Encounters: The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed!/Encounters - The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed (1995).iso/sighting/sight23.txt

Text File | 1995-10-20 | 21KB | 384 lines

                      WHEN PILOTS SEE UFO's

        People have been seeing unidentified flying objects in the
skies for years. But when the eyewitness is up there with the UFO, is
the sighting more difficult to explain?

 *** By Dennis Stacy for Air & Space Magazine December 1987/January
1988

In the late afternoon of November 17, 1986, Japan Air Lines flight
1628, a Boeing 747 with a crew of three, was nearing the end of a trip
from Iceland  to Anchorage, Alaska. The jet, carrying a cargo of
French wine, was flying  at 35,000 feet through darkening skies, a red
glow from the setting sun  lighting one horizon and a full moon rising
above the other.

A little after six p.m., pilot Kenju Terauchi noticed white and yellow
 lights ahead, below, and to the left of his airplane. He could see no
details in the darkness and assumed the lights were those of military
aircraft. But they continued to pace the 747, prompting first officer
Takanori Tamefuji to radio Anchorage air traffic control and ask if
there were other aircraft  nearby. Both Anchorage and a nearby
military radar station announced that they were picking up weak
signals from the 747's vicinity. Terauchi switched on the digital
color cockpit weather radar, which is designed to detect weather
systems, not other aircraft. His radar screen displayed a green
target, a color usually associated with light rain, not the red he
would have expected from a reflective solid object.

Because he was sitting in the left-hand seat, Terauchi had the only
unob- structed view when the lights, still in front of and below the
airplane, began moving erratically,"like two bear cubs playing with
each other," as the pilot later wrote in a statement for the Federal
Aviation Administration. After several minutes, the lights suddenly
darted in front of the 747,"shooting off lights" that lit the cockpit
with a warm glow.

As the airplane passed over Eielson Air Force Base, near Fairbanks,
the  captain said he noticed, looming behind his airplane, the dark
silhoutte of a gigantic "mothership" larger than two aircraft
carriers. He asked air traffic  control for permission to take his
airplane around in a complete circle and then descend to 31,000 feet.
Terauchi said his shadower followed him through both maneuvers.

A United Airlines fight and a military C-130 were both in the area and
An- chorage asked the airplanes to change course, intercept the
Japanese 747, and confirm the sighting. Both airplanes flew close
enough to see JAL 1628's navigation lights, alone in the night sky,
before Terauchi reported that the  unidentified fyling objects had
disappeared. The encounter had lasted nearly 50 minutes.

Because it involved an airline pilot and an unidentified flying object
that  had apparently been captured on radar, the JAL 1628 encounter
attracted a great deal of public attention. But UFO reports from
pilots--private,military and airline--are not new to the subject of
"ufology." One of the best known cases was a sighting by Idaho
businessman and private pilot Kenneth Arnold. Flying his single-engine
airplane over Washington's Cascade Mountains on June 24,1947, Arnold
spotted nine silvery, crescent-shaped objects skimming along at high
speed near Mt. Rainier. They dipped as they flew,"like a saucer would
if you skipped it across water," Arnold told reporters--and thus
"flying saucers" entered the popular vocabulary.

Pilots had reported similar unexplained aerial phenomena before,
mainly in  the form of the "Foo Fighters" noted by American bomber
crews over Europe in World War II. But Arnold's sighting, with its
accompanying front-page publicity, struck a jittery, post-Hiroshima
nerve in American society and set off a barrage of similar reports.
Skeptics believed that every sighting had a prosaic explanation, such
as misidentification of stars, planets, or natural atmospheric
phenomena. Others thought that there was more to UFOs,  that they
could even be visitors from other planets.

Following the Arnold incident, the Air Force was given the
responsibility of investigating UFO reports from the United States,
first as Project Sign (also called Saucer), then Grudge, and finally
Blue Book. Usually understaffed and underfunded, the Air Force program
functioned more like a public relations office than a scientific
investigation, according to the late astronomer J. Allen Hynek. Hynek
himself, who served as a consultant to Project Blue Book from 1948
unitl it was dissolved in December 1969, gradually changed from a
skeptic into a believer.

Not even skeptics can deny the subject's popular appeal. Last March, a
Gallup  poll found that 88 percent of its respondents had heard of
UFOs. Nearly half of those polled believed UFOs were real, not
figments of the imagination or misperceived natural phenomena. Nine
percent of the adult population claimed  to have seen one.

