UFO reports come from all corners of the globe and from people from all walks of life. There seems to be nowhere that is immune to such strange phenomena, with this seeming to be an all-encompassing wave of strangeness that is as of yet beyond our ability to comprehend. One area that has seen plenty of UFO action are the islands of our world, and this may make sense in that UFOs have often been said to be drawn to water. Whether that is true or not, islands have consistently brought in some weird accounts, and here are some of the weirdest.

In 1954 there was a very bizarre UFO event in the island nation of Madagascar, which would be witnessed by potentially tens of thousands of witnesses. On August 16, 1954, an “electric green ball” was seen hurtling down from the sky over the Palais de la Reine, also called the Rova of Antananarivo, in the bustling city of Antananarivo. The mysterious object went streaking behind a nearby hill, and at the time it was thought to be perhaps a meteorite that was about to hit, but there was no explosion or impact. As a multitude of alarmed citizens tried to figure out what was going on, the green light reappeared from behind the hill and proceeded to silently fly up and down over the Avenue of the Liberation while an estimated tens of thousands of awestruck people looked on in various states ranging from awe to horror. It was noticed at the time that street lights and shop lights would flicker and go out as the object passed over them, only to snap back on as it went by, and dogs all over the city were furiously barking. The object continued travelling over the city, passing over a zoo, where all of the animals became absolutely hysterical, and when it passed by cattle on the outskirts of the city they too went nuts. Whatever it was then flew off to the west and was gone. The event was witnessed by as many as 200,000 people and has never been explained.

Antananarivo

In 1958 there is a case from the remote rocky uninhabited speck of rocky land called Trinidade, located in the South Atlantic between Brazil and Africa. The island is far from civilization, with no settlements and the only people here being the seasonal staff of an oceanographic post and a meteorological station operated by the Hydrography and Navigation Division of the Ministry of the Navy. It is a wind-lashed, forbidding place, surrounded by lonely seas and forgotten by the world, and where not much ever really happens, but that would change in January of 1958. At the time, a Naval oceanographic research vessel called the Almirante Saldanha made its way to the island to perform scientific studies, after which it was to head off to Rio de Janeiro. On January 16, as the ship was preparing to depart after several days on the island, something very strange would happen. On that day, a number of people on deck witnessed a bizarre object in the sky, which a photographer on board by the name of Almiro Barauna also observed and managed to take photographs of. He would say of it:

It was on January 16, at 12:15 P.M. The ship was preparing to leave the island, to come back to Rio. I was on the deck observing the operations to take aboard the boat used in the trips between the ship and the island (the island has no harbor). The sea was agitated. The weather was cloudy, clear, with no shadows. I had my Rolleiflex 2.8, Model E, which was kept inside an aluminum box for protection against the corrosive effects of water and salt. I had left my Leica with a telephoto lens in my cabin a few moments before. The deck was full of sailors and officers. Suddenly, Mr. Amilar Vieira and Captain Viegas called me, pointing to a certain spot in the sky and yelling about a bright object which was approaching the island.

At this same moment, when I was still trying to see what it was, Lieutenant Homero, the ship’s dentist, came from the bow toward us, running, pointing out to the sky and also yelling about an object he was sighting. He was so disturbed and excited that he almost fell down after colliding with a cable. Then I was finally able to locate the object, by the flash (of light) it emitted. It was already close to the island. It glittered at certain moments, perhaps changing its own light – I don’t know. It was coming over the sea, moving toward the point called the Galo Crest. I had lost thirty seconds looking for the object, but the camera was already in my hands, ready, when I sighted it clearly silhouetted against the clouds. I shot two photos before it disappeared behind the peak Desejado. My camera was set at a speed of 125 [125th of a second], with the aperture at f/8, and this was the cause of an overexposure error, as I discovered later.

The object remained out of sight for a few seconds – behind the peak – reappearing bigger in size and flying in the opposite direction, but lower and closer than before, and moving at a higher speed. I shot the third photo. The fourth and fifth ones were lost, not only because of the speed the saucer was moving, but also for another reason: In the confusion produced as a result of the sighting, I was being pulled and pushed by other persons also trying to spot the object and, as a consequence, photographed the sea and the island only – not the object. It was moving out to sea again, in the direction from which it had come, and it appeared to stop in midair for a brief time. At that moment I shot my last photo (the last on the film). After about ten seconds, the object continued to increase its distance from the ship, gradually diminishing in size and finally disappearing into the horizon. The object was sighted by almost all the people on the deck at that time, including Lieutenant Homero, Captain Viegas, and Mr. Amilar Vieira.

Trinidade Island

Barauna would have the photos developed as soon as he could, and the negatives were turned over to the Navy. It would also turn out that others in the area on other vessels had also seen the object and even photographed it, and he was extensively interviewed by Navy officials. Barauna would say of all of this:

I was interviewed by several high-staff officers, who asked me all kinds of questions. I went there twice. At the first meeting, they requested the negatives for examination. They were sent to a civilian organization, the Cruzeiro do Sul Aerophoto grammetric Service, remaining there for four days. I was told by the Navy officers that the analyses proved they were genuine -excluding definitely the possibility of a trick or falsification. On the second visit, they performed several time-tests. While I worked with my Rolleiflex, taking shots at the same time intervals I had used to photograph the object, three Navy officers with chronometers registered the times.

They came to the conclusion – based on these tests as well as on studies concerning the ship’s position and examinations of charts of the island – that the object was flying at a speed between 900 and 1,000 km./hour [about 600 mph]. The object’s size was also estimated on the basis of studies related with the island’s details also appearing on the photos, diagrams drawn on charts, graphs, et cetera. The object was about 120 feet in diameter and about 24 feet high. They requested me to keep the matter secret for some time. I was permitted to publish the case only after authorization from the Navy. The permission was granted, verbally, on the night of February 15, by Commander Bacellar. They made only one restriction, which I cannot mention for the reason that I have given my word. I was informed of four other sightings over the island during those thirty days preceding the incident of January 16. I was also informed of another thing: At one of those sightings, the object was photographed by a Navy sergeant. His photo obviously was not released and probably never will be – the reasons are evident. Besides those four sightings, there was also the RADAR case. A target flying at supersonic speed was tracked by the radar of the Almirante Saldanha on January 15.

The photos eventually got out into the wild and created quite a lot of excitement in the general public, as they were very clear photos of an actual UFO. As people discussed and debated them, the Navy went quiet and refused to make any comment or answer any questions on the matter, despite the fact that many high-ranking Navy personnel had witnessed the event and were telling their stories. The hype over the incident and its photos got so intense that the Navy had to step in, making a statement that said:

With reference to the reports appearing in the press that the Navy is opposed to divulge the facts concerning the appearance of a strange object over Trindade Island, this Cabinet declares that such information has no basis. This Ministry has no motive to impede the release of photographs of the referred-to object, taken by Mr. Almiro Barauna, who was at Trindade Island at the invitation of the Navy, and in the presence

of a large number of the crew of Almirante Saldanha from whose deck the photographs were taken. Clearly, this Ministry will not be able to make any pronouncement concerning the object seen, because the photographs do not constitute sufficient proof for such purpose.

In the end, the Brazilian Navy would say nothing more on the case, the photos, or its analysis of them, and we are left to wonder what all of these qualified witnesses saw out there at that island and what is in those images. Another weird case happened at the rugged and remote Anglican mission village at Boianai, Papua, New Guinea, where on April 5, 1959, a Father William Booth Gill was there doing missionary work when he would have an outlandish experience. On that evening, Gill would observe a strange fast-moving light moving through the sky in the distance over the remote Mount Pudi. This would be followed a month later by an “inverted saucer-shaped object” hovering over the mission. At first Gill tried to put these anomalous occurrences out of his head and get on with his work, but on June 26, 1959 Gill and dozens of other witnesses saw a four-legged, disc-shaped object fly out from the wilderness to hover over the mission with four small humanoids that busily went about some unknown task as a blue beam intermittently shot down from the craft to the ground below. Curious, some of the witnesses waved their hands and were astonished when the entities waved back. Gill would say:

On the large one, two of the figures seemed to be doing something near the center of the deck. They were occasionally bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting or “setting up” something. One figure seemed to be standing, looking down at us. In a moment of anticipation, I raised his arms and waved to the figure. To our surprise the figure did the same. Ananias waved both arms over his head; then the two outside figures did the same. Ananias and myself began waving our arms, and all four seemed to wave back. There seemed no doubt that our movements were answered.

After about an hour of this the beings entered the ship again and flew off, after which several smaller craft would patrol the area for some time before disappearing. Later that evening, Gill would hear a loud bang from outside and go out to see four UFOs circling about before flying off. The sightings have never been explained. Moving on to 1972 there is a curious account from Uruguay’s remote Isla de Lobos, a tiny island just off the coast, populated by fur seals and with the only sign of humans is a lone lighthouse on the rocky, wind blasted shore. This lighthouse is manned by a garrison of five Navy men who do 15-day shifts, and on October 28, 1972 the shift would have dinner as usual, after which one of the men, a Corporal Juan Fuentes Figueroa, went out to check the generators on a routine inspection. As he was out there, his attention was caught by some strange lights in the sky hovering near the top of the generator building, seemingly right above a terrace that was situated up there about 20 feet above the ground. The lights looked to him like car headlights, although this was of course impossible, and they seemed to be flashing and oscillating between a mix of white, yellow and violet.

Fuentes was so unsettled by the sight that he went back to get his pistol, oddly not telling any of the other men what was going on. When he went back outside to approach the generator building again, this time he could see that there was an object up there apparently landed on the terrace, described as a metallic, copper-colored object shaped like an inverted bowl, standing on some sort of landing gear and with a rotating antenna of some sort on its top. What’s more, in the eerie illumination of the lights there was what looked to be a figure standing beside the object, and a second and third figure were descending from the craft. They seemed to be wearing some sort of dark suits akin to diving suits, their heads appearing somewhat elongated and oversized, and one seemed to be noticeably taller than the others, although Fuentes could not make out a lot of details. He then realized that they had turned towards him and seemed to be very aware that he was there.

At this time, Fuentes was overcome with fear and panic, and raised his pistol to point it up at the craft. It was at this point that he felt a strange sensation throughout his body like a vibration that sent his hair standing up on end, and found that he was unable to move, as if paralyzed, all while a voice boomed through his head that said “Don’t shoot because it is useless.” After this, the strange entities went back up into their ship, seemingly walking up steps of some kind, appearing to be pulling themselves up with handrails, after which the craft closed and began to lift off as its landing legs retracted telescopically. It hovered up in the air momentarily, then silently sped off at breathtaking speed with a flash of bright light like a fireball. At this point, Fuentes ran back to the others and told them what had happened, but no one believed him. Considering he was the superior officer and no one believed him, this came as a shock, but it would seem that at least one of the men, Francisco Cascudo, thought it was odd enough to pass it along to a superior officer and they would all check it out.

Not long after their tour at the lighthouse ended, Fuentes was called aside by high-ranking officials, who interviewed him at length on what he had allegedly seen. Fuentes would claim that there had also been two men who he believed to be from the U.S. Embassy lurking in the background taking notes, and who were later identified as officers of the “Spatial Affair Service.” Fuentes was also shown various pictures of different UFOs and asked to point out which were most similar to what he had witnessed and then dismissed. At no point was he ever directly questioned by the mysterious Americans, but he could see them excitedly talking to his interrogators in another room, making it obvious they were very interested in his sighting. After this, the case came to the attention of the Uruguayan UFO Investigation Center, who subjected Fuentes to some psychological tests and came to the conclusion that he was a solid witness, described as “sincere, uncomplicated and simple, with no tendency to fabrication or fantasy and lacking an average imagination.” It was also noted that Fuentes had no previous interest in or knowledge of UFOs, and they came to the conclusion that he at least truly believed he had seen what he claimed. Sub-officer Cascudo would back this up, describing Fuentes as a “simple and honest man, incapable of inventing a story of this nature.”

