UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (12 page)

The FAA and United Airlines at first denied having any information about the incident, but both had to acknowledge the sighting when a tape of a United supervisor’s call to the air traffic control tower was released by the FAA.

I have listened to those tapes.

“Hey, did you see a flying disc out by C17?” asked the supervisor, giving her name as Sue. Laughter is audible from tower operator Dave and a second person nearby. “That’s what a pilot in the ramp area at C17 told us,” she continues. “They saw some flying disc above them. But we can’t see above us.” The laughter continues nervously, and Dave replies, “Hey, you guys been celebrating the holidays or anything, or what? You’re celebrating Christmas today? I haven’t seen anything, Sue, and if I did I wouldn’t admit to it. No, I have not seen any flying disc at gate C17.”

About fifteen minutes later, Sue calls back again, this time reaching operator Dwight. The conversation is as follows:

Sue: “This is Sue from United.” (laughter)

Tower: “Yes.” (serious tone)

(12 second pause)

S: “There
was
a disc out there flying around.”

T: “There was a what?”

S: “A disc.”

T: “A disc?”

S: “Yeah.”

T: “Can you hang on one second?”

S: “Sure.”

(pause, 33 seconds)

T: “Okay, I’m sorry, what can I do for you?”

S: “I’m sorry, there was, I told Dave, there was a disc flying outside above Charley 17 and he thought I was pretty much high. But, um, I’m not high and I’m not drinking.”

T: “Yeah.”

S: “So, someone got a picture of it. So if you guys see it out there—”

T: “A disc, like a Frisbee?”

S: “Like a UFO type thing.”

T: “Yeah, okay.”

S: “He got a picture of it.” (laughs)

T: “How, how, how high above Charley 17?”

S: “Well, it was above our tower. So …”

T: “Yeah.”

S: “So, if you happen to see anything …” (she continues to laugh)

T: “You know, I’ll keep a peeled eye for that.”

S: “Okay.”

Unfortunately, the photograph Sue referenced has never been located. Also, due to the way the towers were constructed, the operators were not able to see the UFO; its location in the sky was not within their visual field through the glass window because of the roof overhang, so it hovered in what amounted to the tower’s blind spot. Planes full of passengers were landing and taking off while the “UFO type thing” sat poised in the sky overhead, and no one knew what this thing was, why it was there, or what it might do next. This taped exchange, which includes giggling, Sue’s need to proclaim she wasn’t “high,” and Dave’s admission that he wouldn’t admit it even if he had seen the disc, is a glaring commentary on the UFO taboo that infects aviation personnel even in the midst of an ongoing, possibly dangerous incident being reported by trained observers of aircraft.

Dave might have reacted differently if the flying disc had been picked up on radar, but it wasn’t. Perhaps the object had some kind of stealth capability, but at the same time we know that airport radars are not configured to register stationary objects such as this, or, at the other extreme, extraordinarily high-speed motion, because such behavior is outside the norm. The O’Hare incident is not the only example of this. Unidentified objects are often not detected on radar, even when physically present and seen by multiple witnesses, and obviously this doesn’t mean they aren’t there. In many other cases, radar tracks
are
captured, providing valuable data on the object’s movements. What determines this variability in detection is unknown.

Fortunately, a team of experts from Dr. Richard Haines’s group NARCAP spent five months rigorously investigating the incident and its safety implications, and analyzing all possible explanations for the sighting. Their 154-page report was co-authored by Haines; meteorologist William Pucket, formerly with the Environmental Protection Agency; aerospace engineer Laurence Lemke, also previously with NASA on advanced space mission projects; Donald Ledger, a Canadian pilot and aviation professional; and five other specialists.
²
They concluded that the O’Hare disc was a solid physical object behaving in ways that could not be explained in conventional terms. It had penetrated Class B restricted airspace over a major airport without utilizing a transponder.

The NARCAP study stated:

This incident is typical of many others before it in that an unknown phenomenon was able to avoid radar contact and, thus, official recognition and effective response. When combined with the deeply entrenched bias pilots have against reporting these sightings, the FAA seemingly had justifiable grounds for ignoring this particular UAP as non-existent.
³

And indeed the FAA tried hard to ignore the incident despite its safety implications, but pressure from the
Chicago Tribune
and others forced a response. Initially an FAA spokesperson attempted to explain the incident as airport lights reflecting off the bottom of the cloud ceiling. However, the event occurred in daylight and the airport lights hadn’t been turned on yet! In a second try, a different spokesperson wrote the whole thing off as a “weather phenomenon.” Obviously, these United pilots and airport employees know how to recognize airport lights on clouds and unusual weather conditions, though it was a normal overcast day. They would not have described a flying disc, each providing the same independent description from different vantage points, if some strange weather was unfolding, and to suggest otherwise is an insult to those doing their duty by reporting the incursion.

Transportation expert Hilkevitch, who routinely covers the much less exciting, mundane events that occur on a regular basis at O’Hare Airport, was mystified by the FAA disinterest in the incident. “If this had been a plane, it would have been investigated,” he told me. “The FAA treats the smallest safety issue as very important. It will investigate a coffeepot getting loose in the galley and falling while a plane is landing.” Brian E. Smith, a former manager within NASA’s Aviation Safety Program, told me that “managers should want to hear about such vehicle operations before they become accidents or disasters.” He said the safety implications of
anything
operating outside the authority of air traffic control at a major airport are obvious, no matter what type of vehicle it is.

