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.

The Coyame UFO Crash

Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte have become two of the most prolific writers of UFO lore and they had produced a new book, The Coyame Incident. This tells the tale of a UFO crash in northern Mexico in 1974, at first recovered by the Mexican Army

but later captured by American military forces. The crash was the result of a collision between a small, general aviation airplane that had taken off from El Paso, Texas, enroute to Mexico City, and a UFO that was tracked by radar into American airspace and then into Mexico.

The story was first reported by Len Stringfield in his UFO Crash/Retrievals: Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors, Status Report VII published in February 1994. His source was Elaine Douglass, a UFO researcher active with Operation Right to Know, who received her copy of the report from JS, who is never identified, and who was apparently a member of something called the “Deneb Team.” This document was entitled, Research Findings on the Chihuahua Disk Crash and was dated March 23, 1992.

Stringfield wasn’t too happy with the data and wrote, “Despite the risk of publishing a bunch of baloney, the full text of the report is reproduced herewith, hoping the incident can be verified or exposed as mis-or-disinformation.” The whole of that report as published by Stringfield follows:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Torres and Uriarte took up the challenge and began an investigation into this tale with the hope of adding to the information available. The result of that investigation is their book.

It is an interesting book that is a fast read. It is loaded with names and dates, but most of it is a description of their travels into Mexico and their attempts to find verification of the crash. From the photographs it is clear that both of them were in Mexico and on the field where a small aircraft did crash in 1974. They found bits of wreckage and evidence of a hot fire. That debris, along with soil samples, was analyzed by an independent laboratory and while not all elements could be identified, that does not lead to the conclusion that there was something alien in it.

They interviewed a man who was retired California police officer who told of seeing a small, strange creature when he visited his grandmother in the Coyame area in 1974 when he was 13. The creature he described was similar to that seen much later in Varginha, Brazil.

But the creature can’t be tied to the UFO crash simply because the officer said that when he told his grandmother about it, she said she had seen the same thing. Her sightings preceded the UFO crash and she had said nothing to the family about it earlier because she didn’t think they would believe her.

Ruben Uriarte and Noe Torres

And here is the problem with the book. It contains other, similar tales that might or might not be related to the UFO crash, if one did take place. The witnesses, interviewed so long after the event remember seeing something that might have fallen in 1974. They might have seen the plane crash. There might have been soldiers in the area.

The major problem is told in an email sent to me. Noe said, “The evidence is definitely thin, as we always say in our presentations. It's an amazing story but one that cries out for more data. We're approaching this continuing research effort with the assistance of our fellow investigators in Mexico.”

And that sums up everything about the book. The evidence is thin but it demands more data. This is the same thing that Stringfield said in 1994 when he first reported the case to a wider audience.

What we have here is an interesting account of an investigation into a reported UFO crash that has little in the way of evidence. That fact is underscored by the lack of information about the small plane crash. That one did crash in the area is not in dispute, but other than that, almost nothing is known about it including the name of the pilot.

Torres and Uriarte are to be commended for their attempt to learn more about this incident. They have added a little data to the report but the real importance of their book is the descriptions of their research. Here we see how they have approached the case, how they investigated it, and what they have found. If for no other reason, this is why the book should be in every UFO researcher’s library. There is something to be learned about research methods here.