Finally, we have a report from the Canary Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean in the region called Macaronesia and just about 62 miles from the northwestern coast of Africa off Morocco. On June 22, 1976, people living on the islands of Tenerife, La Palma, and La Gomera began calling in to report numerous strange lights performing odd maneuvers in the sky, amongst them one that seemed to be larger than the others, described as a giant, luminous sphere. Among these reports some were more spectacular than others, and one of the first reported incidents was made by the Navy escort ship, the Atrevida, which at the time was positioned off the coast of Fuerteventura Island. On this evening at approximately 9:27 PM, the crew observed an extremely bright light moving in the general direction of the ship. It was first thought to be a normal aircraft, but this turned out to not be the case, as it began rotating, pulsating, and generating a blindingly bright halo of yellow and blue, as well as various flashing strobe effects. The baffled crew watched this mysterious object for a full 40 minutes, and the official report from the ship would read in part:

The original light went out and a luminous beam from it began to rotate. It remained like this for approximately two minutes. Then an intense great halo of yellowish and bluish light developed, and remained in the same position for 40 minutes, even though the original phenomenon was no longer visible. Two minutes after the great halo, the light split into two parts, the smaller part being beneath, in the center of the luminous halo, where a blue cloud appeared and the part from which the bluish nucleus had come, vanished. The upper part began to climb in a spiral, rapid and irregular, and finally vanished. None of these movements affected the initial circular halo in any way, which remained just the same the whole time, its glow lighting up parts of the land and the ocean, from which we could deduce that the phenomenon was not very far away from us, but was close.

At no point was the craft picked up on radar, and a check of air traffic in the area showed no military or civilian aircraft scheduled to be in the vicinity. This would start a whole series of reports from throughout the Canary Islands as whatever it was headed out on its inscrutable mission, and people seemed to be reporting two different types of phenomena, one being this large sphere and the other being smaller flitting orbs, and these were seen by hundreds of people across several islands. One of the most intriguing reports came from a doctor Francisco Padron Leon, who at the time was in a taxi on his way to a house call at the town of Las Rosas. However, things got very odd when both he and the driver noticed an illuminated globe up in front of them, just seeming to hover over the ground. According to Leon’s report, it measured an estimated 100 feet across, and was seemingly made up of a semi-clear material like crystal. More bizarre still was that as they drew closer they could see that the bottom of the sphere was ringed by some sort of metallic platform, upon which two immense humanoid beings around 10 feet in height were standing next to large consoles of some kind. These two creatures had oversized heads, wore some kind of helmets, and seemed to be operating a giant tube that belched forth a bluish smoke, and the doctor would say of these entities and what happened next:

At each side of the center there were two huge figures of 2.50 to 3 m. [8.5 to 10 ft.] tall, but no taller than 3 m. [10 ft.], dressed entirely in red and facing each other in such a way that I always saw their profile. Then I observed that some kind of bluish smoke was coming out from a semi-transparent central tube in the sphere, covering the periphery of the sphere’s interior without leaking outside at any moment. Then the sphere began to grow and grow until it became huge like a 20-story house, but the platform and the crew remained the same size; it rose slowly and majestically and it seems I heard a very tenuous whistling.

This gigantic sphere would ascend and then purportedly shoot off at astounding speed along with its mysterious occupants. It would then be seen by several other witnesses directly after this, including the very patient that the doctor was on his way to see, all of who described the same translucent crystalline structure and giant beings on their catwalk. By the end of the evening there would apparently be thousands of reports from across the archipelago describing something bizarre going on in the sky, coming from a wide variety of professions and ages and making them one of the most mass witnessed UFO events ever, yet it was all mostly swept under the carpet by the Spanish Air Force.

The Canary Islands

The following year, in 1977, some of these reports were leaked to journalist J. J. Benitez by a Spanish Air Force General, and would subsequently find their way into his book UFOs: Official Documents of the Spanish Government, but this was all still considered unverifiable and filled with spooky conspiracies. It would not be until 1994 that people would really take it seriously, when the Spanish Air Force declassified its files on the events and it was clear for all to see that something very odd had indeed been documented from that evening. The declassified report was very detailed, included over 100 pages of testimony, evaluations, drawings, a full chronology of the sightings, and it also took the step of separating witnesses by their perceived level of veracity and reliability, with the reports of the crew of the Atrevida and that of doctor Leon ranking at the top. It was also explained that an investigative adjunct had been launched by the Spanish Air Force, which had found that there had been no military or civilian aircraft at the time and they officially labelled it an “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

There are no easy answers for any of these cases, and they join the ranks of the many, may UFO reports that have come before them. Although such accounts come in from all over the world from many environments, there just seems to be something fascinating about these island reports. To know that there are these strips of land out there isolated from the rest of the world having these incidents holds a certain sense of allure, and it all only adds to the mystery of the UFO phenomenon at large.

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When we think of UFOs during the Second World War, more often than not, it will likely provoke images of the Foo Fighters. They were small, fast-moving, ball-like, illuminated “things” seen in the sky and mostly during battle and confrontation over Europe. The creations of the Allies? The Nazis? The questions still exist. And, it’s most unlikely that we’ll ever get the complete answers to the Foo Fighter issue. What’s even less well-known, though, are the reports of UFO activity during the Second World War that had nothing to do with the Foo Fighters. In other words, today’s article is on claims of Flying Saucers seen – and allegedly examined by scientists – during the Second World War. I should stress that the story I’m sharing with you today has nothing to do with the extremely dubious stories of “Nazi UFOs” that certain figures have promoted for disturbing, political reasons. Rather, we’re talking about an American journalist, dead aliens and more. With that said, let’s move on.

May 22, 1955 was the date on which a well-respected journalist, Dorothy Kilgallen, put together an account for the American press. The story, that surfaced while Kilgallen was on vacation in the U.K. at the time, read as follows: “I can report today on a story which is positively spooky, not to mention chilling. British scientists and airmen, after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship, are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet. The source of my information is a British official of cabinet rank who prefers to remain unidentified.” One of Kilgallen’s informants for the tale was suspected of having been Gordon Creighton. For a long time, he was the editor of the Flying Saucer Review magazine. Timothy Good, author of a 1987 book, Above Top Secret, knew Creighton. Good followed the Kilgallen story, saying that it “…was alleged to have taken place during a cocktail party  given by Lord Mountbatten, but I have been unable to substantiate this with Mollie Travis, Mountbatten’s private secretary at the time.”

The FBI file on Dorothy Kilgallen

And who was Lord Mountbatten? Read on: “As with many royal relatives, Louis Mountbatten was related to both Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth. A great-grandson of Queen Victoria, he was a distant cousin of the Queen’s as well as Prince Philip’s uncle. Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was Louis’s sister. Philip also lived with the Mountbattens for several years following his mother’s institutionalization… In August of 1979, Lord Mountbatten was killed at age 79 in a terrorist attack by the Irish Republican Army. His fishing boat, named Shadow V, was blown up off the coast of the Republic of Ireland by a bomb that had been smuggled aboard.” Now, back to the story/yarn of the crashed UFO. Dorothy Kilgallen’s primary source for the story – believed to have been Mountbatten, himself – quietly told her these words: “We believe, on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that the saucers were staffed by small men – probably under four feet tall. It’s frightening, but there’s no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.” Kilgallen, recognizing that she had an amazing story on her hands, had more to say: “This official quoted scientists as saying a flying ship of this type could not have possibly been constructed on Earth. The British Government, I learned, is withholding an official report on the ‘flying saucer’ examination at this time, possibly because it does not wish to frighten the public. When my husband and I arrived here from a brief vacation, I had no premonition that I would be catapulting myself into the controversy over whether flying saucers are real or imaginary.”

London Underground

For years, that was where the story pretty much began and ended. However, over the years tales have circulated to the effect that the UFO crash had nothing to do with Roswell (as some have suggested), but everything to do with a Flying Saucer crash somewhere on the U.K. – and, as a result, the Americans and the Brits secretly created a project to study the wrecked craft and dead bodies that reportedly fell into their laps. I’ve heard rumors that during the Second World War, the remains of the dead aliens from the crash were, from 1944 to 1953, held deep in a bunker in the London Underground. Another story (or, more correctly, another rumor) suggests everything was flown over to the United States, along with a team of U.K. scientists. The tales are fascinating. Try proving it all, though. True or not, the story is still an intriguing one. And if there is any truth to it all, then it adds another weird story to strange, UFO-themed activity encountered during the Second World War.

One curious corner of the UFO phenomenon is not what goes on up in our skies, but rather what seems to be going on beneath the seas of our world. Called Unidentified Submersible Objects, or USOs, these are those unidentified objects seen whizzing and zipping about beneath the waves of our oceans and lakes, and while they are rarer than traditional airborne UFOs, they are a curious subspecies of a larger phenomenon. Seeing as these strange underseas craft are supposedly roaming about our waters, it seems only reasonable to assume that Navies have at some point encountered them, and this is true. Indeed, such encounters constitute some of the more believable of reports, with various reliable witnesses with nothing to gain from lying coming forth with such stories. And so here we delve into some strange and often harrowing encounters between military forces and strange underwater forces we may never understand.

In 1966 there was a rather strange series of events seen from the Navy submarine the USS Tiru SS-416. The sub had left Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, and was on its way to Seattle, Washington, where it was to be docked for several days before being moved to a bay in order to carry out some torpedo exercises. During the journey towards Seattle, on one afternoon the lookout reported something strange in the sky about 2 miles distant, and he called others to come check it out even as the radar station began to pick up an anomalous contact. One of the witnesses, a crew member named Jim Speiser, would tell of what happened to UFO Casebook:

The lookout refused to tell the OOD what it was that he had seen and instead insisted that the starboard lookout and the OOD both look at that area. The three men looked through their binoculars toward the area reported and were astounded to see a metal craft larger than a football field tumble from the clouds into the ocean. It actually tumbled end over end and when it hit the water and sank beneath the ocean huge geysers of water rose into the air. When the port lookout was sure that the others had seen it he then told the OOD that he had seen it tumble from the ocean up into the clouds. The OOD and the starboard lookout were speechless. Within a few minutes, however, they all became excited when it again rose from the water and tumbled up into the cloud layer.

At about the same time a crew member below queried the bridge about a radar contact at the same range and bearing. Sonar also reported strange echos. The OOD called for the Captain to come to the bridge at that time. At about the same time the object emerged from the clouds and fell down into the ocean. All five men witnessed this. The QMC took pictures as it rose up into the clouds and then back down into the ocean once again.The five men watched for quite a while longer but nothing else happened. Soon the sub had moved out of visual range and the Captain told all witnesses that they were never to discuss what they had seen with anyone under any circumstances. He stated that the incident was classified information. The Captain then went below and sent a radio msg. There was no doubt as to what we had seen. It was a metal craft with machinery on and around the outside of it. It appeared to have windows or lenses placed around its perimeter. It made no noise that we could hear. It did not disturb the subs electrical systems nor did it affect the gyro compass. It looked very much like a round flying “ship” as in sea going ship. It had the shape and form of a saucer with a bowl inverted in the saucer and it was huge. I will never forget it as long as I live.

After this the sub managed to reach its destination without further incident, and none of the multiple witnesses have any explanation for what they saw out there. Another such incident happened 1991, off the west coast of South America. The case, which I have reported on before and was reported to the files of the site UFO Casebook, comes from a witness who claims that at the time he had been an operations and intelligence petty officer serving aboard the Knox-class destroyer escort the USS Kirk FF1087, and that they had been part of a drug interdiction force, which consisted of the USS Kirk and three other Naval vessels. Their primary mission was to patrol using a network of radar to track and then intercept drug-running aircraft flying out of Columbia, Panama and Guatemala, as well as to engage any smuggling ships they were able to find. The witness says that his primary duties took place within the CIC, or the Combat Information Center, which he and 22 other specialists manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with them rotating between two 11-man shifts.

The witness claims that he was on CIC duty at 2 a.m. on the morning of December 16, and it was a quiet night with nothing going on. He says he took a break to go up to the ship’s bridge, and at the time the entire vessel was in a state called “darkened ship,” with all of the exterior lights turned off, as well as those on the bridge, meaning the area was only faintly illuminated by instrument panels. He began talking casually with the officer of the deck, and this is when things would suddenly get weird. He says:

All of a sudden and out of nowhere, like a huge flash from a camera, emanating from the starboard bow sea level upward was a huge flash of red glowing light, which lit up our entire ship. It only lit up our ship, not the surrounding ocean, just our ship. It happened so fast, that the OOD, the navigator and I were speechless for about 5 seconds, at which time I looked at the OOD and asked him if he just saw that light. He stated yes in a sullen voice. I then asked the navigator and he replied yes. I then took the navigator’s sound powered headset, and asked the forward and aft look outs, if they had just seen the same red flash, to which the forward look out stated, “YES! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?” Aft lookout said yes as well. I then immediately contacted CIC, and asked the CIC officer if we had any aircraft or surface ships in our vicinity, to which he replied clear as a whistle. I asked if we had any submarine activity in the area, to which he replied, no.

