Military-UFO Encounters

People would probably be surprised to find out how many unexplainable military-UFO encounters there have been. Many dozens of them have been formally recorded and there are certainly hundreds more. The reason that we know that latter fact is that a large number of retired servicemen have told us. The picture at the right represents something that is unusual in a whole variety of ways. It's meant to visualize an event that occurred at a New Mexican aerial location, wherein the base [Kirtland] had a plane up which was ordered to intercept an unknown object. The pilot did so, according to his report, and then got carried away and fired on the UFO--a definite No-No unless the intruder is clearly perceived to be a threat and the use of weapons does not unduly risk anyone or anything of the citizenry. The pilot landed and gave his report which was written up. This was not sent up the line to higher authorities because of the poor judgement of the pilot involved. However, when the base intelligence officer was visited by the chief officer of the Air Force's UFO project, Edward Ruppelt of Project Blue Book, he told Ruppelt of the 1952 incident and showed him the file. Ruppelt was stunned by the pilot's behavior, let alone the case, and published it [with the pilot's name left anonymous] in his book The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects. After the base officer showed Ruppelt the case report, he burned it. Following through on something this "messy" was more hassle than it was worth. ------------------------------------------------------------- There are not many incidents where a pilot was foolish enough to fire on a UFO, but the military did have standing orders that such a thing was allowable if a clear threat to the country was possible. This is no surprise, as it is their job to defend our airspace from anything which doesn't belong there, understood or not. In a way, it is more interesting that cases like this almost never occurred, despite the "close-encounters" that many had. ---------------------------------------Here's an example of a nerve-wracking incident of an in-air encounter: the story was given to veteran UFO researcher, John Timmerman, by the chief physical anthropologist at Wright-Patterson AFB, Dr. H.T.E.Hertzberg. Dr. Hertzberg was tasked with interviewing pilots after missions on matters related to stress, cockpit "space" and mobility, general man/machine accommodation, et al. Hertzberg had an ex-Korean ace who was now training young pilots out of Keesler AFB in Texas, tell him of the following incident. He was flying, with a student at the controls, in a great triangle route from Keesler to Chicago to Salt Lake and back. They were well into the final leg when the student noted a light ahead. The instructor told him to forget it and finish the route. The light seemed then to begin to move closer. The instructor told the student to fly towards it. The light then accelerated directly at them and roared by. The instructor took over, and a sort of "dog-fight" ensued. Now close enough to see, the object was a disk with a brightly glowing dome. It had a row of unlighted windows. The entity in control of this thing apparently decided to up the stakes in the experience and cast a brilliant "pencil of light" [the pilot did not yet know about lasers] into the cockpit, the accuracy of which action alarmed the instructor. He thought "this is no place for me". He then dove the plane directly toward the ground and executed his best evasive maneuvers. He flew the rest of the way to base without the thing following. Upon landing, he reported the whole incident to base intelligence. He was debriefed from 1:30am to 3:30am. He went home to sleep and was awakened by a phone call at 7:30am. It was the Pentagon. They kept him on the phone for another two hours. Much later when he found himself at Wright-Patterson, he went to the UFO Project to look up his report--it wasn't there. ----------------------------------------------------------In 1952, a B-36 crew was flying some sort of test mission out of Wright-Patterson itself. One of the crew saw an object heading towards their plane and reported it to the others: "Here it comes. Here the bastard comes, whatever it is." The crew chief was surprisingly non-plussed: "Well, this isn't the first time". The object was a 20-to-25 foot diameter disk with a dome on top. It was very shiny, apparently metal, and was rotating counterclockwise. It "parked" just off their wing and flew with them for about two minutes at 400 mph. The crew took pictures which have never been released. The object then angled upwards and shot away. Upon landing, everyone was debriefed and told that they hadn't seen what they'd seen and to forget it. Their commanding flight officer took this with equanimity and convinced the crew to just swallow it and shut up. They then did the only reasonable thing. "We all ended up back over at the [officer's] club afterwards getting swacked, because no one believed it". ----------------------------------------------July 1958, over New Hampshire, on the last leg of a refueling mission flight from Goose Bay, Labrador. Members of the 509th Air Refueling team were in their KC97 at about 17,000 feet. A light appeared, initially looking like a moving star. It got closer, now brighter than Venus, and appearing like a globe. It was beneath the cloud cover, so our lady planet was not performing any pseudo-UFO mischief. The officers were informed as it continued to close, now about the same apparent size as the full Moon. It was a brilliant blue-white with two enigmatic dark spots on its surface. The commander was ultimately asked: "why don't you turn towards it and flash your lights at it or something?" The commander replied: "No way. I'm not flashing lights at THAT. They might think it's a raid or something". The object then angled upwards and within 5 seconds was out-of-sight. -------------------------------------------------One last tale [for now] among the hundreds: there was a young man who was very interested in UFOs and one of his father's best friends was a career officer in SAC [Strategic Air Command]. The officer liked the young man and so one day the son decided to ask him what was the truth about UFOs. The officer suddenly acted stressed. "And he got real, real solemn, and he looked at the floor, which I had never seen him do...so I kind of backed off and said, Oh, that's OK; if it's some kind of government stuff or something like that." The officer shook his head. "No...I'll tell you. There's something up there".