UFOs - Leslie Kean [36]
The NARCAP experts concurred:
Anytime an airborne object can hover for several minutes over a busy airport but not be registered on radar or seen visually from the control tower, it constitutes a potential threat to flight safety. The identity of the UAP remains unknown. An official government inquiry should be carried out to evaluate whether or not current sensing technologies are adequate to insure against a future incident such as this.4
So, what exactly was going on here?
I decided to call FAA spokesperson Tony Molinaro and ask him for more details about the bizarre “weather” that he said United Airlines pilots mistook for a physical object—weather so freakish that it was able to cut a round, sharply defined hole though a thick cloud bank in a split second. Such a phenomenon would certainly be worthy of study by scientists in the age of climate change, and is actually even more of a novelty than hovering or speeding discs, which have made the news since the 1940s.
“In the absence of any kind of factual evidence, there is nothing more we can do,” Molinaro said in a phone interview, in response to my asking why the FAA chose not to investigate this. But was there factual evidence for his newly discovered weather phenomenon? Weather is the best guess, he said, and then pointed to a specific natural phenomenon that isn’t really weather: a “hole-punch cloud,” as it is colloquially called. After all, he stated, such a cloud hole is in “a perfect circular shape like a round disc” and has “vapor going up into it.” In other words, witnesses mistook the cloud hole for a disc (even though the disc was seen for many minutes before the hole was created), and the ascension of vapor, somehow moving up in defiance of gravity, was what witnesses believed to be the disc shooting upward through the clouds.
Doesn’t this sound ridiculous, if you stop and think about it? It’s the kind of response that has typically been provided for decades when officials are pressured to say something. And even if Molinaro hedged his explanation by qualifying it as a “guess,” this kind of subtle understatement is quickly lost to the mass media and the general public.
And was his guess at all reasonable? I contacted weather experts and scientists specializing in cloud physics, something the FAA would have been wise to have done before issuing its explanation. No, this could not possibly be what witnesses saw, I learned.
Hole-punch clouds are formed when ice crystals from a higher cloud deck fall onto a lower one. The hole is formed by ice crystals falling downward, not upward as Molinaro postulated. Super-cooled water droplets in the lower cloud adhere to the crystals, enlarging them and leaving a space around them in the cloud. The crystal mass accumulates weight and then falls farther, below the second cloud, evaporating when it hits warmer air.
The key factor is that this process can only happen at below freezing temperatures. The temperature at 1,900 feet above O’Hare Airport the day of the sighting was 53 degrees F, according to the National Weather Service. The climatologists and other weather experts I spoke to all stated that temperatures must be below freezing for a hole-punch cloud to explain the sighting.
And they told me that a hole in a cloud can be formed by only one other means: evaporation by heat. And this just happens to fit the witnesses’ explanation of what they saw: a high-energy, round object very likely to be emitting some form of intense radiation or heat while cutting through