What had just happened did not make any sense. The flash emanated from the sea, directly off of our starboard bow (like it was touching our bow), and ascended upwardly so rapidly, creating the effect of the bright red flash. The other weird aspect of this event was that only our ship was lit up within the red flash, not the surrounding sea, but our vessel only. Up until this event, I did not believe in UFOs or USOs. I have no doubt that our ship, steaming along at 12 knots, came right up on a submerged unidentifiable aircraft. I don’t think the aircraft or USO had any idea we were sailing up to them. I think whatever it was, took off in a very unplanned and fast manner, and wanted to quickly identify us, thus the flash.

In the end, after much consideration they decided not to wake the captain, merely logging it as an “unexplained phenomenon.” Another Naval submarine encounter supposedly occurred in October of 1989, aboard the USS Memphis. On October 24 of that year, the sub was on an assignment to secure the shuttle launch pad in Florida, patrolling about 150 miles off the coast when something very large was picked up on sonar approaching them at a fast pace. As it did, apparently the instrumentation on the submarine and operations on the ship in general went absolutely haywire, and the witness would say of this:

The ship was malfunctioning, our tanks were blowing out of control, we were losing navigation ability and the communications area was totally lost. We went to all stop and tried to access what was happening. The controls in the reactor area started to malfunction. This presented a serious danger to our safety, so the captain ordered us to shut down the reactor, surface and go to diesel motors. When the ship surfaced I went to my watch station. The ship was still experiencing electronic difficulties but the mechanical devices such as diesel engines, cook stoves, and turbines were fine.

USS Memphis

The ordeal wasn’t over for them, because whatever had caused the disturbance then emerged from the water, an inverted V-shaped craft of some kind, and it was described as absolutely massive. The witness would say of what happened next:

This huge vessel was over a half mile across. The UFO made a half circle around our ship then passed across the stern causing our electronics systems to go crazy. We had permanent damage in communications and the sonar room. As the craft flew over the stern, I could see the rain stop under its red glow. The water seemed to rise almost a foot as the UFO passed over silently. When the UFO finished its swing across the stern it paused – the sky got brighter red and it simply moved off at tremendous speed inside 15 seconds. When the UFO left, our boat returned to normal with the exception of the radio and sonar. We did a quick system check and the captain ordered us to return to reactor power and get underway. The captain took two petty officers, the executive officer, and myself into the wardroom. He told us to not spread any rumors until we had a chance to talk to Commander Submarine Fleet – Atlantic. We reached port in about 7 hours where I was taken into “protective custody.” Two enlisted men and myself agreed we had witnessed a real UFO. I was the one who shot it with a laser range finder, so I was the only one that had its exact sizes. I shot that vessel as it hovered and I got solid readings, not spotty like I would on debris. We were in holding for about three hours when an officer from the Air Force arrived and gave us a line of bull about an exploding weather satellite. The Navy then transferred virtually everyone on the crew to new assignments. This included the captain, the executive officer and the entire crew. They were split up which almost never happens unless one of them gets a promotion or a new command, neither of which happened.

More recently there was a report from E-4 Petty Officer John Baughman, who was stationed onboard the USS Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class supercarrier, in 2010. At the time, the ship was off the coast of Haiti delivering humanitarian aid to the region, which had just suffered a catastrophic earthquake. On this day, he was taking break and sitting on the SAM Launcher Deck, just looking out across the water, something he often did and during which time he’d see “everything from sharks, dolphins and whales to giant squids, sea turtles, and swordfish,” but on this occasion he’ see something altogether stranger. He would say of what happened and his thoughts on the matter:

I was staring into the water from above when a large, fat, white ‘Tic Tac’ object, approximately twenty feet in length, suddenly appeared in my view below me, moving right and darted into the depths as fast as it appeared. I had a pretty good reference point on how big or deep something was in the water, especially when you can see the water line on the side of the ship. I couldn’t really comprehend what I saw. It was definitely a solid object, but when it descended, its forward end rapidly collapsed in on itself and disappeared. It’s hard to come to grips with something like this, and I still feel somewhat insecure about it because it doesn’t make sense. It could have been just about anything. Rapidly moving flotsam with a keen ability to completely disappear, very large albino shark or an albino whale. Could even be an optical illusion, but it cast its own shadow and that’s how I was able to perceive it as a solid object. But at the same time, more data points, even as basic as my story, could help solve the mystery of whether they’re foreign adversaries playing mind games, non-human entities, or the myriad of other possibilities.

What was this thing? When he reported it to his superior, it was apparently just brushed off and not taken very seriously. What did Baughman really see out there? Who knows? Some interesting cases of USOs have been reported by personnel within the US Navy as well, from which there has been footage released showing UFOs entering the water. Chief among the proposed evidence for this is a video taken off the coast of San Diego in July of 2019 by crew aboard the USS Omaha. The video, which was released by UFO researcher and investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, shows a spherical object fly over the vessel before coming down to make a controlled descent into the water, with a crewmember heard to exclaim “Wow, it splashed!” You can see a report with the footage here. The video caused quite a stir online, but it would become even more interesting when Corbell claimed that a Navy sub had been sent to find the object but came up empty-handed, and information would come out that at around the same time that US submarines had also been picking up other mysterious and anomalous objects underwater in the area that seemed to defy physics as we know them. The Navy confirmed that the footage was authentic and unexplained, and the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan has said of this in connection with the USS Omaha footage:

Relevant to this video, an area we will learn more about is the interaction between US Navy submarines – nuclear ballistic submarines and attack submarines – picking up sonar contact of things moving at hundreds of knots under the water. There is an undersea dimension to this, on top of what the pilots are seeing above water. Hundreds of knots under water? I don’t think people can even digest that. That is what I have heard from very good sources and that the US Navy has the data.

This was only one sighting among many UFOs also being seen in the area in a flurry strange activity, including fast-moving “tic-tac” UFO that was also filmed, a “flying pyramid” that was also caught on film, and others. Indeed, videos and photos of these events leaked and began doing heavy rounds online, to the point that the military had no choice but to address it all. One Pentagon spokesperson would say of it all:

I can confirm that the referenced photos and videos were taken by Navy personnel. The UAPTF has included these incidents in their ongoing examinations. As we have said before, to maintain operations security and to avoid disclosing information that may be useful to potential adversaries, DOD does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examinations of reported incursions into our training ranges or designated airspace, including those incursions initially designated as UAP.

Still from the USS Omaha footage

It seems that it is not only the Americans who have to deal with these underwater objects, as the Russian Navy also have several cases of this sort of thing going on. One case comes from a Vladimir Nikolayevich Chernavin, who is an alleged ex- Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy. Among his many strange claims, such as that USOs had been harassing Russian subs since as far back as 1947 and that the objects were exploring underwater caves in Antarctica, he also claims that he had his own experience with one of these objects. Of which he says:

I saw this phenomenon, including when I was captain of the submarine during our time in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, I clearly saw a flying object over one of our Soviet positions appearing in various forms, but mainly in the form of a round hat. It was especially glowing, this light was changing, but the dish was moving at a tremendous speed, then it would stay hovering in one place and disappear immediately to appear in another place, and then dive into the water and disappear from view, and after a while it came out of the water but in another way, we were watching like this phenomenon, as I saw it, the extraordinary phenomena cannot be ignored.

British UFO investigator Philip Mantle has mentioned several such cases involving Soviet submarines in his book Russia’s USO Secrets, which is based on information coming from declassified documents and testimony from Russian military veterans. One such account comes from former nuclear submarine commander Yury Beketov, who says his submarine was doing maneuvers somewhere near the Bermuda Triangle when they had a strange encounter, of which he says:

We repeatedly observed that the instruments detected the movements of material objects at unimaginable speed, around 230 knots (400 km per hour). It’s hard to reach that speed on the surface – only in the air is it possible. The beings that created those material objects significantly exceed us in development.

A particular harrowing report mentioned in the book allegedly happened in 1951, when a Soviet submarine encountered a massive underwater object, which measured 200-250 meters long and was supposedly rising from the depths as it headed towards shore. According to the account, the captain actually ordered depth charges to be dropped on the object, which seemed to have no effect, but which nevertheless caused it to stop its ascent, change course, and head out to deeper water at great speed. What are we dealing with in cases like these, with such inscrutable objects that even the military is unable to deal with? How can we even begin to fathom the forces behind such encounters, or possibly understand the technology that must be involved to allow for what is being seen? In some cases these mysterious craft seem to defy the very laws of physics as we know them, with Lue Elizondo, former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, saying of this:

Imagine a technology that can do 6-700 g-forces, which can fly at 13,000 miles per hour, which can evade radar and which can fly through air and water and eventually. in the space. And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet can still defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. This is precisely what we are seeing.

The veracity of these reports seem to be sound, as we are dealing with seasoned Naval personnel who know the sea and what can be expected to be found out there. What are we dealing with here? What are these mysterious craft that seem to be taunting even heavily armed military vessels? Where are they from and what do they want? It remains unknown, but with the increasing admittance by the Navy that these things are really out there it really raises cause to wonder, and perhaps cause for concern. As most people blissfully go about their everyday lives, this stuff is happening, unexplained and evading understanding. what it all means perhaps time will tell.

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On March 28, 1975, Senator Barry Goldwater wrote the following, highly thought-provoking, words to a UFO researcher named Shlomo Arnon: “The subject of UFOs is one that has interested me for some long time. About ten or twelve years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information is stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret.” Goldwater continued to Arnon: “I have, however, heard that there is a plan under way to release some, if not all, of this material in the near future. I’m just as anxious to see this material as you are, and I hope we will not have to wait much longer.” Born in 1909, Barry Morris Goldwater served as a Major-General in the U.S. Air Force, a Senator for Arizona, the Chairman of the U.S. Government’s Senate Intelligence Committee, and the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States in the 1964 election. Indeed, it was on May 2, 1964, that Goldwater received no less than 75 percent of the vote in the Texas Republican Presidential primary. Moving onto the next case…

You may not be surprised to know that other senators have got into the UFO subject – and related phenomena, too. From January to March 1973, the state of Iowa was hit hard by cattle mutilations. Not only that, many of the ranchers who lost animals reported seeing strange lights and black-colored helicopters in the direct vicinity of the attacks. That the FBI took keen notice of all this is demonstrated by the fact that, as the Freedom of Information Act has shown, it collected and filed numerous media reports on the cattle-mutes in Iowa. The next piece of data dates from early September 1974. That’s when the FBI’s director, Clarence M. Kelley, was contacted by Senator Carl T. Curtis, who wished to inform the Bureau of a wave of baffling attacks on livestock in Nebraska – the state in which Curtis resided and represented. At the time, the FBI declined to get involved, as Director Kelley informed the senator: “”It appears that no Federal Law within the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI has been violated, inasmuch as there is no indication of interstate transportation of the maimed animals.” The mystery was never solved. Indeed, cattle mutilations continue.

One year later, in August 1975, Senator Floyd K. Haskell, of Colorado, made his voice known to the FBI, on the growing cattle mutilation controversy: “For several months my office has been receiving reports of cattle mutilations throughout Colorado and other western states. At least 130 cases in Colorado alone have been reported to local officials and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI); the CBI has verified that the incidents have occurred for the last two years in nine states. The ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents. The bizarre mutilations are frightening in themselves: in virtually all the cases, the left ear, rectum and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no footprints.” Now, onto the Rendlesham Forest “UFO landing” of 1980.

A well-respected Democrat, Jim Exon was the governor of Nebraska from 1971 to 1979, and the senator for Nebraska from 1979 to 1997. Jim Exon was also a key member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, specifically the chairman of the subcommittee. It was in the early months of 1985 that ufologist Ray Boeche decided to take his investigation of the Rendlesham Forest UFO case of December 1980 to the next level: namely, to seek help from Senator Exon. Ultimately, things didn’t go quite as well as Boeche had hoped for. There is no doubt at all, however, that the whole situation touched a highly sensitive nerve within the labyrinthine corridors of power. Boeche put out a notable feeler to the senator, as Boeche told me: ““We got him a copy of Sky Crash and Clear Intent. [The latter] contained six-pages of material on the case, and we sent those to Exon’s office. A copy of the Halt tape, too. And that started the entire thing.” On March 18, 1985, Exon wrote to Ray: “As you requested, I have asked the Air Force for their assistance. Please know that when I hear from them, I will be back in touch. I am still reviewing the two book you provided me, Mr. Boeche. I will return them when I have finished.” Ray received another response from Exon on April 2. Exon came straight to the point: “Frankly, I am not convinced that the incidents you are concerned with did, in fact, occur. Nor have I found any evidence of a cover-up by the government.” The story didn’t go much further.

Among all of the evidence presented for UFOs and aliens over the years, perhaps the most mysterious and compelling are those we never got to see. There are numerous cases of supposed lost photos or footage, lost witnesses, even lost alien bodies, all of which leave us lingering in a limbo of speculation and wonder. A curious case of this comes from 1973, when a hot shot Hollywood producer and his businessman investor happened across a tale of a supposedly amazing piece of footage of a UFO and alien contect, which has been lost and buried to perhaps never be seen again.

