Coast to Coast - Pilot Sightings

 

First, a quick update. Last week I mentioned the flying humans near LAX were thought to be mannikins and drones. This week, it was announced that they might be some sort of balloon advertising a new movie. I’m still unimpressed with these answers and await more information.

However, I began to look for other reports by pilots. They are considered to be trained observers and should be familiar with many mundane objects seen in the air because they spend a lot of time there. They sometimes supply information that is important to science. On June 30,1954, an airline pilot, James R. Howard, reported he had seen a large object on a flight from New York to London. Although the Air Force wrote this off as Mars, the Condon Committee identified the object as a natural phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since, which suggests that something of scientific value would have been learned had they bothered to pursue that. I will note here that both the pilot and co-pilot were interrogated by government officials and told not to talk about the sighting. You can find all the details in The Best of Project Blue Book.

Project Blue Book card providing very little information,
other than the solution was Mars.

Much more recently, on March 19, 2020, the captain of an American Boeing 767 reported an encounter over Mexico. MUFON CAG member, Bob Spearing and MUFON California State Director, Ruben Uriarte investigated the sighting that included pictures of the UFO as well as video.

The sighting began when the first officer, looking toward the left, saw a yellowish light descending that he, at first, thought was a meteor. When it suddenly stopped at the same altitude as the aircraft, he knew that wasn’t the right answer.

The light, or object, flashed a bright beam at the 767 and seemed to be on a collision course. The pilots thought they were looking at the landing lights of an oncoming aircraft. As they began to take evasive action, the beam disappeared and the UFO accelerated, and began pacing the aircraft. The captain said that the UFO stayed about 1200 feet from their airplane.

The light was described as tear drop shaped, a brilliant yellow-white, had no navigation lights but did seem to have a tail. The encounter lasted for thirty minutes and the crew took eight photographs and four short video segments.

As the aircraft approached the Mexico/US border the UFO began to flicker, changed colors from yellow-white to pinkish/purple, and turned to a perpendicular heading away from the aircraft. It flew parallel to the border without crossing into the United States. The rest of the flight to Memphis was uneventful.

Among the conclusions drawn by Uriarte and Spearing were that approaching the 767 from above, stopping/hovering, shining a light on the plane, and then pacing it for over 32 minutes is something that has been seen frequently in the past. The possibility exists that the UFO is a technical device or system under intelligent control. This, they believe, calls for further careful analysis.

To them, this event suggests that UFOs are still a threat to safe aerial navigation. They suggest that flight crews be instructed on procedures if they find themselves in a similar circumstance. You can find the full report here:

https://www.narcap.org/blog/narcaptr20

And remember, this idea that national security is involved in these new UFO reports (Yes, I know we are now supposed to call them UAPs, but I wonder why), is the reason the millions have been spent studying them lately and there is a call to do it all again. But I remember the Air Force Project Blue Book, and then the Condon Committee, and their conclusions that national security wasn’t an issue and nothing new could be learned by studying UFOs. That seems to have been changed.

The point here is that nothing really has changed. On June 25, eyes were focused on the DNI report on UAPs. Today, we seem to have forgotten all about that. I suppose it will be another 70 years before someone else grabs a few headlines and interest is renewed… Unless, of course the Roswell information is revealed or an alien spacecraft lands in Washington D.C. … I mention Washington because I don’t think our politicians will believe the leaders of another country saying that UFOs are alien spacecraft.