UFOs - Leslie Kean [118]
At one point, two objects appeared to stop directly in front of the 747, and the captain said they were “shooting off lights,” illuminating the cockpit and emitting heat he could feel on his face.
The objects then flew in level flight with the 747. Later, the captain made a turn to evade the UFO, but it flew alongside the jet, keeping a constant distance. Terauchi was able to estimate the size of the largest “spaceship,” as he called it, to be at least the size of an aircraft carrier because he had it on his radar, and the aircraft radar has range marks. He reported all of this to FAA officials, exactly as he saw it.
Over the course of thirty-one minutes, the UFO jumped miles in merely a few seconds. One radar sweep at the air traffic control in Anchorage took ten seconds. At one moment Terauchi says, It’s over here at twelve o’clock at eight miles, and when the radar antenna goes by, we see a target there. Ten seconds later, it’s suddenly six or seven miles behind him. It’s going from eight miles out in front of the 747 to six or seven miles in back, in only a few seconds, in one sweep of the radarscope. The technology was “unthinkable,” Terauchi said, because the UFOs appeared to have control over both inertia and gravity.
FAA officials interviewed the captain and his crew extensively in the days and months following; all of them provided independent descriptions and drawings of the “spaceships” and their remarkable behavior. These three reliable witnesses knew how to recognize aircraft. If this object had been a secret military exercise, the pilots would have been informed as such and would not have wasted time spending thirty-one minutes evading and reporting a UFO, and the FAA would not have bothered to conduct interviews following the event. These witnesses eliminated all known explanations for what they had observed at close range for an extended period of time.
When a pilot looks out the window and sees an aircraft shooting across his nose or flying along with him, the first thing he does is call air traffic control and say, “Hey, do you have traffic at my altitude?” And the controller panics, looks at the scope, and says, “No, we don’t have any traffic at your altitude.” Air traffic would then question the 747 pilot asking for more information: what type of aircraft, any visible markings, color, or numbers on the tail, etc., and then the controller would advise, “We will track that guy and have flight standards meet him at the airport when he lands. We’ll write him up; pull his ticket. We’ll do whatever we have to do to find the pilot of the unknown aircraft.” If his ticket was pulled, the pilot was no longer authorized to fly.
In this case, the pilot responded by saying, “It’s a UFO,” because he could see it so clearly. But who believes in UFOs? This is the type of attitude the air traffic control had at the time, and in any case, neither the controller nor the FAA was equipped to track something like this. The FAA has procedures that cover tracking unidentified aircraft, but it has no procedures for controlling UFOs.
Captain Terauchi sketched a silhouette of a giant ship, which he said was the size of an aircraft carrier, with pale white lights on the horizontal rim. Courtesy of Dr. Bruce Maccabee
After receiving the call concerning the UFO from the Alaskan region almost two months after the UFO event occurred, I briefed my boss Harvey Safer, who alerted the FAA administrator Admiral Engen. Safer and I drove up to the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to observe the computer playback of the event and learn more about what had happened.
The FAA had developed a computer program capable of re-creating the traffic on the controllers’ scope, called plan view display (PVD). I instructed the FAA specialist to synchronize