In 1973, a Los Angeles filmmaker, producer, and composer by the name of Robert Emenegger made his way out to Norton Air Force Base, in in San Bernardino County, California, along with a well-connected business man and partner by the name of Alan Sandler. Although an Air Force Base seems like a rather odd place for these two to be going, they had a very good reason, in that Emenegger was trying to put together a documentary on Air Force advanced research projects and technology, and had been invited there by the commander-in-chief of the Special Investigations Division and the head of the intelligence department, Paul Schartl in order to have a sit-down. It would soon get very weird indeed.

Robert Emenegger

The men allegedly spent some time discussing various research projects being carried out by the Air Force at the base and beyond, but things got really interesting when the topic of UFOs came up. The two officials then began weaving a very odd tale of a UFO that had allegedly landed at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, in 1964. This craft had apparently come down to land at the base at 6 a.m., and not only that, but aliens had actually gotten off of the ship and talked with the top ranking commanders. In addition, the whole encounter had allegedly been filmed, and both of the officials at this meeting had seen the footage for themselves. Schartl would say of what was seen in the 16mm film footage:

Three flying objects in the shape of a disk arrived, one of which landed, and the other two flew away. On the landed UFO, a door opened, from which three creatures appeared. They were human-size. They had an odd, gray complexion and a pronounced nose. They wore tight fitting jump suits and thin headdresses that appeared to be communication devices, and in their hands they held a ‘translator.’ Their eyes had vertical slits like a cat’s, the nose was clearly defined, and their mouths were thin and slit like, with no chins. A Holloman base commander and other Air Force officers went out to meet them.

Schartl would also claim that they would continue meetings for several days, storing the spaceship in a hangar in the meantime, and that during the alien meeting the entities had eerily mentioned that they were monitoring an unfamiliar alien race that they did not know about. When Emenegger pushed for more information on what the aliens and commander had talked about, the officials clammed up and would only offer vague allusions to sharing technology and knowledge, and they also said that the aliens were “doctors, professional types.” It was all incredibly intriguing, so at this point Emenegger had already decided to do his documentary on UFOs and this amazing account. Much to his surprise, the Air Force officials even agreed to allow him to use 3,200 feet of the mysterious footage, and they even personally brought him to the site where the landing had allegedly happened, as well as the hangar where the UFO was kept and the buildings where the meetings with the aliens had supposedly been conducted.

It was all seemingly too good to be true, even though they were given the ominous caveat that the film should be made to look like a hypothetical scenario and that they were to in no way claim that any of it was actually real. Nevertheless, when Emenegger and Sandler left, they did so in high spirits, amazed that they would soon be able to see this mysterious footage for themselves. When days turned into weeks and weeks into months with no further word, Emenegger decided to go to Wright-Patterson AFB and talk to one of his military contacts, a Col. George Weinbrenner. When asked about what had happened to the footage, Weinbrenner allegedly began ranting about Soviet technology and the MIG 25, seemingly completely off-topic, and it was very odd, yet as he continued his tirade he apparently produced a signed a copy of J. Allen Hynek’s book The UFO Experience from a bookshelf and showed it to Emenegger with a nod. Emenegger would later explain that to him the odd monologue was just a cover to throw off anyone listening in through bugs in the room, and that the book was a silent confirmation that the footage did exist. However, he would never get to see it, it never arrived, and no one knows what ever became of it or even whether it exists or not.

Even without the promised film, Emenegger would release his documentary in 1974, called UFO’s Past, Present & Future, which would then become a book of the same name. In the end there are a lot of problems with this story. The first one is that we only have Emenegger’s word to go on. The primary source for this entire tale is three pages in his book, and that’s it. There is no corroboration, no way to verify any of it, you simply have to take his word for it. Another problem is the question of why would two high-ranking Air Force officials not only spill the beans on the whole thing to this Hollywood filmmaker, but also promise to release the film and then show him around the base where it all happened? In an area where secrecy and shadowy cover-ups are the order of the day, why were they so candid with these guys? Does that make any sense? In the end the footage has never been revealed — we don’t know if any of it was real or not, but if it was real I sure would like to see it.

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It might seem hard to believe in this day and age, but there was a time when photographs of UFOs held some amazement and awe, a rime before photoshop and video manipulation made fakes and hoaxes commonplace and ruined the veracity of photographic evidence in general. I have recently done some articles on UFO photos and footage from the 1950s, as well as from the 1960s, going back in time to a sort of golden era of UFO photography. Here we will look at a selection of some compelling such cases from the 1970s and the 1980s, still before the dawn of mass manipulation of photographs.

In 1970, an unnamed couple were out boating at Tagish Lake, in Yukon Territory, Canada, when they had a strange experience they would never forget. They were out on the lake with another couple in a separate boat, with the two men involved identified in the original report by just their first names, Jim and George, and at 10 a.m. Jim and his wife reportedly saw seven eerie glowing yellow spheres floating over the lake and on the mountainside, each one described as being around 4 feet in diameter. Three of the orbs were apparently hovering about further back on the mountain while the other four moved slowly over the water before joining the others, after which they moved off out of sight. Luckily, Jim was able to snap a photograph of the strange objects, but it would turn out that his friend George and his wife had not been paying attention and had not seen the objects.

Jim went about making slides of the photograph and gave one to George, who was amazed by what he saw and sent a duplicate to the Weather Office, who then submitted it the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, and after that this particular slide seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. For a full year nothing more was heard on the matter, and when George contacted the Department of Defence to ask about what they had found in their analysis, they ominously told him it was classified and would say nothing more about it. Another slide was analyzed by the ufobc in great depth, and they were unable to explain it away as just a trick of light or reflections off the mountain rocks. As to what the photos show and what happened to the slide given to the Department of Defence, it remains unknown. You can read a detailed analysis of the photos here.

The Tagish Lake photo

Close-up of the alleged UFOs over Tagish Lake

From 1971 there is a curious photograph taken by a witness named Rudi Nagora, of Munich, Germany, who on May 23, 1971 was vacationing with his wife near St. Lorenzen, Austria, when he had a rather bizarre experience. At about 12:30 p.m., they stopped their car and Nagora got out to walk around a bit, and that’s when he allegedly heard a strange whizzing sounds from above. When he looked up to the sky, he saw a metallic silver disc reflecting the sunlight as it flew along in an erratic zig-zag pattern. It was weird enough that he quickly grabbed his camera and snapped a full roll of 12 exposures of the object before it suddenly shot up into a bank of clouds above it and disappeared. What would go on to be known as the Nagora photographs would go on to be widely touted as some of the best photos of a UFO ever taken and have never been fully explained.

One of the Nagora photos

Some of the most controversial UFO photos ever taken come from the 1970s, originating with a man named Eduard “Billie” Albert Meier. A purported alien contactee from the age of 5 years old, he claims that he had been regularly visited by humanoid aliens from the Pleiadian star cluster, taught about all manner of wisdom and wonders and assigned as their representative on Earth. Being a mediator for them seems to have had its perks, because according to him they regularly allowed him to photograph their spaceships, to the tune of a total of over a thousand crystal clear photographs of them. When they were first released they were impressive for their clarity and the sheer number of them, but of course they were picked apart by skeptics and quickly deemed to be a hoax. Meir himself has always defended them as genuine, and although today they are mostly regarded as fake even within the UFO community, at the time they were a big deal and caused a lot of waves, being perhaps the most instantly recognizable and most famous UFO photographs of not only the 1970s, but any era. You can read more about Billy Meir and his photos in much more detail in my article on it here.

One of Meir’s many, many photos

Going into the 80s we have another famous and very clear photograph taken by a Mrs. Hannah McRoberts, of Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada. In October of 1981, she was on vacation with her family on the rugged east coast of Vancouver Island, and their weeklong stay would turn out to be far from just a normal family trip. For the first few days, things went normally, they went hiking and took various photos of the surrounding scenery, but then on October 8 they looked out towards one of the mountains and noticed that there was something very odd about it, in that it seemed to have a crown of anomalous looking clouds at its peak, which reminded them of a “volcano issuing steam.” At the time they took a photograph of the strange sight and then didn’t think much of it, thinking it to just be an odd cloud formation. However, things would get very weird when the photos were developed.

When the picture of that cloud-wreathed mountain came back, they were astounded to see that the photograph had also captured an unidentified object to the right of and above the peak and the cloud. It was very clear in contrast to the blue sky, and appeared to be a disc-shaped solid object, not a camera artifact or trick of light, and it was very strange indeed. The photo would find its way to Richard F. Haines, Editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration for analysis. Haines would deduce that indeed the object was not a result of “emulsion deformity or optical illusion of the camera’s inner mechanisms,” and he would not be able to find any evidence of trickery or of a hoax. Haines would also interview the family in depth and deem them to be reliable and unlikely to be perpetrating a hoax. Haines would say:

Analyses of the original negative included micro-densitometry, computer enhancements, and other measurements intent upon showing a support thread, atmospheric disturbance, or other evidence of a hoax. These analyses suggest that the disc was a three dimensional object located at a distance of at least 30 feet from the camera; the object’s surface albedo was diffuse and of lower luminance than a sunlit cloud. Extensive interviews with the photographer (who never saw the aerial object), her husband, and daughter and site survey tended to support the entire narrative account. If this event had been a deliberate hoax, it is more likely that some overt action to capitalize on it might have been taken soon after the disc had been discovered, and not almost a year later. Of course this is not a conclusive argument to support this contention. The author found the photographer and her husband to be middle-class, hard-working people. Their property was well kept. Nothing could be found which pointed to a deliberate hoax. Both displayed genuine puzzlement about the origin of the disc on the photograph. Mr. and Mrs. D.M. were not defensive nor did they ever attempt to cover up anything as far as could be determined. The identity of the disc object remains unidentified.

The Hannah McRoberts photo

Moving on to 1989 we have another very intriguing photograph supposedly taken by a photographer on the night of July 14, 1989 in Nashville, Tennessee. On this evening, the unnamed witness was driving along a remote rural road when he noticed a a bright illumination beyond the trees. Since this was the middle of nowhere and there was no town there, he stopped the car and got out to investigate this weird light, taking his camera along with him. As he drew closer, the light rose up over the trees around 4 miles away, showing itself to be a bright flying object with some sort of coronal discharge around it, as well as shooting beams or flames of some sort below it, before slowly moving towards him as he began taking pictures of the amazing sight until he was out of film, after which the object flew off and went behind a mountain. A report on the incident by the National UFO Center would say of it:

The photographer states, “I had a feeling that the craft was behind the mountain waiting for me and when it appeared it felt like I was in another world, the sounds were far, far away.” He looked at the object but could not see any definition, the light was far too bright and too far away. When he looked through the lens the craft was sharp and vivid. The craft was visible for more than five minutes, but less than ten. It seemed like forever. He changed the lens package from the T-90 to the AE-1 camera and continued shooting using all his film. He felt he was not in control of what was happening. He remembers constantly pushing the buttons on the back of the T-90, each time he made a change it sharpened the image. There were other witnesses, but they have been reluctant to come forward. They also were taking pictures, but the field around the craft interfered with the film as the craft moved away. They did not have high magnification lens so there was not enough definition to make the craft identifiable. The photographer has had a recent heart attack and an auto accident and does not want his name revealed.

One of the Tennessee photos

The photos would eventually by the photographer to his friend Commander Graham Bethune, of the US Navy, who would examine them and hold to them for a time before handing them over to the National UFO Center for their own analysis. The National UFO Center would deduce that the object was solid, about 100 feet in diameter, and at a distance of approximately 5 miles from the camera. One analysis describes the object in the photos as follows:

Analysis of the film shows unusual colors not normally seen in any lighted object. The colors indicate a coronal discharge similar to the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights.) The photographs show a craft with approximately 32 red, white and blue perimeter lights. These lights are not used in normal aircraft configuration. At times they appear all red. At other times they are all white. Sometimes outer perimeter lights appear mixed in color indicating they may have the ability to change color. Inside the outer perimeter lights are panels of lights. These also appear to have the ability to change color. Although they are predominantly white they are sometimes seen as partially red or black. Assuming the craft is 100 feet in diameter these outer panels take up about 40 feet or 20 feet on each side. Below the center of craft there appears to be a crystal or lights with crystal like appearance. Generally, these lights appear blue. craft appears to rotate in the photos.