Of these claims, pilot reports are the ones that interest Richard F.
Haines, a perceptual psychologist who compiles AIRCAT, a computerized
catalog that lists more than 3,000 UFO sightings by aviators over the
past 40 years. Chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA's Ames
Research Center in California Haines is the author of "Observing
UFOs", a handbook of methodology for  accurate observation, and the
editor of "UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist", a collection
of psychologically oriented essays on the subject.

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*********

                       -- SKEPTICS R US --


The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal (CSICOP) was founded in the spring of 1976, during a
meeting of the American  Humanist Association in Buffalo, New York.
The impetus for the group's form- ation had been provided a year
earlier by the publication of "Objections to  Astrology" by Paul
Kurtz, professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at
Buffalo. The manifesto had been signed by 186 scientists, in- cluding
18 Nobel prizewinners, who feared that the public was confusing
astronomy and astrology.

Today Kurtz is chairman of the loosely knit international
organization, which holds annual meetings and publishes a
25,000-circulation quarterly, "The  Skeptical Inquirer." The journal
is devoted to articles debunking psychokinesis telepathy,clairvoyance,
and other psychic claims, the Loch Ness Monster, astro- logy and UFOs.
CSICOP Fellows include science writer Isaac Asimov, astronomer Carl
Sagan, Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and James Randi, recent
recipient of a "genius grant" awarded by the MacArthur Foundation.

The UFO subcommittee is led by Philip J. Klass
("UFOs--Identified","UFOs Ex- plained",and "UFOs, the Public
Decieved"), James Oberg ("UFOs & Outer Space Mysteries"),and Robert
Sheaffer ("The UFO Verdict"). The subcommittee con- sists of about two
dozen members who operate as an informal network, exchang- ing
articles about UFOs for information and comment. Some members make
them- selves available for local media appearances to counteract what
Klass calls "the popular view of UFOs as extraterrestrial spaceships."

"We prefer to have skeptics, of course," says Klass, "but we don't
require anyone to take an oath of allegiance saying they don't believe
in flying saucers. Basically, we're a mutual education circuit."

                                                -- Dennis Stacy

*********************************************************************
*********

AIRCAT's cases include Blue Book's declassified files as well as some
Haines collected and research personally. Before joining the Space
Human Factors  Office, his research included interviewing pilots about
what they had seen peripherally during takeoffs and landings, data
that may one day lead to re- design of airplane cockpits. "I was
interviewing pilot anyway," he says, "and fell naturally into the
habit of asking them if they'd ever seen anything strange."

Haines concentrated on pilot reports for reasons other than
convenience. "They have a unique vantage point simply by being in the
air," he says, "if for no  other reason than if the phenomenon is
between your eyes and the ground, you  can calculate the slant range,
and you're establishing an absolute maximum distance the object could
be away. You can't do that with the object against the sky
background."

"Pilots also have available to them a variety of electromagnetic
sensors of various kinds onboard the aircraft itself, which can
possibly record some manifestations of the phenomenon, such as
electromagnetic frequency and even  energy content," he says. "They
can control the location of their plane so that they can maneuver to
gain the best vantage point, under some conditions.

"Finally," says Haines, "they represent a very stable personality type
with a high degree of training, motivation, and selection. If a pilot
comes forward with a strange tale, I give him a lot of careful
concentration because he's  putting his reputation on the line and
maybe his job. He's had to have thought  the details out in his mind
already, and perhaps eliminated a number of ex- planations before
going public."

He's also likely to request anonymity. Kenneth Arnold, tired of the
publicity following his sighting, later commented, "If I ever see
again a phenomenon of that sort, even if it's a 10-story building, I
won't say a word about it." The feeling was echoed even in the Air
Force. When Blue Book's predecessor, Project Grudge, conducted an
informal survey of Air Force pilots in the late  1940s , one
respondent said, "If a spaceship was flying wing-tip to wing-tip
formation with me, I would not report it."

The UFO phenomenon got its tabloid reputation at least in part because
of the  saucer-busting of active UFO skeptics. Foremost is the UFO
panel of CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of
Claims of the Paranormal (see "Skeptics R Us," previous page). Led by
Philip J. Klass, contributing avionics editor of "Aviation Week and
Space Technology", James Oberg, an aerospace writer and a manned space
operations specialist, and Robert Sheaffer, a Silicon Valley computer
systems analyst, CSICOP exposes hoaxes and uncovers explanations of
UFO sightings.

