My UFO encounters

There’s a lot of talk of strange objects in the skies these days. I’ve had two UFO encounters in my life as a pilot and professional observer of the sky. Here are my stories …

The first was over Florida in the late 1990’s, and I was more a bystander than direct “experiencer”. I was on the way back from a meeting the at National Hurricane Center on a late February evening. A cold front had just passed through, it was a beautiful moonless night. I was at about 7000 feet, just north of Cape Canaveral, on the Jacksonville Center frequency. The radio was fairly quiet, mostly traffic headed to or from the Miami area. Then a Delta flight passing over me at 28,000 feet asked the controller if he had traffic off his right wing. The controller said no, nothing but a Piper Cherokee at 7 thousand. The pilot started to sound worried and agitated, insisting there was a bright red “scintillating” object “pacing us and clearly moving” just off his wing and saying he might need to take evasive action. The controller said there were no primary or secondary targets, and a call in to Patrick AFB (the Air Force Base near Cape Canaveral) had nothing either. I looked up and could see the flashing lights of the cattle car (big passenger jet) passing overhead – and the object. So I came on the air and asked the controller if I could talk to the Delta flight (normally pilots only talk to controllers and vice versa unless the controller clear a direct conversation). I asked the pilot to find a star near the object, and compare the object’s motion with the star. He did, and said now it wasn’t moving. I then explained what it was: the planet Mars, rising in the east, and being near opposition it was far brighter than usual. The super clear air and diffraction as it was rising, as well as the natural effects of bright objects, vibration, and so forth made it appear it was scintillating and moving. The point here is that even an experienced pilot can get duped by an occasional (every couple years) astronomical phenomena and being in the right place at the right time to witness something really pretty.

My second “encounter” was more direct and had a less obvious explanation. I was at 18,000 feet and crossing the Mississippi River headed westbound. Although there were scattered clouds and haze below 10,000 feet, I was in “severe clear”. I saw a solid triangular object moving rapidly from south to north several thousand feet below me. And by rapidly, it was hauling – almost certainly supersonic, with what looked like vorticies behind it from the mach wake. Nothing on TCAS, and by the time I switched on my IR it was out of the view of the camera. It was already moving out of sight and merging with the distant clouds when I noticed movement. Suddenly the scene clicked in my brain. It was a flock of birds, and was probably only a few hundred feet below my altitude. I would have sworn it was solid and lower, but the relative speed and the fact they were so close, combined with the natural tendency of the mind to “fill in” gaps made it a perfect optical illusion. The “mach wake” were birds trailing the main formation. If I hadn’t seen one of the flock changing position I wouldn’t have figured it out, and an experienced observer, pilot, and scientist would have gone down in the annals of UFO sighting history.

Over the years I’ve seen many strange and beautiful things in the sky. Most of the time I was looking for them, or had at least read about them and knew what to expect. The bird encounter was different – I didn’t know bird flocks flew that high, I thought that other than some raptors who soar high, flocks stayed below 5000 feet above ground level. I know most pilots start to relax about bird strikes above 3000. That turns out to be really wrong, that migrating birds (and the Mississippi is a major north/south “flyway”) often fly higher, although fortunately strikes are rare higher up.

So what to make of the current sightings? The disputes in New Jersey between the locals and the blue bellies, um, beloved Federal Agencies, is interesting to watch. Surprised this guy hasn’t shown up:

I can’t exclude that there are real objects out there, and I think most people who report them are sincere. However, I suspect the vast majority, maybe even all of them, are natural or man-made phenomena that are misinterpreted by the observer. Jupiter is at opposition right now and very bright in the east at sunset, and Venus is super bright in the southwest at the same time. Cold fronts are making the air very clear, with objects appearing a lot closer than they would ordinarily. Migrating flocks of birds can, under the right conditions, look solid. And there is a lot of stuff in the sky now – drones, satellites (Elon Musk is littering low earth orbit with his crap), and of course aircraft. If you are not used to looking up, you probably don’t notice them most of the time, so once there is a report of something strange in the skies, more people look up, and see stuff they hadn’t noticed before. So I’m pretty skeptical about all this for the most part.

Be aware that historically our government has used the “we don’t know what it is” explanation as cover for classified operations. It is also very possible there are other, less savory but equally earthbound explanations.

There is one last thing to consider if you have weird hair and think it’s ancient aliens returning to see how we are doing. Creatures with sufficiently advanced technology to cross space probably wouldn’t need to resort to close-up, in-atmosphere observation systems to monitor us. Assuming they’d bother: my guess is there is a “do not taunt the dynamite monkeys” sign somewhere out by the Oort cloud. So I’ll leave you with this …