Graham gave me his word that these were authentic photographs of an actual flying craft to the best knowledge. He has known the photographer for 24 years and the man worked for him for ten years. He has always been known to tell the truth and was of high character. The lights themselves have an unusual depth of color. When you look at a colored light it is normally a white light covered by a lens of red, yellow, green, blue etc. The lights on the craft appear as if the light contain the actual color. There is a vividness of color that is difficult to describe that appears to be in these photos. The fog or plasma is penetrated by the powerful lights shining downward. The lights extend down for an estimated seventy-five feet to one hundred plus feet and seem to stop abruptly. Duplication of this capability is exceptionally difficult to accomplish with any normal lights. I have never seen lights that have these properties except on a UFO, nor have I seen comparable photography.

These have just been a selection of some of the more interesting supposed UFO photos coming out of the 1970s and 80s, still in an era when photo doctoring techniques like photo shop were not available and when pictures were taken more seriously than they are now. We are perhaps beyond the days when any photo of a UFO means any thing at all due to the ease with which they can be faked, and indeed those we have looked at here could very well be faked too, but it was an a different era when photos seemed to carry more weight. While those days are over it is interesting to look back at some of these photos and think that there was a time when these types of photos were not so common and not so easily faked. Real or not, they are a glimpse back in time to another age of ufology that is very much gone.

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UFO videos and footage have come and gone over the years, ranging from the somewhat compelling to the downright obviously fake. In more recent times the wide availability of photoshop and other means of doctoring photos and footage has made such evidence all but pointless, but there was a time before the advent of computer trickery, when photos and footage could be taken more at face value, and one of the more astounding of the pieces of footage of a UFO from the time is not only one of the earliest films of a UFO, but also one of the most intriguing and oft-discussed.

On August 15, 1950, an unassuming minor-league baseball manager by the name of Nick Mariana, of Great Falls, Montana, was going about a usual day. On this day he went to the baseball stadium to inspect the site before a big game for his team the Great Falls Electrics, and it was completely routine, no reason to suspect that the day was about to get very strange, indeed. He was there with his 19-year-old secretary, Virginia Raunig, and as they went about their inspection at around 11:30 a.m. a bright flash in the sky caught Mariana’s attention. When he looked up, he saw two bright silvery objects that seemed to be rotating and speeding along at an estimated speed of between 200 and 400 miles per hour, with each of the objects around 50 feet in diameter. Raunig had seen the strange objects as well, and for a few moments they just stared in disbelief. Incredibly, Mariana was able to overcome his awe and fascination to remember that he had a 16mm camera back at his car, and he ran to get it.

Upon returning to the field, the anomalous objects were still up there moving in a formation and keeping a steady distance of around 50 to 100 feet between them. Mariana started up his camera and was able to take 16 seconds of color footage of the mysterious objects, which the very next day was doing the rounds in the news, appearing in the local paper the Great Falls Tribune, and from there it would attract a great amount of attention from all over. The footage went on to get nationwide coverage, with Mariana further spreading the word through private showings at various local community groups. At the time, UFOs were a hot topic, with the late 1940s really kicking off the craze of “flying saucers” and stories about alien invasions all the rage, so what was being called the “Mariana footage” really hit a nerve and sparked much excitement, controversy, and fear. At the time the footage was a pretty big deal. You can see some of the footage here.

A shot from the Marianas footage

Among those who took an interest in the footage was the U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Air Force Captain John P. Brynildsen arrived in Great Falls to interview Mariana on the incident. He would learn that both of the witnesses had also seen two jet fighters fly over the stadium shortly after taking the footage, which they had assumed to be the military perhaps pursuing the objects. This was a curious detail, as it suggested to Brynildsen that perhaps what they had seen were just the two jets. He managed to procure a portion of the footage and send it to Wright-Patterson AFB for analysis, where it was quickly written off as merely the reflections of the two F-94 jet fighters that were officially confirmed to have been flying over at the time. However, this explanation did not sit well with everyone.

In 1952, the United States government had launched an official investigation into unidentified flying objects called Project Blue Book, which evolved from another study of UFOs started in 1949 called Project Grudge. Although Project Grudge had agreed that the Mariana footage was just fighter jets, when Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt took the reigns of the newly minted Project Blue Book, he wasn’t so sure, thinking that perhaps the footage had been written off prematurely. Interestingly, as all of this was going on, Mariana would complain that sections of the footage he had submitted to the Air Force were missing, specifically frames which proved that the objects were rotating or spinning, something the military denied.

Ruppelt was not only able to arrange for another, more detailed analysis to be done on the film, but also get Mariana’s permission to resubmit the footage again. This time, analysts came to the conclusion that the objects seen in the film were not birds, balloons, or meteors, and they also ruled out the original idea that these were just F-94 jets. Ruppelt was also able to ascertain that the jets were nowhere near the stadium at the time of the sighting, making it even less likely that they could have accounted for what was seen in the film. Whereas the first analysis had quickly explained it all away, this time the Air Force had no choice but to concede that it was “an unknown.” In 1954 the footage was under the microscope again when it was used in a UFO documentary for Greene-Rouse productions. The documentary hired a scientist and engineer for the Douglas Aircraft company by the name of M.L. Baker, Jr. to take a look at the film, who also rejected the hypothesis that the objects were reflections of fighter jets. Baker would conclude in a Congressional hearing on UFOs concerning the Mariana footage:

Preliminary analysis excluded most natural phenomena. More detailed study indicated that the only remaining natural phenomenon candidate for the Utah film was birds in flight, and for the Montana film it was airplane fuselage reflections of the sun. After about 18 months of rather detailed, albeit not continuous, study using various film-measuring equipment at Douglas and at UCLA, as well as analysis of a photogrammetric experiment, it appeared that neither of these hypothesized natural phenomena explanations had merit.

In the end, in Baker’s opinion, the objects were an unknown. For the next decade the Mariana footage was much discussed and debated, and then in 1966 it became the subject of another official investigation, this time by an Air Force funded study of the UFO phenomenon based at the University of Colorado at Boulder and run by the physicist Dr. Edward U. Condon. Called The Condon Report, the study looked at all manner of UFO reports, and this time they had their sights set on the Mariana footage. Condon recruited physicist Dr. Roy Craig and psychologist Dr. David Saunders to re-examine the footage and they would come up with mixed results. While Saunders thought the footage had merit, Craig was mostly skeptical of the whole thing, doubting several elements of Mariana’s story, including when it was actually taken and his claims that parts of the film had been taken by the Air Force. Another specialist called in by the Condon report was Dr. William Hartmann, an astronomer for the University of Arizona, who also analyzed the footage and could not rule out that the objects seen are airplanes.

Indeed, the identity of the objects in the Mariana footage has never been adequately resolved, and even now it is picked apart and debated. That a piece of footage from so many decades ago is still unsolved and discussed to this day is fairly impressive, especially since these were the days before photoshop and digital manipulation of film, and the Mariana footage is still of much interest in the UFO field. Copies of the film reside at the US National Archives and it still gets heavy play in UFO documentaries and TV shows, and whether real or not, it has earned a high place among the countless pieces of UFO footage out there. Real or not, the Marianas footage has its place in the UFO lore, and has never been fully explained.

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Throughout the decades there have been many photos presented as evidence of UFOs and aliens. Such photos and films are countless, and they go way back through time, to before any sort of the photo manipulation methods we have at out disposal today. Here we will look at a selection of curious photos from the 1960s, which real or not have managed to make their mark.

In 1960 there is a case from the country of Argentina, which would soon become one of the most well-known UFO incidents in a country already considered a hotspot for the phenomenon. On July 3, 1960, Hugo F. Niotti, then a captain of the Argentinean Air Force (AAF), assigned to the Air Force School for Sub-officers located in the city of Cordoba, was out driving from Yacanto toward Cordoba when near the area of Villa General Belgrano he noticed a bizarre object hovering off the side of the road to his right. Niotti stopped his car and had the presence of mind to snap off a single photograph of the object before it suddenly shot off at astounding speed out of sight. He would say of what he had seen;

The object was conical in shape, with a height of 7-8 meters and a base diameter of 3-4 meters, with its axis almost parallel to the ground and its base facing the witness. The color of the object was a uniform dark gray. The surface was perfectly smooth without joints or rivets and had a definite metallic aspect. It was at a distance of 80 to 100 meters from his location and moving very slowly toward the south, perhaps at 10 KPH, always parallel to the ground. It was rotating, also very slowly. It then accelerated very rapidly, attaining a speed of perhaps 200 KPH in 3 or 4 seconds, and disappeared into the low cloud bank. This sudden acceleration without any sound was inexplicable.

The Yacanto photograph

The confused and awed Niotti would continue on to Cordoba, turning over what he had seen in his head over and over along the way, and as soon as he arrived, he had his film processed. What he saw in the picture astounded him, but he was not willing to release it because he did not want to tarnish his military reputation and career, but he eventually was persuaded to release it to the Servicio de Informaciones de Aeronautica (SIA), which deemed them to be authentic and then passed them along to the Air Force. The photos gradually leaked to the public and were widely dissected and discussed. UFO Dr. Willy Smith would conclude that the photograph was very compelling, and would give his own thoughts as follows:

A case with a single witness usually is not even considered, but in this instance we have two circumstances that allow an exception to the rule. First, we have a competent witness, trained by his profession to observe details, who did not lose his presence of mind when confronted with the unknown. On the contrary, he reacted promptly, snatching his camera and jumping out of his car to obtain a unique graphic document. And second, the photograph by itself lends enough credibility to the case to make it deserve serious consideration. Not only has the photo repeatedly been shown to be genuine, but it is inconceivable that the Air Force officer would compromise his career with a fabrication that would bring him nothing but problems and discredit. For those who know Vice-commodore Niotti, this option is unthinkable.

What does this photo show? Is it a hoax, and if so, why would a well-respected, high ranking military official do that? Or perhaps he was hoaxed himself? We may never know for sure. In 1965 there is another piece of photographic evidence from a traditionally reliable source. On August 2, 1965 in Sherman, Texas, a television cameraman named Robert Campbell was interviewing policeman Peter McCollum in the wake of a spate of sightings in the area of a massive glowing UFO that had caused a deluge of calls from panicked residents. Campbell had been alerted to this through scanning short wave radio conversations between two police highway patrols. Before long, during that interview the two men saw it for themselves as the glowing cylindrical object hovered in a stationary position nearby. Campbell was able to get a series of four photographs of the thing before it flew off. Unfortunately, the photos would come out overexposed, but no explanation has been forthcoming. Interestingly, the object was witnessed by numerous solid witnesses, including Highway patrolman Bill Quires and Department of Public Safety Dispatcher Jim Faglia. What does the photo show? It is hard to say.

The Sherman, Texas photo

Rather weirdly, just the following day there was another unrelated case from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where at 1:30 a.m. a Mr. A. L. Smith, his 14-year-old son Alan, and three other witnesses saw a brightly glowing, multicolored object in the sky. The mysterious object moved slowly towards the witnesses, before hovering nearby as if watching them, and it is then that Smith would snap off a photo of it before it shot off into the night. The resulting photo would heavily make the rounds at the time, appearing in Life Magazine and generating a lot of excitement due to its clarity, and many analyses done on it have been unable to conclude what it actually is.

The Oklahoma photograph

The 1960s can also claim perhaps one of the most famous supposed alien images ever taken. On 24th May 1964, Jim Templeton, a fireman in Carlisle in the North of England, was out with his wife and young daughter at a place called Solway Firth. They would report that the day had been a bit odd in that they had been constantly aware of a sort of electrical charge in the air, almost like a storm was coming despite the clear, calm weather at the time. The spent the day there taking various photos but despite that creepy electrical charge they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. It was only when they got home and had the film developed that things would get weird.

In the photo was seen to be a figure in some sort of silvery white “space suit” looming in the background over the daughter as she sits there holding a bunch of flowers smiling and completely oblivious to its presence. It was completely odd, as the Templetons would insist that there had been no one else there at the time and no rational explanation for it. When police were notified and the photo was examined, it was found to not be a double exposure, making it all very mysterious indeed. Making it even weirder still is that Templeton would claim that he was being visited by shadowy men who would pass by his house wearing black suits and driving a black car, and eventually come to his doorstep. These two men would act bizarrely, refer to each other with numbers, and allegedly ask Templeton about the photograph and the conditions that it was taken under, before telling him that he had merely taken a picture of a guy walking by to essentially photobomb the shot, something Templeton denied. The two mysterious men then became agitated and drove off in their unmarked car.