Sheaffer doesn't agree that pilots are superior UFO observers. "The
idea of pilots as super witnesses just doesn't hold," he says. "The
last I heard they  were human like the rest of us, and still subject
to all concerns and errors  of human psychology and perception. In
fact, they're apt to be less worried about how bright an object is, or
its angular elevation, than in keeping their plane in the air. Anyone
surprised by a very brief and unexpected event is not  likely to
report it accurately."

Haines agrees that normal perception isn't infallible. Very bright
objects, for example, can appear to be much nearer than they actually
are. Autokinetic or self-generated, movement of the eyeball can make
distant objects like  stars and planets appear to move. "Also when
you're flying in a sunny, clear blue atmosphere," Haines
says,"sometimes the eye can focus inaccurately, so that you're not
focusing at infinity anymore, but maybe only one or two meters in
front of the cockpit."


Because the way we see external events depends on the body's
perception of it- self in space, acceleration and inertil forces that
disrupt the inner ear's delicate sense of balance can also lead to
optical illusions. Still, Haines  contends that many induced illusions
are short-lived and cannot account for the majority of AIRCAT's cases.
"If a pilot describes a disk-shaped airform  with no visible means of
propulsion pacing his right wing for 30 minutes, doing everything he's
doing--and I have plenty of cases like that--then that's not an
optical illusion, it's not a bird or balloon or meteor, it's not any
of those prosaic explanations," Haines says. "We don't know what it is
necessarily but we know quite clearly what it isn't."

One sensational pilot-and-UFO case almost certainly had a prosaic
explanation. On the afternoon of January 7, 1948, people near Godman
Air Force Base at Fort Knox, Kentucky, reported an object in the sky
that looked like "an ice cream cone topped with red." Captain Thomas
F. Mantell, flying in command of a ferry flight of four F-51 Mustangs
(P-51s had been redesignated F-51s the previous year), was asked to
investigate. None of the fighters were equipped with oxy- gen, and
after three dropped out of the chase Mantell continued alone. "It's
directly ahead and above and still moving at about half my speed," he
radioed. "The thing looks metallic and of tremendous size. I'm going
up to 20,000 feet, and if I'm no closer I'll abandon the chase." A few
minutes later Mantell's airplane crashed, earning him the dubious
distinction as the world's first  "UFO martyr."

Project Blue Book proposed that Mantell succumbed to hypoxia, or
oxygen  starvation, and crashed while chasing the planet Venus, but
later evidence indicates he was pursuing a top-secret, high-atmosphere
Skyhook balloon. The balloons, designed for upper-atmosphere research,
were later used by the CIA for surveillance. At altitudes of 70,000
feet or more, the translucent plastic balloons would often be swept
rapidly along by the jet stream.

Mantell wasn't the last pilot to die while pursuing, or being pursued
by, an alleged UFO. At 6:19 p.m. on Saturday, October 21, 1978,
Frederick Valentich of Melbourne, Australia, took off from Moorabbin
Airport aboard a rented  Cessena 182 bound for nearby King Island. He
planned to pick up a load of  crayfish for his fellow officers at the
Air Training Corps, where he was a flight instructor. An experienced
daytime pilot with an unrestricted license and instrument rating,
Valentich, 20, was relatively inexperienced at night flying. He was
also a UFO enthusiast who, his father said later, had claimed a UFO
sighting 10 months before his disappearance.

Out of Melbourne, Valentich paralleled Cape Otway before heading over
open water for King Island, where he was scheduled to land at 7:28. At
7:06 he radioed Melbourne Flight Service, asking, "Is there any known
traffic in my area below 5,000 feet? Seems to be a large aircraft."
Ground control asked what kind. "I cannot confirm," Valentich replied.
"It has four bright lights that appear to be landing lights...[and]
has just passed over me about 1,000 feet above... at the speed it's
traveling are there any RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] aircraft in
the vicinity?"

"Negative," answered Melbourne. "Confirm you cannot identify
aircraft?" Valentich replied in the affirmative, adding three minutes
later, "It's not an aircraft, it's ..." At that point there was a
brief break in the recorded transmission that was later released to
the Australian press.

"It is flying past," Valentich continued. "It has a long shape. Cannot
 identify more than that... coming for me now. It seems to be
stationary. I'm orbiting and the thing is orbiting on top of me. It
has a green light  and sort of metallic light on the outside." The
pilot then informed air  traffic controllers that the object had
vanished. At 7:12 he was back on the air, reporting his "engine is
rough-idling and coughing." Ground control  asked what his intentions
were; Valentich said, "Proceeding King Island. Unknown aircraft now
hovering on top of me." His radio transmission ended in a jarring
17-second metallic noise. Neither pilot nor airplane has been seen or
heard from since. Some have attempted to explain away the incident as
a hoax or a suicide, while others have suggested that the
inexperienced night pilot, overcome by vertigo, may have turned upside
down and seen the reflections of his own lights before the engine of
his Cessna failed.