The NARCAP experts concurred:

Anytime an airborne object can hover for several minutes over a busy airport but not be registered on radar or seen visually from the control tower, it constitutes a potential threat to flight safety. The identity of the UAP remains unknown. An official government inquiry should be carried out to evaluate whether or not current sensing technologies are adequate to insure against a future incident such as this.
⁴

So, what exactly was going on here?

I decided to call FAA spokesperson Tony Molinaro and ask him for more details about the bizarre “weather” that he said United Airlines pilots mistook for a physical object—weather so freakish that it was able to cut a round, sharply defined hole though a thick cloud bank in a split second. Such a phenomenon would certainly be worthy of study by scientists in the age of climate change, and is actually even more of a novelty than hovering or speeding discs, which have made the news since the 1940s.

“In the absence of any kind of factual evidence, there is nothing more we can do,” Molinaro said in a phone interview, in response to my asking why the FAA chose not to investigate this. But was there factual evidence for his newly discovered weather phenomenon? Weather is the best guess, he said, and then pointed to a specific natural phenomenon that isn’t really weather: a “hole-punch cloud,” as it is colloquially called. After all, he stated, such a cloud hole is in “a perfect circular shape like a round disc” and has “vapor going up into it.” In other words, witnesses mistook the cloud hole for a disc (even though the disc was seen for many minutes before the hole was created), and the
ascension
of vapor, somehow moving up in defiance of gravity, was what witnesses believed to be the disc shooting upward through the clouds.

Doesn’t this sound ridiculous, if you stop and think about it? It’s the kind of response that has typically been provided for decades when officials are pressured to say
something
. And even if Molinaro hedged his explanation by qualifying it as a “guess,” this kind of subtle understatement is quickly lost to the mass media and the general public.

And was his guess at all reasonable? I contacted weather experts and scientists specializing in cloud physics, something the FAA would have been wise to have done before issuing its explanation. No, this could not possibly be what witnesses saw, I learned.

Hole-punch clouds are formed when ice crystals from a higher cloud deck fall onto a lower one. The hole is formed by ice crystals falling
downward
, not upward as Molinaro postulated. Super-cooled water droplets in the lower cloud adhere to the crystals, enlarging them and leaving a space around them in the cloud. The crystal mass accumulates weight and then falls farther, below the second cloud, evaporating when it hits warmer air.

The key factor is that this process can only happen at
below
freezing temperatures. The temperature at 1,900 feet above O’Hare Airport the day of the sighting was 53 degrees F, according to the National Weather Service. The climatologists and other weather experts I spoke to all stated that temperatures must be below freezing for a hole-punch cloud to explain the sighting.

And they told me that a hole in a cloud can be formed by only one other means: evaporation by heat. And this just happens to fit the witnesses’ explanation of what they saw: a high-energy, round object very likely to be emitting some form of intense radiation or heat while cutting through the cloud bank. Thus, isn’t evaporation by heat the most logical explanation, the “best guess,” for what happened?

The NARCAP team also recognized the folly of Molinaro’s explanation:

We postulate that the instantaneous nature of the hole formation, the circular shape, and its sharp edges all point to the direct emission of, for example, electromagnetic radiation from the surface of the oblate spheroid as the proximate cause of the hole in the clouds. We cannot identify the object or phenomenon lying inside the oblate spheroid surface, but two conclusions seem inescapable: (1) the object or phenomenon observed would have to have been something objectively and externally real to create the hole effect; and, (2) the hole phenomenon associated with this object cannot be explained by either conventional weather phenomena or conventional aerospace craft, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged.
⁵

Unfortunately, our government is not willing to issue a sensible statement about what actually happened, giving due respect to witness reports, and instead refuses to investigate. Once again, a curious general public is left out in the cold, frustrated, alarmed, and perplexed by their government’s silence. In keeping with the historical pattern, the FAA’s explanation of a hole-punch is factually ludicrous, since the temperatures at O’Hare were too warm for it to have even been a physical possibility.

Nonetheless, once the FAA explanation is tossed out and printed by the media, no matter how far-fetched, it provides a handy way out for those inclined to dismiss any and all UFO sightings, those committed to believing they don’t exist. Most people will never know that temperatures at O’Hare render the FAA explanation impossible (this information was not put forward until months after the fact) and will be swayed by what the authorities tell them. The case from then on is tainted by that seed of doubt, which becomes part of the record. Those who
do
know the facts about the O’Hare incident continue to mistrust our government, which has demonstrated, once again, that it will avoid dealing with UFO incidents at all costs.

This recent event clearly illustrates the fundamental tenets about the UFO problem that I spelled out in the introduction: UFOs are real, physical objects; they remain unexplained; they can be an aviation safety hazard; our government routinely ignores them, disrespecting expert witnesses and issuing false explanations; the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot be ruled out when no man-made or natural explanation applies; and an immediate investigation is required.

Why is our government uninterested in a strange, highly technological object hovering over a major airport, as reported by competent airline personnel? What about passenger safety? Or national security after 9/11? Or just plain scientific curiosity about an unexplained phenomenon? Official distate for dealing with the UFO phenomenon is entrenched to the point of being not only counterproductive, but possibly dangerous.

CHAPTER 7

Gigantic UFOs over the English Channel, 2007

by Captain Ray Bowyer

Five months after the O’Hare incident, on April 23, 2007, another sighting occurred involving pilots and aviation personnel, this time over the English Channel off the French coast of Normandy. Commercial airline pilot Ray Bowyer did not hesitate to report his sighting of two massive UFOs, witnessed by him and his passengers, even though it had no direct impact on flight safety. Following regulations, he submitted his report to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Britain’s aviation regulatory body responsible for air safety, the equivalent of our FAA. This time the objects
were
tracked on radar, and the sighting made news around the world, without delay
.