The Solway Firth Spaceman

The photo has since been widely picked apart and is mostly thought of as a hoax or a shot of someone simply walking by in the background, but what has come to be called the “Solway Firth Spaceman” has nevertheless gone on to be one of the most instantly recognizable and iconic supposed photos of an alien there is.  It joins the ranks of mysterious photographs that have, whether real or not, set the stage for supposed photographic evidence from then on out, and whatever one wants to believe we can expect photos like this to continue coming in for the foreseeable future.

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Photographic evidence of UFOs has always been pretty shaky at best. Among all of the videos and photos of supposed UFOs there are the hoaxes and fakes, and this has only become more pronounced in recent years with the advent of advanced means to fake photos such as Photoshop. Yet controversial photos and video footage of UFOs go way back in time, to the days before Photoshop and computer manipulation, back to the simpler times of the 1950s.

By far the most famous and iconic purported UFO photos from the 1950s were taken by a couple by the name of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Trent, in rural McMinnville, Oregon. On May 11, 1950, Mrs. Trent was out on their farm when she allegedly noticed a strange, disc-like object flying out over their property. She immediately called out in a panic to her husband, who ran over to see it as well, managing to take two photographs of it before it shot off. These photos would hit the media, including Life Magazine and create quite the stir at the time. They were the clearest photographs ever seen of a “flying saucer,” which was a concept that was at the time just starting to really take off in the mainstream. For a long time, these photographs were widely discussed and debated, going on to become iconic in the UFO field, but it wasn’t until nearly two decades later that the Trent photographs would be subjected to any detailed analysis, by an astronomer from the University of Arizona, William K. Hartmann. After performing a painstakingly meticulous investigation of the photos, using various scientific photographic analysis techniques and photometric measurements with the original negatives, he came to the conclusion that they were the real deal, saying:

It appears significant that the simplest most direct interpretation of the photographs confirms precisely what the witnesses said they saw. To the extent that the photometric analysis is reliable, (and the measurements appear to be consistent), the photographs indicate an object with a bright shiny surface at considerable distance and on the order of tens of meters in diameter. While it would be exaggerating to say that we have positively ruled out a fabrication, it appears significant that the simplest most direct interpretation of the photographs confirms precisely what the witnesses said they saw, and that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of [the] two witnesses.

One of the Trent photos

Of course, not everyone agreed, with more skeptical photographic analyses coming to the conclusion that the UFO was faked, which is not really hard to guess since looking back on the photos now they are obviously a hoax. However, experts continued to defend them as genuine, including optical physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who did his own analysis and insisted that it was an object “over 1 kilometer away, and about 30 meters in diameter and 4 meters thick,” while also debunking many of the skeptical arguments. The Trent photographs are now widely considered to be faked, but they are an interesting case of early UFO photographs astounding everyone when they were first released.

Another set of photos that made waves in their day were taken in 1952, in Barra da Tijuca, Brazil. On May 7, 1952, press photographer Ed Keffel and reporter Joao Martins were in the area on an assignment when they spotted a strange object in the sky moving very fast at approximately 4:30 p.m.  They at first thought it was a plane, but soon realized that this was something else, as it was flying too fast and in a very odd manner. It looked like some sort of flying disc, and Keffel was able to shake off his astonishment enough to take a series of five photographs of the object before it disappeared. These photos would later appear in O Cruzeiro magazine in its May 24, 1952 issue, where they immediately earned wide acclaim for being among the best photographic evidence of UFOs ever taken. The Brazilian Air Force would even conduct a full analysis of the photos and deem them to be genuine, but of course skeptics say it is all a hoax, citing inconsistencies in the lighting and shadows that contradict the witness claims, but Keffel and Martins have always defended the photographs, with Marin saying:

I herewith confirm that in May 1952, I saw an “unidentified aerial object” at Barra da Tijuca, as was published, with every detail, in the review [magazine] 0 Cruzeiro at the time. Together with me was the photographer-reporter Ed Keffel, an exemplary professional, well-succeeded and well-respected for his honesty and seriousness, who obtained a series of photos of the above-referred object. These photos were also published by the above-mentioned review, for which both of us worked at the time. Besides being a journalist, I am also an engineer; and I also have a large experience and knowledge of meteorological, astronomical, and optical phenomena. I have experience of all known types of aircraft and can state that the referred object cannot be framed in any natural phenomena or aircraft of my knowledge.

Neither I nor Ed Keffel tried to derive any financial profit from the fact. We were at the time exclusively contracted by that review [0 Cruzeiro], and there we handed in our report and the photos, without receiving any extra bonus for either. Neither did we receive-nor did we wish to-any payment from anybody, either for the account or for the photos or for the appearances we were practically obliged to make on different occasions on television… I narrated the fact in free talks to military authorities and university auditoriums. I do not know what that object was, and because of this, I classified it in the category of “unidentified flying object”, commonly called a “flying saucer.” The incident, besides the annoyances it entailed, contrived to call my attention on the subject as an only advantage, and consequently I have done research on the subject with the greatest detachment, both in sightings here in Brazil and abroad.

The Brazil photo

Also from 1952 is an actual color film taken of a supposed UFO in the U.S. state of Utah. On this occasion, Warrant Officer D.C. Newhouse was out with his wife in the vicinity of Tremonton, Utah, when they witnessed a formation of flat and circular disc-shaped flying craft flying across the sky in broad daylight. Newhouse happened to have a 16mm color camera with a 3-inch telephoto lens, with which he was able to film the mysterious objects as they traversed the sky. The excited Newhouse would perhaps foolishly submit the film to the Air force, who later returned the film with sections and frames mysteriously missing. The Air Force concluded that the film was of out of focus seagulls, but if this were the case, then why had portions of the film been removed? This was never explained. Other experts who looked at the film debunked the seabird theory, such as Dr. Robert M.L. Baker, Jr., Douglas Aircraft Corporation, who said:

The motion of the objects is not exactly what one would expect from a flock of soaring birds, not the slightest indication of a decrease in brightness due to periodic turning with the wind or flapping. The evidence remains rather contradictory and no single hypothesis of a natural phenomenon yet suggested seems to completely account for the UFO involved.

What did Newhouse film out there? You can see the footage here and decide for yourself. Another photo of a UFO from the same year comes to us from the country of Peru, where on the afternoon of July 19 of that year a Sr. Domingo Troncoso, then with the Peruvian Customs Office at Puerto Maldonado on the jungle choked Bolivian border, saw a gigantic cigar-shaped object soaring over the rainforest leaving a trail of smoke or mist behind it. Troncoso was able to take a single photo of the object before it shot off out of sight. Apparently at the same time, other witnesses in the region had seen it as well, and one Peruvian UFO researcher would tell the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) of this:

In Lima I met Senior Pedro Bardi, who is an agricultural engineer. On July 19, 1952, while on a farm in the Madre de Dios section of Peru, he and others saw a saucer. It was about 4.30 p.m. and they were talking to Lima by radio. Suddenly, according to Bardi, the radio went dead. They looked out the window and saw a round object going by at high speed. (The witnesses included Pedro Arellano, owner of the farm). The object had passed; it was at an estimated 100 meters altitude and was a little smaller than a DC-3, according to Bardi. It made a buzzing sound as it went by.

The object’s speed was determined by a report that it was seen four minutes later near Porto Maldonado, 120 kilometers distant. This speed was computed at 1117 miles per hour. The photograph was secured from a customs administrator named Domingo Troncosco, who said he had taken it as the object flew near the port. Though the photo shows a cigar-shaped object instead of the round shape Bardi described, this could possibly have been due to an elongated effect caused by speed. It seems obvious to me that the photo is genuine. Incidentally, I strongly doubt if this particular saucer was anything but earth-made. The object traveled from left to right at about airplane speed. When the trail settled to ground it turned out to be a mass of thin fibrous threads.

Troncoso’s photograph

Moving ahead to 1957, there is a curious set of photographs taken from the British ship S.S. Ramsay by a radio officer named Thad Fogl. At the time, the ship was near the coast of California when Fogle was called to the deck by the excited 2nd Officer at around 2:30 p.m. When he arrived on deck, he found other crew members staring in awe at a massive disc hanging in the sky. He would later tell Flying Saucer Review Magazine of what happened next:

Without being told twice, I grabbed my Yashica C reflex camera from my wardrobe and dashed on the side of the bridge. Sure enough, there was a queer looking object hovering in the distance. It was suitable for a shot so I waited. In the meantime, I tried to keep under control my shaking knees and hands, and watched the disc. It made no noise and was not more than a mile away. It was silver and black. There was no smoke or any gases coming from it. However, under the disc, a red light pulsated.

We thought it tried to signal, so the 2nd Officer grabbed the Aldis and flicked back, but there was no response. At last the disc came down near enough and I got one shot. Then it turned and I shot again. The disc was rather thick, and had a flat dome. There were no ports. However, there were some black marks, and I wonder if they were not some sort of exhausts. Then we noticed a ladder! Whether it really was a ladder I can’t say. It could be some depression in the craft. The object moved very slowly and stayed with us for a few minutes. Then it shot with quick acceleration towards a rugged mountain, and the desert coast of sun-baked California.

One of Fogle’s photographs

The photographs would turn out to be incredibly clear and showed something that seemed decidedly otherworldly. These photos would be published in several high-profile publications, including The London Illustrated News and Life magazine, earning Fogle much unwanted publicity, much of it negative. His photos were widely derided as clear fakes, and seeking to avoid any more embarrassment, he would say that he had indeed hoaxed them, although he would later claim that this was just to dispel all of the negative publicity being aimed at him and to get everyone off his back. After that he refused to talk on the matter anymore, even though there were plenty of believers who suspected that the photos were actually real. Indeed, we are left to ask if any of these could possibly be real, but real or not, they form the first stirrings of a wave of the proposed photographic UFO evidence that was to come, and have their own place within the world of Ufology.

In many ways the 1940s were a sort of golden era for UFOs, and ushered in the phenomenon as we know it today, as well as the term “flying saucers.” Beginning with the Foo Fighters of World War II, which were strange lights in the sky observed by both sides of the war, from there the phenomenon would really take off. While World War II had its Foo Fighters, most pilot encounters with UFOs were still obscure, and only really started to appear shortly after perhaps the most famous pilot encounter in history, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen a line of nine shiny fast-moving objects at Mt. Rainier, Washington on June 24, 1947. The sighting would launch the idea of “flying saucers” into the public consciousness, and although there had been UFOs sightings much earlier than this, Arnold’s account was the first one to really hit the mainstream news, and is largely credited with launching the mainstream UFO phenomenon as we know it today. After this there would be a string of similar reports of pilots encountering UFOs throughout the 1940s, and here we will look at a selection of these, ranging from the odd to the harrowing.

On July 16, 1947, just a month after the Arnold encounter, a witness and pilot stationed with the Aircraft Distribution Officer of the Far East Air Materiel Command in Fuchu, Japan had a rather strange sighting. On this occasion he was not actually flying the plane, but rather riding along on a mission to bring a B-17 aircraft to Middletown Air Depot, Pennsylvania in order for it to undergo various modifications to make it into an air rescue craft, mostly equipping it with features for sea rescues. This went through as planned smoothly, and then they made the return trip headed back to Japan, and this is where things would get strange. The witness says that he was at the nose of the craft as they headed out over the area of Promontory Point, Utah, when he observed some strange objects that seemed to be ascending from the Salt Flats. He said of what happened:

At first I thought they were big white birds but they were coming towards our aircraft at such great speed that I became alarmed. However, in just a few moments they veered to the left of our aircraft, but close enough for me to identify them as nine round disks, approximately 40-60 feet in diameter with light blue underbellies. They were in what appeared to be a V formation of three, three, and three. They passed off the left wing of our aircraft in a climbing flight. I immediately made my way to the cockpit to advise the pilot of my sighting. He had not seen them. However, the flight engineer, Technical Sergeant GJH (name withheld), Serial Number AFxxxxxxxx, did see them and confirmed my sighting. We only differed on one thing. He saw them as they were a little lower than our aircraft and he described the top of them as sand colored. I had been in the Philippines Islands and Japan for approximately for 18 months and had not been aware of the UFO excitement in the States at that time. The weather over the sighting area was perfectly clear and there was no way that I could have been mistaken about what I had seen.

