The revelations that in November of last year a UFO was spotted by personnel at Chicago's O'Hare Airport have created an undoubted frenzy within the media on a scale that hasn't been seen for a long time. Yet, UFO encounters at prominent airports are nothing new. In fact, they are positively old-hat.
I could ramble on for hours with regard to all of the cases I have in my files; but for now, one such report will suffice.
Between 7.25 p.m. and 7.45 p.m. on the evening of February 25, 1959, an unidentified flying object was sighted hovering over London (now Heathrow) Airport by four separate witnesses. One of those fortunate enough to have seen the UFO was an Air Traffic Control Officer at the airport, who studied the phenomenon with binoculars for several minutes, before checking with operators to see if any unexplained air-traffic had been monitored.
Although nothing untoward was picked up on radar, one of the witnesses stated that the UFO resembled "the reflection of a searchlight on the clouds." He was keen to stress, however, that the sky had been entirely devoid of cloud cover at the time of the encounter.
Singapore: A bright light across the sky took many Singaporeans by surprise on Sunday evening.
Callers to our hotline said that at about 7.40pm, they saw a bright green light across the evening sky.
Some described it as a shooting star; others said it was like a satellite re-entering the earth's atmosphere.
They also said it was not very high up in the sky and it had streaked over brightly from east to west.
It was over in a matter of seconds.
Viewers called us from all over Singapore - Serangoon North, Sembawang, Woodlands, Selegie Road, Bedok, Bukit Panjang and Marina South.
Alan Boyle
CosmicLogTue, 02 Jan 2007 15:04 UTC
More than 3,000 reports of unidentified flying objects were sent to the National UFO Reporting Center over the past year - but not one has generated as much buzz as November's sighting at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Was it a metallic-looking, saucer-shaped object rising through the clouds, or nothing more than a meteorological oddity? It's hard to figure out whether the truth is really out there, but one thing is for sure: Clouds can do some positively alien-looking things.
Peter Davenport, the UFO center's director, says the buzz over the O'Hare sighting is fully justified.
"In my opinion, because I know the quality of the witnesses, and because I know the nature of the documents that were generated, it is one of the most dramatic cases of the year 2006 that this center has handled," Davenport told me today from the center's headquarters in Washington state.
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?
Dirk Vander Ploeg
UFO DigestFri, 29 Dec 2006 12:00 UTC
This year, 2006, has been a watershed of sorts in the field of UFOlogy.
From the stories I have investigated, to those contributed by writers and those from eyewitnesses, 2006 was indeed a monumental and unforgettable year for ufodigest.com and ufologists.
I was discussing this very thought with Errol Bruce-Knapp, host of The Virtually Strange Network and the radio program Strange Days...Indeed (CFRB Toronto, Canada). Something was in the air we agreed. Sightings, some of a remarkable nature, were being reported monthly if not weekly and this phenomena seemed to be increasing. We could both remember when a single sighting of significance would incur once every few years or at best annually. Now it seemed the floodgates were opening, inch by inch, and month by month.
The story goes something like this:
The date was March 16, 1967. Missile maintenance crews from Malmstrom Air Force Base were camped out at a missile site about 30 miles north of Lewistown.
Suddenly an alarm horn sounded.
A Minuteman missile had gone off alert and become inoperable. Upset and believing that the maintenance personnel had failed to tell him they were doing work that would create this "off-alert" warning, a first lieutenant called the missile site.
He didn't get the response he was expecting.
An on-site security guard told him that no maintenance had been done on the missile that morning. A UFO hovering over the site was a more likely culprit, he said.
Mother-ship: now there's a term absolutely guaranteed to raise the hackles of any smug, self-important ufological skeptic. So, I'll say it again, only this time louder: MOTHER-SHIP!
For those unacquainted with this one-time ufological stalwart, the mother-ships were almost a permanent fixture of the halcyon days of ufology (and by that I mean the 1950s and 1960s), and became so-named as a result of their huge size. Usually described as being hundreds of feet in length, and very often cigar-shaped, the mother-ships were seen by many as being the outer-space equivalent of a modern-day aircraft carrier - the purpose of which was to carry smaller, flying saucer-style vehicles across vast stretches of space before dropping them onto our planet to undertake whatever dark and nefarious activities they deemed fit.
But the problem with the mother-ships wasn't so much the fact that people saw them, or that the scenario of having one huge craft carrying a whole "family" of smaller ones defied logic. Nope: the problem was that the mother-ships became inextricably linked with the so-called "Contactee" controversy.
Paris - The French space agency is to publish its archive of UFO sightings and other phenomena online, but will keep the names of those who reported them off the site to protect them from pestering by space fanatics.
Jacques Arnould, an official at the National Space Studies Center (CNES), said the French database of around 1,600 incidents would go live in late January or mid-February.
He said the CNES had been collecting statements and documents for almost 30 years to archive and study them.
On Dec. 23, 2006, here in Oshawa, we had great clear skies. I took a moment to sky watch around after 12:30 PM, and took some pictures facing south, over Lake Ontario.This particular photo caught my eye of two unknowns photographed. The top one near the clouds appears disc shaped, as the bottom one appears capsule shaped and brilliant white. The temperature was unusually warm here, even bringing out insects .I can't really say what has been photographed.
Among the 26 people who attended a local UFO conference last Saturday night was a Wolf Creek resident who also saw two large orange balls floating over the area in February 2005.A report of the sighting over the Mary Lake subdivision next door to Wolf Creek was filed with UFOBC by a couple who watched the unidentified flying objects together with the husband's parents.
It was later learned that others also witnessed the UFO event. They included a couple of building contractors who were in the subdivision looking at a house project with some children in their company.
It's reported the group actually took refuge under the house because the objects appeared so close there was a fear they would actually land on the roof.
