the FBI director from the special agent in charge at the agency’s office in San Francisco.

“Enclosed for your information are copies of two letters from Lt. Col. (redacted) … with attachments reporting the sighting of ‘flying discs’ on Guam,” the report said.

The attachment reports “unidentified flying objects,” seen by three enlisted men of the 147th Airways and Air Communications Service Squadron at Harmon Field.

“The men report that at (10:40 a.m.) on Aug. 14, 1947, the two objects, which they describe as small, crescent shaped and traveling at a speed twice that of a fighter plane, passed over them on a zig-zag course in a westerly direction and approximate altitude of 1,200 feet,” the report states.

The report went on to state that the objects disappeared into some clouds and, a few seconds later, re-emerged before proceeding west.

Making headlines

Reports of UFO sightings aren’t limited to cryptic government documents either. From at least 1979 to 1990, sightings made newspaper headlines in Guam.

“Police hunt UFO,” read one Pacific Daily News headline from 1980.

In that case, the newspaper reported officers being assigned to observe a UFO seen over Mt. Santa Rosa in Yigo for several days. Two days later, the end of the quest for answers was reported with what some might consider a less-than-satisfactory headline: “UFO a star.”

Ten years later, a “mysterious blue light” was “reported by dozens,” another article stated.

Two days later, an Air Force spokesman said the light was a missile from California. The next day, though, a second spokesman from the same base said such a missile would only appear as a “tiny speck,” not a streak across the sky.

One year after that, in 1991, a “sky light” appeared above the eastern horizon one night before it “just, like, blew up,” according to one witness.

A NASA official in Hawaii theorized the light was a large meteor breaking up as it entered the atmosphere.

Cigar-shaped light

Finally, there was the case of Sgt. Andrew Anderson, a police officer on patrol in Dededo on Feb 15, 1988.

While driving alone near the War Dog Cemetery entrance on Route 1, something caught his eye in the distance, hovering over the vicinity of the Guam International Airport. It was a light, bluish-white in color, roughly five to six miles away and about 500 feet in the air.

“And I saw that light,” he said in a recent interview. “A cigar-shaped, blue light.”

Anderson said he was used to seeing planes taking off and landing, but this was different. This light, he said, simply hovered there, stationary. It was strange enough for Anderson to call the radio dispatcher and ask whether any “unusual activity” had been reported above the airport.

The airport, he said, told him there was nothing according to their radar.

Meanwhile, the light was drifting side to side.

“It sort of moved a little left, a little right. And that already goes against the natural course of an airplane,” Anderson said. “It just hovered. And I don’t know what it was, I can’t say what it was.”

Anderson kept his eyes on the light as it continued hovering for 20 to 30 seconds.

“And then just ‘poof!’” he said. “Did I just see that that thing just take off?”

“It just went out,” he added, his hand darting upward, “shot up.”

Career at risk

When Anderson returned to the precinct, the duty lieutenant had heard about the sighting and asked the sergeant if what he reported was true.

“I said ‘Of course!’” Anderson said. “I’m not gonna make things up. We report exactly what we see and we don’t lie about anything.”

Making up a police report, he said, would mean termination and possible prosecution.

“It’s not a joke,” he said.

That’s similar to how Ted Brunson felt, according to his son, who said even mentioning UFOs can put a pilot’s career at risk.

“In a sense, you were kind of risking your career making mention of something like that,” he said.

Anderson added that he was wide awake at the time he had his encounter.

“In fact, it made me even wider awake,” he said, laughing. “And I wish somebody was with me. They would’ve seen the same thing and they would’ve reported the same thing.”

As to why he made a police report out of it, Anderson said it was his job.

“It was something that was very unusual,” he said. “It would be just like unusual if a store was closed and you see a light pass through the window. You don’t ignore it. That’s what I do as an investigator. You document things you see and note it.”

No speculation

For that same reason, he said, he didn’t speculate or make any opinions about what the light might have been.

“That’s not what I do,” he said. “I leave it up to the professionals to do their investigation. I can’t speculate on what it was.”

That’s a trait he shares with Ted Brunson, who, his son said, took a very matter-of-fact approach to recounting his experience.

“I would ask him all the time, just kinda jokingly ‘Was it a flying saucer? Were there like Martians in it or something like that?’ Just kinda teasing around with him about it and he would get pretty serious,” Ty Brunson said.

“When I asked him what it was he would just say ‘It was a UFO. It was a UFO,’ that’s all he would say. He never said that it was a flying saucer or that there was any kind of life-form on the inside,” Ty Brunson said. “He just stated that it seemed to be intelligent and it was a UFO.”

Ty Brunson also said he doesn’t speculate about what the light was.

“As far as I know, it was just a flashing light,” he said. “I believe it was what he said it was: a flashing light.”

Lingering mysteries

The strange lights reported in Guam over the years might forever remain a mystery.

Andersen Air Force Base, when contacted, said they “don’t have a subject matter expert” about UFOs in Guam. They did, however, provide an extract from the 3d (CQ not 3rd) Air Division History — 36th Wing Archives.

The excerpt refers to a notice received in Nov. 18, 1959, of an unidentified flying object sighted by “numerous personnel at Andersen Air Force Base, and other sections of Guam,” according to the report.

It came from the northwest traveling southeast about 35,000 feet in the air before disappearing from view. Witnesses described the object as “circular or spherical and tapered off at the trailing edge.”

It made no sound, but appeared blue-green in color, changing to orange-yellow. The report ends the same as many others seem to end.

“The true nature of the object was not determined.”