B-17

He made a report of the odd incident but after that it seems to have just been quietly filed away to be forgotten. In that same year, a Mr. John H. Janssen was flying his private plane from Morristown Airport in New Jersey on the morning of July 10, 1947, when he saw in the sky above him “six, luminous spherical craft with hazy rings around them” apparently flying in a tight formation. He claimed to have managed to take a photo of the objects before they disappeared from sight. Then on July 23, he saw the objects again in the same area as he was flying at an altitude of 6,000 feet. He would say in a report to NICAP of this sighting and the strange events that would play out:

While my eyes played over the horizon, I became aware of a shaft of light that seemed like that of a photographer’s flash bulb. It came from aloft, very high up. It was above that position over my plane’s nose that flier’s call 11 O’clock. At first, I thought it was merely the reflected sun bouncing off the sides of an exceedingly high flying aircraft. I gave it no more thought. But then the engine of my own plane began to perform peculiarly. It coughed and sputtered spasmodically. So I pulled on the carburetor heat and gave it full throttle hoping to thaw any ice that might be accumulating in the carburetor. The engine emitted one final wheezing cough and then quit. Now, the nose of my plane, instead of dropping to a normal glide, remained… rigid… fixed on the horizon, in its normal level flight attitude.

Abruptly, I became aware that my plane was now defying the basic law of gravity. I became frightened and close to panic at so weird a predicament. I saw that the airspeed indicator was at zero! There was now an odd prickling, electric-like sensation coursing through my body. I had an eerie feeling that I was being watched and examined by something that minutely studied my features, my clothing, and my airplane… I flicked a cold bead of perspiration from my eye. Then I saw it! Above and slightly beyond my left wing tip was a strange wraith-like craft, one of the flying objects! Its flanged and protecting rim was dotted on either side with steamer-like portholes. It seemed to radiate a dull metallic hue that conveyed an impression of natural strength, and a super-intelligence not of this planet. It was motionless. Perhaps a quarter of a mile away… beyond, and slightly higher, I could see another (similar) object, seemingly fixed in the sky. I assumed that the second strange ship was but waiting for the one nearest me to complete its examination. Then I had the most unaccountable urge to reach up and snap on the magneto switch. I had turned it off when the engine quit. I switched both magnetos to the on position. Slowly the propeller began to turn… then the engine burst into a steady rhythmic roar. The plane nosed up into a stall, dropped off, picked up airspeed and steadied under control.

It is quite a frightening case, since the object seemed to have had the ability to affect his aircraft, to potentially dangerous effect. One of the most famous, well-publicized, and allegedly deadliest UFO pilot encounters supposedly happened the following year, in January of 1948. It revolves around Kentucky Air National Guard Pilot Captain Thomas F. Mantell, who was an experienced WWII ace pilot and a war hero, being the recipient of awards such as the Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal for his brave actions and heroism during the war. In other words, he was no rookie and no nut job, and on January 7, 1948 Mantell was piloting a F-51D Mustang along with three other pilots from the 165th Fighter Squadron of the Kentucky Air National Guard, in the area of Godman Field, at Fort Knox, Kentucky on a training exercise, when a strange series of events began to unfold.

It started with a report to Godman field from a Kentucky highway patrolman warning that he had seen a large circular object about 300 feet in diameter in the sky near Maysville, Kentucky, after which several other reports came in of people seeing the same thing in the vicinity of Owensboro and Irvington. Shortly after this, at approximately 1:45 PM, a Sgt. Quinton Blackwell at Fort Knox made visual contact with the object along with two other personnel in the tower, and it was described as being “very white” with a red border at the bottom. It was also seen at Clinton County Army Air Field in Ohio, with the witnesses saying it had “the appearance of a flaming red cone trailing a gaseous green mist,” and an observer at Lockbourne Army Air Field in Ohio reported that it had dipped all the way down to the ground, only to suddenly soar to an altitude of 10,000 feet and speed off.

Seeing the object as a potential threat to air traffic in the area and looking to find out exactly what it was, Mantell and the other pilots in the air in the area at the time were ordered to go investigate. One of them had to return to base after he ran low on fuel, but the other three dutifully approached the mysterious object, and Mantell would make visual confirmation, reportedly telling air traffic control that it was “metallic and of tremendous size.” The other pilots would give a slightly different description, saying that they could not exactly make out what it was as it was too indistinct at the time. They advised Mantell to hold off on pursuing it until they could more concretely identify what it was, but the WWII fighter ace ignored this and tore off after it in hot pursuit.

The other two pilots followed him as he gained altitude, but were then forced to abort because one of the pilots had a low oxygen supply and the other had no oxygen mask at all, so they were unable to climb too high. They were forced to break off and head back as Mantell continued to chase the anomalous object, which seemed to be retreating upwards, passing an altitude of 22,500 feet. As he passed this threshold, it seems that Mantell must have blacked out from a lack of oxygen, as his plane was seen to stop its ascent and then begin a spiraling, circular fall towards the earth. The out-of-control descent ended with Mantell’s aircraft careening down to crash into a farm south of Franklin, Kentucky at 3:18 PM, and emergency crews were immediately sent out to the site. The UFO itself then vanished from view and was not seen again.

Image by Steve Baxter

It wasn’t thought that Mantell could have possibly survived the horrific crash, and this was indeed correct. The pilot was found dead and burned in the wreckage, and there were some odd clues found in that the seatbelt had been shredded and his watch had stopped at exactly the time that the plane had come down. It is uncertain what else was found there, but considering that a UFO had been involved and the story began getting splashed all over the media, rumors would soon begin to fly. Various rumors said such myriad mysterious things as that Mantell’s body had been found unburned and fully intact, that it had been full of bullet holes or alternately tiny burned holes indicative of some unknown laser weapon, or that there had been no body at all, as well as that the entire plane had actually been disintegrated in mid-air, or that the wreckage had been magnetized or radioactive. There was absolutely no evidence for any of this, but the public ate it up and it created an added mystique to it all. One witness who claims to have actually visited the crash site is Captain James F. Duesler, who was one of several military officers at Godman at the time, and would come forward in 1997 to say of what he saw at the site:

The wings and tail section had broken off on impact with the ground, and were a short distance from the plane, he recalled. There was no damage to the surrounding trees and it was obvious that there had been no forward or sideways motion when the plane had come down. It just appeared to have “belly flopped” into the clearing. There was very little damaged to the fuselage, which was in one piece, and no signs of blood whatsoever in the cockpit. “There was no scratching on the body of the fuselage to indicate any forward movement and the propeller blade bore no telltale scratch marks to show it had been rotating at the time of impact, and one blade had been embedded into the ground. The damage pattern was not consistent with an aircraft of this type crashing at high speed into the ground. Because of the large engine in the nose of the plane, it would come down nose first and hit the ground at an angle. Even if it had managed to glide in, it would have cut a swath through the trees and a channel into the ground. None of these signs were present. All indications were that it had just belly-flopped into the clearing. I must admit, I found this very strange.

Theories at the time ran amok that he had been shot down by a top-secret air craft or even a UFO. As far as the military was concerned, it was a classified issue, but many Air Force officials said that they believed that Mantell had died after misidentifying the planet Venus for an unidentified object and then losing oxygen as he got too high in his pursuit of it. However, this hypothesis seems pretty odd, as according to astronomers Venus at the time was not bright enough to be seen, at most as a vague pinpoint of light, let alone mistaken for an enormous metallic craft like that described. The official stance would change when it was found that the Navy had been carrying out a top-secret program called Project Skyhook at the time, which entailed testing the use of special high-altitude meteorological balloons for the purpose of intelligence gathering. The idea was that the balloon could have been mistaken for a mysterious craft, and then foolishly pursued by Mantell. Of course, considering that the official stance is rarely completely trusted by the public, there is of course the idea that he really did chase an alien UFO.

There are a few problems with the balloon theory, such as why such an experienced pilot would not recognize it for what it was, and the fact that the object was also tracked by numerous other trained sources who also did not recognize it as a balloon, and the fact that no one seems to be able to tell if there was even one of those balloons in the area at the time. It also seems to have displayed very non-weather balloon-like behavior with the report of the object dipping down to ground level and shooting up to the sky, as well as displaying amazing acceleration. Whatever it was that Mantell chased or thought he was chasing, it has never really been satisfactorily explained, and nothing really matches all of the details, the experience of the pilot, and the preceding sightings by numerous other observers before the incident. It has gone on to have the distinction of being the first known death of a pilot directly as a result of a UFO, in this case not necessarily an alien craft, but an unidentified object. In the end, it is a weird tale with many unanswered questions, and has become perhaps the most well-known case of a pilot engaging an unidentified flying object.

The year 1948 seems to have been the year for this sort of thing, because another very similar case allegedly occurred in October of that year, this time in the skies over Fargo, North Dakota, in the United States. On October 1, 1948, a veteran fighter pilot of the Second World War by the name of George Gorman was on a cross country flight as a second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard. On this day he was travelling as a part of a squadron of P-51 Mustangs on a training flight, and they made their scheduled destination of Fargo at 8 PM that evening. While the other pilots landed, Gorman went off to do some night flight practice in the clear weather. After 1 hour of this, at 9 PM Gorman would report that he had seen a bright blinking light that did not seem to have a fuselage or to be a normal airplane in any sense that he could tell. He radioed in the strange object to Fargo’s Hector Airport, and it turned out that no other aircraft was in the area except him and a small Piper Cub that Gorman could see even as he witnessed the mysterious light. It soon became apparent that the Piper Club was also witnessing the anomalous object, and this was enough to make Gorman decide to approach it to see what it was, soon finding that it was moving very rapidly, and it seemed to be evading his attempts to close in on it even as it seemed to taunt him, at one point whizzing by a mere 500 feet away. However, because of this he was able to get a closer visual, and would explain that it was little more than an intensely bright light only perhaps around 8 inches in diameter, and that it got brighter whenever it slowed down. He would say of this encounter:

It was about six to eight inches in diameter, clear white, and completely round without fuzz at the edges [i.e., sharp and clear]. It was blinking on and off. As I approached, however, the light suddenly became steady and pulled into a sharp left bank. I thought it was making a pass at the tower. I dived after it and brought my manifold pressure up to sixty inches but I couldn’t catch up with the thing. It started gaining altitude and again made a left bank, I put my F-51 into a sharp turn and tried to cut the light off in its turn. By then we were at about 7,000 feet. Suddenly it made a sharp right turn and we headed straight at each other. Just when we were about to collide, I guess I got scared. I went into a dive and the light passed over my canopy at about 500 feet. Then, it made a left circle about 1,000 feet above, and I gave chase again.

Gorman on the left

Gorman would proceed to doggedly pursue the object, which climbed and dropped at a rapid pace, sometimes drawing the pilot to such an altitude that his plane stalled, moved with incredible dexterity, circled around him, and on several occasions buzzed by dangerously close. This “dogfight” brought them directly over the Fargo Airport, where it was also clearly witnessed by air traffic control and ground personnel, who also watched as Gorman’s plane chased it right past them to the southwest. One of the air traffic controllers at the time would say of what he saw:

After passing to the east of the airport it seemed to take a northwest heading, The object seemed to be at about 2,000 feet and appeared to be traveling at quite an excessive speed compared to a Piper Cub that was east of the field at the time. No definite outline could be identified. Both objects [the UFO and the Piper Cub] were sighted at the same time. It was an object or a light traveling at a high rate of speed, apparently on a southwest heading. The F-51 [Gorman’s plane] was some distance behind and the object was traveling fast enough to increase the spacing between itself and the fighter. The object appeared to be only a round light, perfectly formed, with no fuzzy edges or rays leaving its body. The edges were clear cut. No other shape was observed. The main identifying characteristic was the high rate of speed at which it was apparently traveling.

Gorman would continue his pursuit, managing to get above the object and make a dive on it, after which he claims that it made a sudden vertical maneuver to go shooting past and disappear up into higher altitudes. Unable to get another visual on the object, Gorman gave up and flew back to the airport to land, where he would go on to give a formal account of what happened, saying:

I am convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvers. I am further convinced that the object was governed by the laws of inertia because its acceleration was rapid but not immediate and although it was able to turn fairly tight at considerable speed, it still followed a natural curve. When I attempted to turn with the object I blacked out temporarily due to excessive speed. I am in fairly good physical condition and I do not believe that there are many if any pilots who could withstand the turn and speed effected by the object, and remain conscious. The object was not only able to out turn and out speed my aircraft … but was able to attain a far steeper climb and was able to maintain a constant rate of climb far in excess of my aircraft.

P-51 Mustangs

Gorman, the pilot of the Piper Cub, and other witnesses to the incident would be intensively questioned by the Air Force and the aircraft involved extensively checked for radiation or magnetism, finding Gorman’s plane to be significantly more radioactive than it should have been. At first the Air Force were forced to concede that “something remarkable had occurred,” but perhaps not surprisingly to the conspiracy minded they soon changed their tune. Their new theory? It was a weather balloon. Not only that, but to make it more bizarre they claimed that not only had Gorman frantically chased this balloon, but that he had then mistaken the planet Venus for the object and chased that as well. Remember, this was a war hero ace pilot we are talking about, so does this really make sense? Whether it does or not, this would be the official explanation and still is. We are still left to ask, does a trained and experienced fighter pilot mistake a balloon and Venus for something zipping around doing circles around him and taunting him? It seems odd. Of course, this has been picked apart within the UFO community, and probably will be a mystery for some time to come.

