- Much is made this day of the declassification of UFO
material by some of the world's air forces and civil aviation boards, but
much of this openness surely mirrors the greater receptiveness toward the
UFO subject in society at large. Pilots and workers in the aviation industry
who stepped forward years ago with claims of the abnormal could find their
flight status revoked or their employment terminated.
-
- We can only imagine the fate of pilot Ricardo France
of the LAN carrier, who spoke openly to Chile's REVISTA VEA in January
1972 about being pursued by a flotilla of UFOs over a considerable length
of Chilean territory for nearly 90 minutes. It is likely that he underwent
rigorous investigation and medical checkups, even when four days after
his experience, five hundred cars in the city of Tandil "were paralyzed
by a flashing flying saucer" according to the same publication. These
unbelievable cases form part of the collection of ufologist Liliana Núñez.
-
-
- Pilots in Peril
-
- "The altimeter started to climb and the artificial
horizon spun like a top. The gauges all became whirlygig and the readouts
on three inertial navigation computers turned to frantic numbers and coordinates.
The airliner flew along the indicated parameters, but if the autopilot
had obeyed the instruments, we would've been killed."
-
- It sounds at first blush like a line of dialogue from
LOST or some television show in which square-jawed protagonists take on
the unknown. But this is the testimony of a Mexican commercial pilot whose
crew actually had a brush with the bizarre in February 1979 at an eleven
thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean. The three man crew who steadfastly
refused to allow their names to be used spoke to researcher Alberto
Montemayor under a promise of anonymity. Had the cause of the confusion
on flight deck been ascribed to faulty software, defective hardware or
some other mundane reason, they would surely have been less reticent. But
as the airliner captain known only as "F.T." told
the researcher, the cause for the confusion anguish among the crew was
an powerful source of light that appared to fly over the aircraft for an
endless, maddening three minutes.
-
- "F.T." had no illusions about the experience.
"If someone was trying to send us a special message," he told
Montemayor, "all they managed to do was show us that the thing had
such power and control over our aircraft that it could have seized the
airliner and spirited us away."
-
- This harrowing experience is among several collected
by our friend and colleague Bruno Cardeñosa, host of Spain's ever-popular
La Rosa de los Vientos radio show. Cardeñosa, an acclaimed UFO writer
and researcher, mentions another mid-air incident involving a another Mexican
pilot on an international flight between Europe and the Americas. The pilot
only known by his initials said that the flight was going along
as planned and that stepped out of the flight deck to inspect the cabin
and see how the passenger service was going. He chatted for a few minutes
with the cabin crew and some passengers when a flight attendant made a
curious observation: the sun's light was streaming through the wrong side
of the aircraft. "I returned to the flight deck for an urgent confirmation.
It turned out we were flying toward the O navigation point," said
the pilot, "that is to say, we were heading toward Africa instead
of the Americas. We made the appropriate corrections, but the fuel wasted
in the inexplicable turn forced us to land in Bermuda. Upon making the
corrective turn, I could see a dot of light pulling away from us and throbbing
brightly."
-
- Weirder things have happened: according to the March
13, 1992 issue of Mexico's reputable El Universal newspaper, a sudden encounter
with a UFO on March 6 of that year caused an airliner to become invisible.
-
- The Aeromexico airliner allegedly departed from Mexico
City at 11:30 p.m. enroute to Monterrey. The pilot dimmed the cabin lights
and passenger began falling asleep for the short flight, until they suddenly
found themselves staring into the night sky and the bright stars in the
heavens above...as if the entire fuselage had been lifted away. "We
were flying in space, seeing the skies and stars without the barrier of
cabin walls, which were still there and detectable to the touch, but completely
invisible," said a witness to this sudden phenomenon. "We could
even see the pilots in the cabin, at the controls of an aircraft that none
of us could see, only touch."
-
- One would expect to see passengers gripped by panic,
but this was not the case: the startled passengers tried to make sense
of the phenomenon until they suddenly became aware of a glowing object
shaped like two "inverted bowls" stuck together flying alongside
the aircraft.
-
- The newspaper account states that the broadcast media
reported the disappearance of the Aeromexico airliner from radar screens
in both Monterrey and Mexico City for ten minutes, along with the corresponding
gap in communications.
-
-
- Strange Encounters in the Southern Cone
-
- Ever since the days of the "Stendek" affair
in the 1960's (solved in recent years when the wreckage of the aircraft
was found in an Andean valley), the UFO phenomenon has shown an interest
in commercial aviation and has even interfered with routine flights, as
has occurred elsewhere in the world.
-
- The February 17, 2001 issue of Chile's "El Mercurio"
newspaper ran an interesting story which demonstrated that this disturbing
attraction to airliners wasn't a thing of the past: at 11:30 a.m., the
crew of LAN Chile Flight 560 established visual contact with a shining
ovoid object "of considerable size" which prompted the pilot
to report it to the National Air Traffic Control Center in Santiago de
Chile. Although civilian radars reported that the contact was not on their
screens, the 5th Air Brigade in Cerro Moreno (Antofagasta) and the regional
airport of Calama in nothern Chile managed to track it.
