Is it a bird? Is it a plane...?

[ScatterbrainKid]

Some years ago I happened to pick up a book on UFO's and was amazed at all the eyewitness accounts by civilian and military pilots and crew who made fully-detailed reports,bravely using their full names.
Ever since,I've bought the occasional similar book or magazine to keep abreast of this fascinating subject,and just wonder if any real-life pilot member of this forum has seen or experienced anything in the "inexplicable" category at any time?

[pa2Q2]

I am not a real life pilot but I can categorically say that I have seen what I believe to be a UFO. I was not alone, there were 2 other people with me and immediately after it had happened the local radio was besieged with calls, it was in the local papers and on the news the following day. This happened approximately 4-5 years ago.

It was 0130 and 3 of us were travelling down the A19 in Tyne & Wear (England) in a 3.5ton wagon approaching the A1058/A19 roundabout heading for our outside storage warehouse in Wallsend. As we approached the Atmel (formerly Seimens) factory we noticed bright lights (white, red, green and yellow)in the sky above and infront of us at roughly 1500-2000ft. Now I should point out that aircraft come in quite low and in around the same position as they approach Newcastle airport(EGNT). The difference was this was hovering. Being not far from the Meadowell estate, where all the riots were a good few years back we just assumed it was the police helicopter.

It stayed in that position until we started to come down the bank to the roundabout and then suddenly it became one big orange ball and shot off out to sea at a speed that no helicopter or passenger jet can manage. We are talking out to sea in the blink of an eye. We stopped the wagon and just gawped at each other. None of us could believe it. Within minutes there were people ringing up the local radio station telling what they saw. There were people ringing up saying they could still see the lights out to sea and zooming up and down the coast at amazing speeds.

There was no official explanation as to what it was and radar controllers said they didn't see anything on their scopes, which makes it all the more interesting, as surely even if it was an aircraft or helicopter they would have seen something and could have discounted all the stories.

pa2q2 :-jumpy

[Jeff_DCA]

:-eek Great story there!

I remember once when i was just about to turn in for the night, i was just closing the curtains when i saw a little white dot hovering in the sky. I paused and was looking at it when suddenly it shot upwards at great speed, lighting up the surrounding clouds. Quite a sight!

This kinda stuff fascinates me no end! :D

Regards,

[jwenting]

UFO means nothing more or less than "Unidentified Flying Object".
ANYTHING you see in the sky that you don't recognise is a UFO until such a time as you can recognise it.

I've seen my fair share of UFOs on approach to Schiphol. All of them were aircraft (I did know that already) but I couldn't tell what type from several km away :)

As someone else stated elsewhere: "the real proof of the existence of alien intelligences is that they've not attempted to contact us".

[johnfrum]

Fellow aviators,

This topic is way outside flightsim, but nevertheless:

I've seen some impressive things in the sky over the years and I've been able to identify all but one.

- An extremely bright, slow moving light not long after sunset. Looked at this with a telescope and it turned out to be a teardrop-shaped high altitude research balloon made of some very reflective silvery material that was still catching the sunlight.

- A dull orange pulsating light moving with the breeze, from which a bright spark dropped off. I knew what this was because I was guilty of building them myself when I was a teenager: A hot-air balloon made of a dry cleaners bag, balsa wood and candles.

- A fuzzy, oval shaped light with coloured edges flying below the airliner I was on, matching its exact speed. This was a sundog, and they're actually pretty common. It's an atmospheric effect, kind of a mirage.

- The next was one I identified even before I saw it :-) I was up in a highrise building watching seagulls circling around with the afternoon sun low in the background. At times they looked like wobbling silver disks, exactly like the classic flying saucer description. I don't know the explanation -- I guess another atmospheric effect. They kept transforming from birds to disks and back again. If I had only seen the disk effect it would have been absolutely convincing.

- I was in northern Ontario one winter night with CAFB dark skies when I spotted a very bright light hovering motionless above the horizon that was flashing red, yellow, green, blue in sequence with about a second of darkness between the flashes. I watched this for ten minutes or more and it gave me goosepimples because it didn't look like any aircraft. Looked at it with binoculars too. Fortunately, I've always been into astronomy (I was outside looking at the stars at the time) and I realized that the light was the star Arcturus. Once again, an atmospheric effect, but it was amazing -- my description of it is feeble, you had to be there.

- The one I can't explain was one that I saw in Columbus, Ohio one night about 9 pm in 1966. It's hard to describe, but it was as though a big dirigible (much longer than any blimp) had a bright light on each end of it and it was tumbling end over end moving against the wind at just about the level of a thick cloud deck. Moving in and out of the clouds. It was the damndest looking thing -- absolutely enormous. Hundreds of people saw it, phoning the police, radio stations, etc. The next day the Air Force said it was jets refueling. Try as I might, I cannot connect what I saw with that explanation.

When it comes to alien spacecraft, I'm an open minded skeptic. I need a lot more proof than just this strange thing that I saw.


-JF-