UFOs - Leslie Kean [108]
A civilian aircraft is always in contact with air traffic control, and all of these operations in Brazil are linked to the Air Force and are of a military nature. When a commercial pilot says, “There’s something going on here,” the control center will immediately report it to the military operations center in that area, in case it is something serious. They will take some action regarding that fact and report to the air defense operations center,7 which is the superior body and the only one to oversee the whole country. Then the pilot or the air traffic controller will fill out a report; they know where to get the form—from any Air Force base or any traffic controlling office throughout the country—and they deliver the completed papers to any Air Force base.
Next, there’s always an investigation after the pilot registers what he saw. As requested on the reporting form, he must report the direction, altitude, and speed of the object. We also need other details, such as the position of the sun compared to the aircraft at that time. The brightness of the object is also important, as well as the kind of clouds in the sky at the time. All these data are precious. The controllers are then able to check if some other aircraft crossed the path of this pilot, which could explain the event. An investigation will follow, and if they discover that no other aircraft was there and the weather was not a factor, we have a special situation. And all these things are easy to check when everything is spelled out in the initial report. We go on eliminating all possibilities until we are sure that there is no conventional explanation for the data, and then the report is securely filed.
Pilot reports that turn out to have a conventional explanation are eventually deleted, and someone from the Air Defense will inform the pilot that they found out what happened. If no explanation is found, the case is transferred to another folder, called the “Book of Flight Occurrences.” All of these unsolved cases are kept there in those books, and one hopes that researchers will eventually be allowed to see them. They include serious reports from pilots and air traffic controllers—everything we cannot explain, everything that is held as secret, goes to those books. It’s important to emphasize that this “Book of Flight Occurrences” contains cases that couldn’t be explained even after analysis by experts especially assigned to this task.
When I was a commander at COMDABRA, the Brazilian Airspace Defense Command, from 1999 to 2001, all cases involving UFOs spotted by military pilots and by radars would came to my attention. I directly participated in an investigation of a UFO incident only once, although I had access to secret files and both official and unofficial reports. After leaving the military, I still had access to nearly all the information I desired on this subject.
I haven’t followed what happened at the Air Defense over the last four years, but I know that we continue to receive reports. Even so, I want to mention something important. I believe that up to 90 percent of all sightings are never reported. Brazil is a huge country, and these reports are filed only where there is an airport or an Air Force base, and only by people who know how the process works. Civilians don’t even know that these forms exist and are available throughout the country. I don’t know the actual percentage of sightings that result in reports, but I think it must be tiny. So the number of reports that come to the knowledge of the military is almost insignificant.
It is a big step for a country to officially acknowledge the existence of UFOs, as France has done. But releasing information has not caused people to panic, and I don’t think it would if more files were to be opened. No one fears transparency; instead people fear the lack of it. I think that from the moment the government opens the subject for debate, all the fear people have toward this subject will disappear. And if there’s one country that never panics, it’s