-
- Confirmation for the event was received five minutes
after an Avant airliner had taken off from the Calama airfield--its crew
corroborated the LAN Chile information, adding that the object was stationary
and remained visible 10 minutes after the initial sighting.
-
- The military air station at Cerro Moreno placed the object
40 miles over the town of Mejillones and at an altitude of 60,000 feet,
thus ruling out the possibility that the strange object could have been
a weather balloon -- the usual "culprit" in these cases--due
to the fact that said meteorological artifacts were launched from Cerro
Moreno on a daily basis early in the morning.
-
- Across the Andes, Argentinean pilots have had a long
history of facing the unknown.
-
- Researcher and author Carlos Iurchuk takes note of two
early incidents from the early days of the UFO phenomenon: In August 1958,
private pilot Raul N. López took to the skies in his Piper PA (LV-XJW)
on what he described as "a glorious day" marred only by the smoke
arising from agricultural burning. Flying from Machagay to Resistencia
in the Chaco, López became aware at 11:16 hours of a glowing "something"
at 2400 feet, when his small aircraft was 180 degrees from La Verde. Within
seconds, the unknown light had ascended to an estimated thirty six hundred
feet and at twenty kilometers' distance. Intrigued, López changed
course to get a better look, only to find that the light had exactly the
same intentions.
-
- When interviewed, the pilot noted that the intruder hac
come within seven kilometers of his position and was shaped "like
a flat dish with a dome in its middle, and it was golden-yellow in color.
Its external section was thirty meters in diameter and spun quickly, shooting
off greenish-red sparks."
-
- The physical proximity of the unknown object soon began
exerting physical effects on the Piper PA: López noted a rapid increase
in the engine's RPMs as the golden disk rose into the air, losing itself
in the blue sky. López remarked that he was startled to see that
without having touched the controls, the tachometer indicated a return
to cruising speed after the intruder had taken its leave. The Raul López
case was featured in Hector Anganuzzi's "Historia de los Platos Voladores
en la Argentina"
-
- A year later, an Aerolineas Argentinas DC-3 piloted by
Nestor del Blanco also ran into unknown traffic over the Chaco.
-
- Flight 757, scheduled service to Buenos Aires, departed
on time from Roque Sáenz Peña in the Chaco on 16 October
1959 on a 205-degree heading and at altitude of 7,900 feet. The DC-3 was
well on its way toward a refueling stop in Sauce Viejo (Santa Fe Province)
when Captain del Blanco noticed an unusual cloud formation on the horizon.
Upon closer inspection, he noticed to his surprise that the cloud formation
was actually "a spindle-shaped object" that was soon joined by
three similar ones.
-
- In subsequent statements, the pilot noted that the strange
objects "had the color of lead" and were not self-luminous. They
changed intensity according to the sun's brightness. At this point, the
captain alerted Officer Manso, his co-pilot, and both men witnessed the
curious intruders as they engaged in horizontal maneuvers. One of the objects
described as "voluminous" disgorged three saucer-shaped
objects that flew off, becoming mere specks in the horizon.
-
- The DC-3's radio operator, Miguel Villafañe, was
a third witness to the uncanny spectacle: he contacted the tower at Resistencia
Airport to see if the objects could be seen from the ground, but all efforts
were negative.
-
-
- A Pilot Goes Public
-
- A memorable scene in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters
of the Third Kind shows the moment when an air traffic controller
asks two airliner captains who have just reported a UFO encounter if they
wish to file a formal report--both men refuse, one of them saying unequivocally,
"I don't want to report one of those!"
-
- One can well imagine the penalties that a professional
responsible for safety of hundreds of passengers and a multi-million dollar
aircraft might face if he or she admit to seeing "flying saucers".
Fortunately the silence imposed on airliner crews is now being broken as
many pilots retire and no longer face being grounded for good. Juan Lorenzo
Torres is one of them.
-
- Torres, who retired from the Spanish carrier Iberia at
the age of 65, had an illustrious career that included forty years of flying
military and civilian aircraft. Born in Madrid and the son of an Air Force
general, Torres served in the military with Spain's King Juan Carlos and
is presently the director of an aviation academy. "The day I saw a
UFO from my aircraft," he told interviewer Pedro Madueño, "I
wasn't able to sleep, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it
all this time."
-
- But why would a man with such an illustrious background
and career wish to enter the UFO fray? "I think many people would
like to know that my crew and I saw something that no one has been able
to explain to this very day."
