Phantoms of the Airways: Pilots and UFOs

[CVX]

By Scott Corrales

FATE Magazine - 2005 UFO Special

Commercial aviation has almost surely seen better days: complaints about flight delays, congested runways, collapsing radar systems, and passengers venting their pent-up rage against flight attendants have made the evening news more than once in recent years. As if pilots didn’t have enough problems to contend with, there are still stories involving other occupants of the air corridors whose intentions aren’t always clear.

Although most accounts found in published works on the UFO phenomenon concentrate on classic encounters between commercial and military airliners and unidentified flying objects, these encounters are by no means a thing of the past. The 1990s were particularly rich with such encounters, many of which border on the incredible. Perhaps it is only fitting to begin our story with one of the most startling (and credibility-straining) of them.

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 staff-written article provides no flight number, but the Aeromexico airliner allegedly departed from Mexico City at 11:30 p.m. en route to Monterrey. The pilot dimmed the cabin lights and passengers 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.”

More surprising is that panic did not spread throughout the aircraft. 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.

Planes, Trains, and Saucers



Ever since the days of the “Stendec” affair in the 1960s (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.

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 from the town of Mejillones 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.

A Pilot Breaks the Silence



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 admits 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 40 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 November 4, 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 31,000 feet to 28,000 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 Torres, “but at 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 copilot 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 the 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 Lieutenant Colonel Ugarte and a lawyer showed up and the copy was confiscated. After reporting the sighting, Lieutenant Colonel Ugarte concluded that what the copilot, 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 show that unidentified flying objects have always shown an interest in our passenger airliners. (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.) Nor was Captain Torres’ experience one of a kind.

On January 6, 1995, a Boeing 737 carrying 60 passengers piloted by Capt. Roger Wills and flying between the northern Italian city of Milan and Manchester had a mid-air encounter with the unknown that almost ended in disaster. At 06:48 hours, as the airliner began its final descent into the Manchester area, it came across a triangular object with small, white lights along its sides and a black band surrounding it.

Wills and his copilot, Mark Stuart, confirmed with the control tower that they were the only craft in the air at the time. Yet the unidentified object would not make way for the swiftly oncoming airliner. A perilous nosedive was all that saved the 737 from a certain collision.

The flight crew would later state that the UFO appeared not to have the slightest intention of deviating from its course, and eventually flew under the airliner’s starboard wing.

The Manises Incident



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, Capt. Javier Lerdo de Tejada, a senior pilot with 8,000 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 Salzburg and the Canary Islands, where over 100 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 the ten-mile safety range. The lights, spanning a diameter of 200 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 approach maneuvers were initiated. “This was the first time,” writes Spanish ufologist Javier García Blanco, “that a passenger airliner was forced to change its flight plan in order to avoid a collision.”

More at: http://www.fatemag.com/2005_UFOSpecial_Corrales.html

[john8pies]

Fascinating! I`ve heard several of these inexplicable stories before - but don`t forget some of them were hoaxes (eg, the flying disc over New Zealand). That said, there are zillions of planets and galaxies and stuff out there, and it would be astonishing if we were the only ones able to send satellites, spacecraft and rockets out there.