UFOs at Chicago O’Hare
Who says UFOs are never seen by credible individuals? Try telling that to the ground-staff and pilots at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. According to the story, that focuses upon an event that occurred last November and that has just surfaced, “the strange obect spent a short time hanging around an airport terminal before disappearing into the clouds.” Sadly, the official head-in-the-sand response to the case was all too common: ignore it.
Jon Hilkevitch
Chicago Tribune
In the sky! A bird? A plane? A … UFO?
Video: UFO over O’Hare Airport?
Published January 1, 2007
It sounds like a tired joke–but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously.
A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O’Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.
Was it an alien spaceship? A weather balloon lost in the airspace over the world’s second-busiest airport? A top-secret military craft? Or simply a reflection from lights that played a trick on the eyes?
Officials at United professed no knowledge of the Nov. 7 event–which was reported to the airline by as many as a dozen of its own workers–when the Tribune started asking questions recently. But the Federal Aviation Administration said its air traffic control tower at O’Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if controllers had spotted a mysterious elliptical-shaped craft sitting motionless over Concourse C of the United terminal.
No controllers saw the object, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.
The FAA is not conducting a further investigation, Cory said. The theory is the sighting was caused by a “weather phenomenon,” she said.
The UFO report has sparked some chuckles among controllers in O’Hare tower.
“To fly 7 million light years to O’Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable,” said O’Hare controller and union official Craig Burzych.
Some of the witnesses, interviewed by the Tribune, said they are upset that neither the government nor the airline is probing the incident.
Whatever the object was, it could have interfered with O’Hare’s radar and other equipment, and even created a collision risk, they said.
The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the term that extraterrestrial-watchers nowadays prefer over Unidentified Flying Object) was first seen by a United ramp worker who was directing back a United plane at Gate C17, according to an account the worker provided to the National UFO Reporting Center.
The sighting occurred during daylight, about 4:30 p.m., just before sunset.
All the witnesses said the object was dark gray and well defined in the overcast skies. They said the craft, estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter, did not display any lights.
Some said it looked like a rotating Frisbee, while others said it did not appear to be spinning. All agreed the object made no noise and it was at a fixed position in the sky, just below the 1,900-foot cloud deck, until shooting off into the clouds.
Witnesses shaken by sighting
“I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don’t understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport,” said a United mechanic who was in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 that he was taxiing to a maintenance hangar when he observed the metallic-looking object above Gate C17.
“But I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an [Earth] aircraft,” the mechanic said.
One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and “experienced some religious issues” over it, one co-worker said.
A United manager said he ran outside his office in Concourse B after hearing the report about the sighting on an internal airline radio frequency.
“I stood outside in the gate area not knowing what to think, just trying to figure out what it was,” he said. “I knew no one would make a false call like that. But if somebody was bouncing a weather balloon or something else over O’Hare, we had to stop it because it was in very close proximity to our flight operations.”
Some joke, others research
The databases of various UFO-watching groups are full of accounts filed by pilots about sightings of unknown aircraft and anomalies that affected navigational equipment onboard planes.
Whether any of the UFO incidents are real or merely the result of individual perceptions, some experts say the events pose a potential safety risk to pilots and their passengers.
“There have been documented cases where safety appears to have been implicated, and more and more we are coming to the point of view that we are dealing with an intelligent phenomenon,” said Richard Haines, science director at the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, a private agency.
“We must be proactive before an aircraft goes down,” said Haines, a former chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
Haines is investigating the O’Hare incident. He said he has determined that no weather balloons were launched in the vicinity of O’Hare on Nov. 7.
“It’s absurd that the military would be conducting aerial test flights” near the airport, Haines said.
All the witnesses to the O’Hare event, who included at least several pilots, said they are certain based on the disc’s appearance and flight characteristics that it was not an airplane, helicopter, weather balloon or any other craft known to man.
United denies UFO report
They’re not sure what was hanging out for several minutes in the restricted airspace, but they are upset that no one in power has taken the matter seriously.
A United spokeswoman said there is no record of the UFO report. She said United officials do not recall discussion of any such incident.
“There’s nothing in the duty manager log, which is used to report unusual incidents,” said United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy. “I checked around. There’s no record of anything.”
The pilots of the United plane being directed back from Gate C17 also were notified by United personnel of the sighting, and one of the pilots reportedly opened a windscreen in the cockpit to get a better view of the object estimated to be hovering 1,500 feet above the ground.
The object was seen to suddenly accelerate straight up through the solid overcast skies, which the FAA reported had 1,900-foot cloud ceilings at the time.
“It was like somebody punched a hole in the sky,” said one United employee.
Witnesses said they had a hard time visually tracking the object as it streaked through the dense clouds.
