UFOs - Leslie Kean [107]
This was a situation in which numerous expert witnesses saw something and radar detected the same thing. Radar equipment can be affected by many different factors, and can present a false echo, but a false target appears very briefly and is easy to recognize because it disappears quickly. It’s a different story when we have a regular trajectory to follow. Also, when we have more than one radar spotting the same target, we know it’s serious. This equipment operates in different frequencies, so we have the correlation of independent readings from different sources. These data have nothing to do with human eyes. When, along with the radar, a pilot’s pair of eyes sees that same thing, and then another pilot’s, and so on, the incident has real credibility and stands on a solid foundation.
A few days after these sightings, Brazil’s Minister of Aeronautics, Brigadier Octavio Moreira Lima, called a press conference to explain what happened. He revealed that six jets had been scrambled from Santa Cruz AFB and Anapolis AFB, and some of the pilots had made visual contact, while all objects were registered on radar. The minister promised an official report within the next thirty days, but for some reason he changed his mind about releasing it. This was probably for some political reason, or maybe fear of panic because at that time the thinking was that the population might panic, if they knew. But in the meantime, the pilots and controllers were not prohibited from speaking about it.
The events of that night were really amazing, and some of our simple questions have simple answers: Did the pilots see the phenomena? Yes. Did the radars spot them? Yes. Did Ozires and other military pilots see them? Yes. Did pilots in commercial aircraft see them? Yes. Do the times of the sightings correlate? Yes. Do the trajectories of the objects correlate? Yes; all of this was technically analyzed. So, did it happen?
Yes, it did happen.
Everything was spotted by both aircraft radars and the radars on the ground. On-board radars operate in a microwave band, which is very narrow, while ground radars operate in a much broader band, so there’s no risk of confusion or mistaken correlation.
During this event, the military was not fearful of any sort of invasion. Jets armed with missiles took off and reached the objects in less than two minutes. These jets are always armed, but with peacetime armaments, consisting of two small missiles. If those objects were from an enemy country, they’d have been crushed that night. These pilots were highly trained and their radar capacities were increased to the maximum, which normally isn’t required. Radars never operate at full capacity, in order to save energy and to prevent wear-and-tear on the equipment. But after the jets took off, the capacity was increased to a broader range. Communications never failed, and the country was suffering no threat whatsoever. The jets landed safely and the pilots returned unharmed. Mission accomplished!
I don’t think that UFOs have made any real threat to national security, but we have to recognize that the current lack of knowledge about the subject is enough to raise suspicions, as it would about anything as seemingly advanced. So we then come to the very biggest of questions: What were those objects? No one knows. They were not foreign jets attacking. They were unidentified flying objects. And where are these objects now? Who knows? Were they captured? Not that we know. So here is where the problem of material evidence comes in, and we don’t have it.
When I was a commander, these unusual sightings occurred about once a month and usually were of very short duration. I remember there were about two to three incidents per year of military pilots being sent up to intercept something unknown that appeared on radar. Our civilian pilots are not afraid to speak up, and they always do, because they don’t want to lose their jobs for not reporting unusual events. The first thing they do when they see something strange is to call the controllers,