-
- On the fourth of November, 1968, at 18:23 hours, Torres
was flying a Caravelle 6-R along the London to Alicante route (Iberia Flight
249). This routine flight proceeded normally until the Barcelona tower
ordered the aircraft to descend from an altitude of thirty one thousand
feet to twenty eight thousand feet, ostensibly to compensate for the transit
of another aircraft on the same corridor. "Well, I had already ordered
dinner and the trays were in the cabin," reminisces Captain Torres,
"but a that altitude we were shaving the clouds, which produce a slight
though uncomfortable turbulence. Having one's dinner that way was thoroughly
disagreeable. I asked my co?pilot to visually monitor if the opposing traffic
could be seen, in order that we could return to our proper level to have
a peaceful dinner."
-
- Within seconds, the pilot said that the incoming aircraft
was in sight, but it wasn't another airliner: instead, the Caravelle's
crew saw a flash of light heading toward them at full speed and on a collision
course.
-
- "We dumped the trays and our jaws dropped, since
that blinding light was nothing we'd seen before." he explained. "We
called the stewardess to witness the thing. None of us knew what it could
be."
-
- The petrified crew witnessed how the object stayed some
ten meters away from the Caravelle's nose cone, moving up and down and
sideways, but always returning to its position in front of the aircraft.
Torres made an effort to contact the object in English and Spanish with
no success; contacting the Barcelona tower was fruitless, since area was
beyond its radar coverage. The next thing he did was to initiate an emergency
broadcast "on the 121.5 channel, so that all nearby aircraft could
communicate with us."
-
- Torres recalls turning on all of the aircraft's lights
in an effort to begin a rudimentary form of communication with the object.
"I told it in Spanish: "On and off twice means no, on and
- off once means yes." When asked by the interviewer
if there had been any success, he replied that "there had been logic"
in the intruder's movements.
-
- "That night we all slept poorly, as my crew told
me the next day. We all made a pact of silence, but lieutenant colonel
Abreu of the Barcelona tower, called me when I landed at El Prat and told
me that the radar coverage for eastern Spain had recorded those "UFOs".
I asked for a copy of these records and he gave me one." This valuable
bit of evidence would be lost later on in a series of events.
-
- "Four months later, another Caravelle piloted by
commander Ordovas had another sighting in the area, flying with the same
flight engineer, Jose Cuenca! The news made it into the media because one
of the flight attendants had a boyfriend who was a journalist. Journalists
began calling and four months later Lt. Col Ugarte and a lawyer showed
up and the copy was confiscated. After reporting the sighting, Lt. Col
Ugarte concluded that what the co?pilot, engineer, flight attendant and
I had seen was in fact Venus! Venus was stuck to my plane's nose, and I
never realized it!"
-
- Captain Torres' remarks go to show that unidentified
flying objects have always shown an interest for our passenger airliners,
and some have humorously suggested that the smaller unidentified objects
may be attracted to jumbo jets like baby whales to surface ships in a misguided
imprinting event
-
- Few cases in Spanish ufology have achieved the level
of angry pro-and-con discourse that characterizes the so-called Manises
Incident, in which a Mirage F-1 fighter pursued a UFO for an extended period
of time with full authorization from ground control. The military component
of the case often overshadows the civilian aspect, which is hair-raising
enough, as we shall see.
-
- On November 11, 1979, Captain Javier Lerdo de Tejada,
a senior pilot with eight thousand hours of flight time under his belt,
was flying a Super Caravelle belonging to the TAE airline on a flight between
the Austrian city of Saltzburg and the Canary Islands, where over a hundred
passengers hoped to spend a sunny vacation. After having been aloft for
less than half an hour, the Super Caravelle began to pick up an odd distress
call on the emergency band, being informed by ground control that it emanated
from a point 40 miles northwest of the coastal city of Valencia. Captain
Tejada remarked that it was as if the party sending out the distress signal
had no knowledge whatsoever of Morse code.
-
- At 23:47 hours, flight engineer Francisco Rodriguez reported
the presence of a pair of red lights at a lower elevation and to the left
of the airliner. The Barcelona control tower insisted that their flight
was alone in the night sky and that no other traffic was in the area.
-
- The object began closing in on the Super Caravelle, causing
consternation among the crew, since it was flying within less than the
10 mile safety range. The lights, spanning a diameter of two hundred meters,
practically made a bee line for the airliner, coming within half a mile
of its wing. Certain that a collision was imminent at this point, Tejada
broke his flight plan and began an emergency descent to the Manises airport
outside of Valencia; the pursuit ended only when the approach maneuvers
were initiated. "This was the first time," writes Spanish ufologist
Javier García Blanco, "that a passenger airliner was forced
to change it flight plan in order to avoid a collision."
-
- Conclusion
-
- Ufology has always set a high bar for witnesses, preferring
the testimony of "trained observers" over reports from the average
citizen. Airline pilots, entrusted with the care of human lives and very
expensive equipment, surely occupy the highest tiers of reliability. The
cases in this article suggest that regardless of the hypothesis one may
favor to explain the phenomenon, unidentified flying objects have interacted
closely us "up in the wild blue yonder" all over the planet...an
interaction that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.
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