It left behind an open hole of clear air in the cloud layer, the witnesses said, adding that the hole disappeared within a few minutes.
The United employees interviewed by the Tribune spoke on condition of anonymity.
Some said they were interviewed by United officials and instructed to write reports and draw pictures of what they observed, and that they were advised by United officials to refrain from speaking about what they saw.
Federal agency backtracks
Like United, the FAA originally told the Tribune that it had no information on the alleged UFO sighting. But the federal agency quickly reversed its position after the newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request.
An internal FAA review of air-traffic communications tapes, a step toward complying with the Tribune request, turned up the call by the United supervisor to an FAA manager in the airport tower, Cory said.
Cory said the weather might have factored into what the witnesses thought they saw.
“Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon,” she said. “That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low [cloud] ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things. That’s our take on it.”
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 11:27 am and is filed under Alien Encounters, Breaking News, Close Encounters, Eyewitness Accounts, The Redfern Files, UFO Sightings. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit BlinkList Google Ma.gnolia StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! Help
- Related News Stories:
- Podcast UFO »
- Leaked News Footage About O’Hare UFO »
- Mexico’s “O’Hare”? »
- O’Hare UFO Update »
- The Hawaiian UFO »
|
Jan 02 2007 
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Seems like something really “interesting” happened there and “beaucoup” people saw it. Also seems like “officialdom” has been trying like hell to sling that good old rich topsoil coverup dirt all over it, but the event keeps working to dig itself out of the dirt and stand up and wave for attention.
How interesting. We have this UFO thing pop up now, right at the time Gerald Ford has been lying in state in DC and brought home to Michigan to be buried…and it was forty years ago that the Ann Arbor “Swamp Gas” sightings took place that first got then-Congressman Ford riled up about the Air Farce’s insulting and patronizing “explanations” of these incidents to the people of Michigan….and led him to begin “making noises” (futile, of course) on capitol hill about responsible investigation of this phenomenon. What he GOT was the “Condon Commission” and report, which could be described as “more of same…only more so”.
And as he has lain in state, at the end of 2006, a UFO hullabaloo has erupted with charges of attempts at spin-debunking coming forth. What a hoot. I bet both Ford AND Carl Jung are laughing at this somewhere.
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:01 am
Yep, funny how that happened. Kind of like how when Bigfoot faker Ray Wallace died a couple of years ago, and there were claims that it was all nonsense, suddenly (particularly in the UK) there was a whole wave of man-beast reports in the immediate aftermath of his death.
January 3rd, 2007 at 9:16 am
It’s like in “Trickster”-world, there are time-cycles ,”programmed” synchronicity patterns, “name-game” correlations, and all manner of other weird “co-incidences” built into the workings of the overall mechanism. In many ways it seems like much in life and human history is an ongoing joke of some kind, and only the “powers that be” are IN on it.
January 3rd, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Nick,
Kenn Thomas hipped me to this a couple of days ago, but you beat me to the punch! Seems like the authorities held this in abeyance for a couple of months while they sorted it out (or the news media did until things slowed down news-wise.)
Bill,
Maybe the powers that be are “controlled” by it–another reason for covering up its existence!
January 3rd, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Yep. That may be why it pays to have a good Fortean sense of humor about it all. Maybe the concept that “The Gods Must Be Crazy” isn’t far off the mark!!!
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:20 pm
It concerns me watching UFO reports over the years that the “special effect” if you want to call it that (Me, I think they are Nephilim) always seems interested in our security efforts. So during the cold war when the big fear was the balloon going up, they hung out around silos and nuke facilities. Now that terrorism is the big fear there are UFO sightings around airports. I don’t think this is an isolated incident but time will tell. So whatever UFOs are, they seem to feed off of fear like hummingbirds feed off of sugarwater. If there is a joke, we are the butt of it.
Jess
January 4th, 2007 at 5:45 am
Jess
That’s a very good point re hanging around airports/silos and how things have changed. Yep, feeding on us seems to be the key.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:07 am
[...] A new podcast interview with me has been posted today at the website of Nearthwort Obtain, “the multidimensional adventurer’s handbook.” Conducted by Nearthwort’s Marc Fiszman of London, the interview covers how I got interested in the UFO subject, views, ideas, alien abductions, the O’Hare UFO encounter and more. [...]
January 31st, 2007 at 9:26 am
[...] And, with sightings such as the O’Hare encounter of last year and that of freight pilot Jorge A. Narvaez in Nevada on December 29 of last year currently in the news, I figured it might be a good time to reveal some of the “pilot encounters” reported to the CAA. I could list countless such reports spanning several decades - but instead I’m going to focus on the 1980s, a period that saw some truly bizarre reports reach the CAA. [...]