Haines has published a book about the Valentich incident, "Melbourne
Episode: Case Study of a Missing Pilot," and he is in the midst of
another  compiling all of AIRCAT's cases. Most are variations on
ufology's two major themes: daylight disks and noturnal lights. The
first involves what appears to be objects in the shape of disks,
spheres, or elliptical forms. Nocturnal lights normally appear as
single, continuously visible white light sources. Sometimes the lights
are also detected by ground or airborne radar and less frequently,
accompanied by radio static and brief engine interruption, such as
that experienced by Valentich. Most sightings involve two or more
witnesses and last slightly more than five minutes, long enough in
most cases, says Haines, to eliminate a number of explanations, such
as meteors and  ballons.

One case from the AIRCAT files involved a pilot--call him Captain
Gray--who had logged more than 21,000 hours in a 31-year career. On
July 4, 1981, he was piloting a passenger flight in a Lockheed L-1011
Tristar, cruising on automatic pilot at 37,000 feet. The flight was
bound from San Francisco to New York's Kennedy Airport, approaching
the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. The lake below was obscured by
clouds, but ahead and above the sky was clear.

Suddenly, from ahead and to the left of the aircraft, a silvery disk
"splashed into view full size...like the atmosphere opened up," Gray
said later. He  leaned forward, blurting out, "What's that?"

Appearing at first like a sombrero viewed from the top, the object
rolled as it approached the airplane along an arc that carried it
toward and then  aburptly away from the L-1011. From the side, the
disk appeared ten times  wider than it was thick, with six evenly
spaced, jet black portholes along its edge. A bright splash of
sunlight flared off the top left end of the object. As it disappeared,
seemingly in a shallow climb, Gray noticed what looked like the dark
smudge of a contrail.

"Did you just see anything?" Gray asked his first officer. "Yes," he
replied, "a very bright light flash." The flight engineer, his view
blocked, had seen  nothing.

The overriding question for ufologists is whether a sighting like
Captain Gray's is a natural phenomenon or an object that displays
evidence of in- telligence. "As a scientist I have to be cautious,"
says Haines. "But when AIRCAT is made public, I think the
technical-minded can read between the lines."

Skeptics would disagree, "I think there are more than enough ordinary
stimuli floating around to create the UFO phenomena, the UFO social
event, of the past 40 years," says CSICOP's James Oberg. "Because of
imperfections in human memory and perception, coincidences and so on,
there'll always be a small residue of unsolved sightings. A small
percent of airplane crashes, murders, and missing-person cases don't
get solved either. But you don't have  to invoke alien airplane
saboteurs, murderers, or kidnappers to explain them."

Haines retorts that Captain Gray was a skeptic before his own UFO
confront- ation. But afterwards, "there was no doubt in his mind
whatsoever' that what  he had seen was an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Captain Terauchi of JAL flight 1628 was equally convinced that he had
encount- ered an extraterrestrial craft in the skies above Alaska.
Skeptics are not so  sure, citing the fact that Terauchi had reported
seeing UFOs on two previous occasions--and would report yet another
sighting the following January, again over Alaska. (He would later
explain his second Alaskan encounter as city  lights reflecting off
ice crystals in the clouds.) CSICOP's Philip Klass  thinks that ice
crystals in clouds played a significant role in the November
encounter. He theorizes that moonlight reflecting off the clouds
accounts for the initial sighting, and that when the crew later saw
Mars and Jupiter, bright in the autumn sky, they assumed the planets
were lights from the original UFO. The signal on the onboard radar,
Klass believes, could have been reflected by the same ice crystals
(although ice crystals, unlike rain droplets, are very poor reflectors
of radar energy). The FAA analyzed the ground radar and con- cluded
that they had been uncorrelated radar signals, a common phenomenon
that occurs when a radar beam bounced back from an airplane to a
ground station  doesn't match up with a separate signal sent by the
airplane's transponder.

That pilots, as well as ground observers, have seen something in the
skies is undeniable. The question of what they have senn has yet to be
satisfactorily resolved. Maybe it never will be. It may even be
irrelevant. As Jacques Valle, who has wriiten several books on the
subject, once said,"It no longer matters whether UFOs are real or not,
because people BEHAVE as if they were,  anyway."




                *** END ***     12/3/87

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