The following year we have another rather well-known case that supposedly played out on July 24 1948 over Montgomery, Alabama. On this day, Captain Clarence S. Chiles, and co-pilot John B. Whitted were flying an Eastern Airlines DC-3 in routine flight from Houston, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia when things would get bizarre. As they were cruising at an altitude of 5,000 over the city of Montgomery, they suddenly noticed a reddish light that appeared to be headed directly at them. Whatever it was passed them in close proximity and at high speed off their starboard side, and both the pilot and c-pilot could see that the object was cigar-shaped, about the size of a B-29 bomber, and had no wings or tail section. It also had two rows of portholes or windows that were glowing brightly like “burning magnesium,” and they also noticed a bluish glow from the bottom of the craft and some sort of fiery exhaust from its rear section. The object was then seen to make a sharp vertical ascent after the near-collision. Both of the witnesses would later claim that they had felt no turbulence as the massive object had passed and heard no sound, although some passengers would report having felt the plane tremble as the object had passed, as well as a sound “like a rocket.” It is a very unusual case that you can read about in far more detail in my article about it here.

From the 1940s, the notion of flying saucers was fully entrenched in the public imagination, and would from there show no signs of letting up, with some of the more perplexing and believable accounts being from the pilots flying around up there with these things. Reading such accounts, it would seem that we are sharing our airspace with something beyond our understanding and ability to rationalize into the universe we think we know. Over the decades there would be numerous other such accounts, and it all really seems to have truly begun in earnest in the 1940s.

Special thanks to Steve Baxter for his artwork and the cover image.

Some of the best and most close proximity UFO encounters are reported from the pilots who are right up there in the skies with these mysterious objects. I have recently done a series of articles covering some of these cases, spanning the 1950s, the 1970s, on into the 1980s, and most recently the 1990s, only really hitting the tip of the iceberg on such reports, which are numerous. Of course it goes beyond even that, well into the present day, and pilots continue to come into contact with things up there that cannot be easily explained. Here let us look at a selection of very odd pilot UFO encounters from the year 2000 and onwards.

One strange case comes from the files of UFO researcher Scott Corrales, with the Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU), and involves a bizarre UFO encounter experienced by a Mexican military Merlin C26/A jet belonging to the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA). On March 5, 2004, the jet was on maneuvers to patrol for drug runners in the area of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, when the pilot picked up a radar hit for an unknown object at an altitude of around 3,500 meters. The very fast-moving object was also seen on the its infrared equipment (FLIR), and the jet followed it only to lose it in the clouds. After that, they then detected more of the objects, 11 in total, which appeared from the clouds to follow and surround the jet. At the time there were eight witnesses to this surreal event, including the pilot, radar operator, FLIR operator, and other monitoring specialists, and they were able to take video footage of some of the objects through the FLIR. Oddly, the objects were only picked up on radar and FLIR, and were not witnessed with the naked eye. All of the crew insisted that these could not have possibly been any normal aircraft. The footage was shown on Mexican news outlets and created quite a stir at the time, although it is a relatively obscure case outside of Spanish speaking sources.

One of the FLIR images of the objects

From the same year is a case from San Francisco, California, involving a passenger airliner making its final approach to San Francisco International Airport on November 3, 2004. As the plane was making its approaching descent, the pilot and co-pilot observed a bright orange light flashing to the west, and it then began to change colors from orange to white in an alternating pattern. They at first thought this must be another plane, but the object soon was behaving in an erratic manner that showed that it was no normal aircraft. The pilot would say of what happened next:

It then began to move in a northeasterly direction. Once again, being in an airplane, it is very easy to think an object is moving, from small corrections the autopilot makes. I found a handful of stars to serve as a reference point and verified that the object was slowly moving north. It moved about 30 degrees and then stopped. Then, it made a slight tangent to the right and continued moving for about 20 more degrees. It stopped and turned again to the right and continued for 10 degrees, then stopped again and disappeared. The whole sighting ran about two minutes or so from start to finish. It was difficult to judge the actual distance and speed. When I talk about ‘moving in degrees and turning,’ I am talking about my cockpit viewpoint and compass degrees. The UFO’s size was very small, about the size of the stars and planets you see in the sky. There were two of us in the cockpit, and we both witnessed the same thing. We were both in awe. I have been flying for 14 years have never witnessed something like this before.

From the following year we have a report from the files of the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), concerning a not a report from the pilot themselves, but rather from a witness on the ground that saw what appears to have been a harrowing encounter between a fighter jet and UFO. On May 27, 2005, the witness was taking a walk at around 11:30 p.m. on a clear, calm night, when his attention was drawn to something very strange playing out in the sky above., which appeared to be a fighter jet engaging with some sort of triangular UFO. The witness says of what he saw:

The craft’s speed was about 500 knots. The craft was perfectly silent and moving rapidly. Several miles behind the craft was what appeared to be a fighter jet moving very rapidly, 600 to 700 knots. As the jet was chasing the craft they both where flying toward my position. I could begin to hear the engines of the jet at that time. It appeared as thought the triangular craft was toying with the jet in that as the jet got closer to the craft, the craft would speed up somewhat and leave the jet behind. As the craft and jet got nearly directly over my location, the triangular craft made a sharp right hand turn the west. The jet was unable to make the turn at the same angle as the craft. The jet’s turn was much more pronounced and made a much wider loop. Due to that, the jet lost quite a bit of ground on the craft during the turn, yet again as both craft began traversing in a straight line toward the west-northwest the craft again appeared to toy with the pursuing jet in the same manner aforementioned. After a few seconds it appeared that the craft accelerated dramatically and left the jet behind. I observed the jet make one tight loop several miles from my position and then turn off to the north-northeast and flew out of my line of sight.

One thing that was odd about the triangular craft was the three lights making up the triangular pattern were not equal in distance. Referencing the wingspan of the jet, two of the lights on the craft were about 50 to 75 feet apart and the third light was approximately 100 to 150 feet from the other two lights. Additionally, the two lights closer together were at the front and the other further away light was at the rear facing the pursuing jet. This made the craft to appear to be moving in reverse. It should be noted, that the color of the triangular craft lights were an unusual milky white color, nothing like that of the very bright red, green and white lights observed on the jet. Tinker Air Force Base, which does have fighters, is located about 25 miles east of my house.

Image by Steve Baxter

Unfortunately, despite an investigation into the alleged incident by NUFORC, they were unable to find any further witnesses to the event, and furthermore the military of course denied that such an event had happened or that it even had any jet in the area at the time at all. It would be very interesting to hear an account from the pilot of that jet, but this seems as if it will never happen, and we are forced to wonder what was going on here. Moving to the year 2007, we come to a report from the Alderney Coast of the UK, where two seasoned airline pilots on two separate unrelated flights both saw something very odd in the sky on April 26 of that year. One of the witnesses was a Captain Ray Bowyer, a pilot for Aurigny Airlines, who says he first noticed a bright yellow light at 3 p.m. around 30 miles from the coast during a flight from Southampton. He would describe it as follows:

It was a very sharp, thin yellow object with a green area. It was 2,000ft up and stationary. I thought it was about 10 miles away, although I later realized it was approximately 40 miles from us. At first, I thought it was the size of a 737. But it must have been much bigger because of how far away it was. It could have been as much as a mile wide It was exactly the same but looked smaller because it was further away. It was closer to Guernsey. I can’t explain it. At first, I thought it might have been a reflection from a vinery in Guernsey, but that would have disappeared quickly. This was clearly visual for about nine minutes. As I got closer to it, it became clear to me that it was tangible. I was in two minds about going towards it to have a closer look but decided against it because of the size of it. I had to think of the safety of the passengers first. I’m certainly not saying that it was something of another world. All I’m saying is that I have never seen anything like it before in all my years of flying.

Another pilot with Blue Island Airlines also reported something very similar in the same area at the same time, yet air traffic control were unable to get a radar signature for what was being reported. One of the air traffic controllers on duty at the time would explain:

The pilot from Blue Islands was en route to Jersey at the same time and as he went past Sark he described an object behind him to his left. The description was very similar to Captain Bowyer’s and they described it as being in exactly the same place. But they were looking at it from opposite sides. The Blue Islands plane was at 3,500ft at the time so, again, both pilots placed it at the same altitude. If the object was stationary, our equipment would not have picked it up because the radar would have screened it out.

The incident was apparently investigated by the Ministry of Defense, but it is unknown what became of it. From the country of Greece, we have an incident from 2009 that involves both civilian airline pilots and fighter jets. On October 11, 2009, Olympic Airways flight 266 was on a routine flight from Athens to London, when at approximately 3:20 a.m. the pilot noticed a very bright object with a “constantly shifting shape” to the west of Athens. At the same time, two other airliners, Olympic Airways flights 730 to Kos and flight 700 to Rhodes, saw the same thing, and it was also witnessed by personnel at the Athens Airport control tower.

As all of this was going on, the Greek Air Force was tracking the object, and considering the object was not responding to efforts to contact it by radio and was violating Greek airspace, two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled and sent to intercept. The fighters approached the location of the mysterious object, but as they drew closer it is reported as having shot off at breathtaking speed to disappear from sight. Very unusually, although the object had been visually identified on the ground and by the pilots, it had at no point actually shown up on radar. After this, Greek officials would try to cover it all up, but the case eventually leaked to the media, after which the Greek Air Force explained it away as a misidentification of the planet Venus. Case closed, yet the several experienced pilots who observed the object dispute this, saying it was no planet, nor any known aircraft they have ever seen. What was going on here? We may never know for sure.

Image by Steve Baxter

Our final and most recent case we will look at comes from 2012, in the country of Scotland. On December 21 of that year, a passenger Airbus 320 with 220 people aboard was about 13 miles outside Glasgow Airport and making preparations to land when a glowing blue and yellow object sped out of nowhere to narrowly miss the plane, whizzing by just 300 feet below it, a hair’s breadth in respect to aviation. It was so close that the pilots had prepared to take evasive action, but it passed by so quickly they had no time to react. The pilot would later report that there had been “a high risk of collision” with the unidentified object, but ground radar picked up nothing. The pilot and co-pilot would both describe the mysterious object as “blue and yellow or silver in color with a small frontal area.” Part of the transcript between the pilot and ground control during the incident reads:

A320: ‘Er yeah we just had something pass underneath us quite close and nothing on TCAS.  Have you got anything on in our area?

Control: ‘Er negative er we’ve got nothing on er radar and we’re n-not talking to any traffic either’

A320: ‘Er not quite sure what it was but it definitely er quite large and it’s blue and yellow’

Control: ‘OK that’s understood, do you have a an estimate for the height?’

A320: ‘Maybe er yeah we were probably about four hundred to five hundred feet above it so it’s probably about three and a half thousand feet. We seemed to only miss it by a couple of hundred feet it went directly beneath us … wherever we were when we called it in it was within about ten seconds… couldn’t tell what direction it was going but it went right underneath us’

An official investigation would be carried out into the matter, which looked into several possible explanations for what had happened, but they were ultimately forced to conclude that it was unexplainable. Part of the official conclusion reads:

The board initially considered likely candidates for the untraced aircraft. The A320 crew had not been able to assimilate any information regarding the form of the untraced aircraft in the fleeting glimpse they had, reporting only a likely colour. Members were of the opinion that, in the absence of a primary radar return, it was unlikely that the untraced aircraft was a fixed-wing or rotary-wing aircraft or man-carrying balloon. It was considered that a meteorological balloon would be radar significant and unlikely to be released in the area of the Airprox. A glider could not be discounted but it was felt unlikely that one would be operating in that area, both due to the constrained airspace and the lack of thermal activity due to the low temperature. Similarly, the board considered that a hang-glider or para-motor would be radar significant and that conditions precluded them, as they did para-gliders or parascenders. Members were unable to reach a conclusion as to a likely candidate for the conflicting aircraft and it was therefore felt that the Board had insufficient information to determine a cause or risk.

Indeed, for all of these cases there seems to be no rational explanation that can trump the experience and observational skills of these pilots. Sadly, most reports like this will never come properly to light, partly because pilots are afraid to put their reputations on the line to file such things, and partly because many of the reports that are made are just explained away and brushed off, often to the disagreement of the witnesses themselves. We are left with some very intriguing accounts by some very credible witnesses who are right up there with the phenomena, often practically rubbing elbows with it, hinting at something very strange going on up in our skies. Whatever that might possibly be remains to be seen.

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