On 25 March 1968, at 8.15 pm, residents of Batulechaur in Pokhara, on the way to Mahendra Gufa, witnessed an unusual phenomenon. ‘A blazing object, flashing intermittently, accompanied by big thunder sound disintegrated over Kaski region.’ Although urbanised today, Batulechaur would have been little more than a few homes amid rice fields at the time. Pokhara itself was a sleepy town, centred around the north-south axis of Bagar to Ramkrishna Tole, the old market. The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), however, found the phenomenon interesting enough to classify it as an unidentified flying object (UFO) in a report dated 13 June 1974. Most intriguingly, the document noted that ‘a huge metallic disc-shaped object with a six-foot base and four feet in height was found in a crater at Baltichaur (sic), five miles NE of Pokhara.’
This was not the only instance of UFO spotting by the CIA in our part of the world. Although the sources have been redacted, presumably for security reasons, similar bright objects were seen in the skies above Ladakh, Thimphu, Sikkim, and Olangchung Gola and Ghunsa in the east of Nepal, where ‘a fast-moving object, long and thin, emitting red and green bright light, as bright as to cause daylight’ was seen on the night of 19 February 1968. The document covers UFO sightings between February–March 1968, during which there were seven such sightings in these areas.
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