WHEN PILOTS SEE UFO's

                            WHEN PILOTS SEE UFO's

                         -------------------------

        People have been seeing unidentified flying objects in the skies

for years. But when the eyewitness is up there with the UFO, is the sighting

more difficult to explain?

 *** By Dennis Stacy for Air & Space Magazine December 1987/January 1988

In the late afternoon of November 17, 1986, Japan Air Lines flight 1628, a

Boeing 747 with a crew of three, was nearing the end of a trip from Iceland 

to Anchorage, Alaska. The jet, carrying a cargo of French wine, was flying 

at 35,000 feet through darkening skies, a red glow from the setting sun 

lighting one horizon and a full moon rising above the other.

A little after six p.m., pilot Kenju Terauchi noticed white and yellow 

lights ahead, below, and to the left of his airplane. He could see no details

in the darkness and assumed the lights were those of military aircraft. But

they continued to pace the 747, prompting first officer Takanori Tamefuji to

radio Anchorage air traffic control and ask if there were other aircraft near

by. Both Anchorage and a nearby military radar station announced they were

picking up weak signals from the 747's vicinity. Terauchi switched on the

digital color cockpit weather radar, which is designed to detect weather sys

tems, not other aircraft. His radar screen displayed a green target, a color

usually associated with light rain, not the red he would have expected from a

reflective solid object.

Because he was sitting in the left-hand seat, Terauchi had the only unobstr-

ucted view when the lights, still in front of and below the airplane, began

moving erratically,"like two bear cubs playing with each other," as the pilot

later wrote in a statement for the Federal Aviation Administration. After

several minutes, the lights suddenly darted in front of the 747,"shooting off

lights" that lit the cockpit with a warm glow.

As the airplane passed over Eielson Air Force Base, near Fairbanks, the 

captain said he noticed, looming behind his airplane, the dark silhouette of 

a gigantic "mothership" larger than two aircraft carriers. He asked air 

traffic control for permission to take his airplane around in a complete 

circle and then descend to 31,000 feet. Terauchi said his shadower followed 

him through both maneuvers.

A United Airlines fight and a military C-130 were both in the area and An-

chorage asked the airplanes to change course, intercept the Japanese 747, and

confirm the sighting. Both airplanes flew close enough to see JAL 1628's

navigation lights, alone in the night sky, before Terauchi reported that the 

unidentified flying objects had disappeared. The encounter had lasted nearly

50 minutes.

Because it involved an airline pilot and an unidentified flying object that 

had apparently been captured on radar, the JAL 1628 encounter attracted a

great deal of public attention. But UFO reports from pilots--private,military

and airline--are not new to the subject of "ufology." One of the best known

cases was a sighting by Idaho businessman and private pilot Kenneth Arnold.

Flying his single-engine airplane over Washington's Cascade Mountains on June

24,1947, Arnold spotted nine silvery, crescent-shaped objects skimming along

at high speed near Mt. Rainier. They dipped as they flew,"like a saucer would

if you skipped it across water," Arnold told reporters--and thus "flying

saucers" entered the popular vocabulary.

Pilots had reported similar unexplained aerial phenomena before, mainly in 

the form of the "Foo Fighters" noted by American bomber crews over Europe

in World War II. But Arnold's sighting, with its accompanying front-page

publicity, struck a jittery, post-Hiroshima nerve in American society and

set off a barrage of similar reports. Skeptics believed that every sighting

had a prosaic explanation, such as mis-identification of stars, planets, or

natural atmospheric phenomena. Others thought that there was more to UFOs, 

that they could even be visitors from other planets.

Following the Arnold incident, the Air Force was given the responsibility of

investigating UFO reports from the United States, first as Project Sign (also

called Saucer), then Grudge, and finally Blue Book. Usually understaffed and

underfunded, the Air Force program functioned more like a public relations

office than a scientific investigation, according to the late astronomer J.

Allen Hynek. Hynek himself, who served as a consultant to Project Blue Book

from 1948 until it was dissolved in December 1969, gradually changed from a 

skeptic into a believer.

Not even skeptics can deny the subject's popular appeal. Last March, a Gallup 

poll found that 88 percent of its respondents had heard of UFOs. Nearly half

of those polled believed UFOs were real, not figments of the imagination or

misperceived natural phenomena. Nine percent of the adult population claimed 

to have seen one.

Of these claims, pilot reports are the ones that interest Richard F. Haines,

a perceptual psychologist who compiles AIRCAT, a computerized catalog that

lists more than 3,000 UFO sightings by aviators over the past 40 years. Chief

of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA Ames Research Center in California

Haines is the author of "Observing UFOs", a handbook of methodology for 

accurate observation, and the editor of "UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral

Scientist", a collection of psychologically oriented essays on the subject.

*****************************************************************************

AIRCAT's cases include Blue Book's declassified files as well as some Haines

collected and research personally. Before joining the Space Human Factors 

Office, his research included interviewing pilots about what they had seen

peripherally during takeoffs and landings, data that may one day lead to re-

design of airplane cockpits. "I was interviewing pilot anyway," he says, "and

fell naturally into the habit of asking them if they'd ever seen anything

strange."

Haines concentrated on pilot reports for reasons other than convenience."They

have a unique vantage point simply by being in the air," he says, "if for no 

other reason than if the phenomenon is between your eyes and the ground, you 

can calculate the slant range, and you're establishing an absolute maximum

distance the object could be away. You can't do that with the object against

the sky background."

"Pilots also have available to them a variety of electromagnetic sensors of

various kinds onboard the aircraft itself, which can possibly record some

manifestations of the phenomenon, such as electromagnetic frequency and even 

energy content. They can control the location of their plane so that

they can maneuver to gain the best vantage point, under some conditions."

"Finally," says Haines, "they represent a very stable personality type with a

high degree of training, motivation, and selection. If a pilot comes forward

with a strange tale, I give him a lot of careful concentration because he's 

putting his reputation on the line and maybe his job. He's had to have 

thought the details out in his mind already, and perhaps eliminated a number 

of explanations before going public."

He's also likely to request anonymity. Kenneth Arnold, tired of the publicity

following his sighting, later commented, "If I ever see again a phenomenon of

that sort, even if it's a 10-story building, I won't say a word about it."

The feeling was echoed even in the Air Force. When Blue Book's predecessor,

Project Grudge, conducted an informal survey of Air Force pilots in the late 

1940s , one respondent said, "If a spaceship was flying wing-tip to wing-tip

formation with me, I would not report it."

One sensational pilot-and-UFO case almost certainly had a prosaic 

explanation. On the afternoon of January 7, 1948, people near Godman Air 

Force Base at Fort Knox, Kentucky, reported an object in the sky that looked 

like "an ice cream cone topped with red." Captain Thomas F. Mantell, flying 

in command of a ferry flight of four F-51 Mustangs (P-51s had been 

redesignated F-51s the previous year), was asked to investigate. None of the 

fighters were equipped with oxygen, and after three dropped out of the chase 

Mantell continued alone. "It's directly ahead and above and still moving at 

about half my speed," he radioed. "The thing looks metallic and of tremendous 

size. I'm going up to 20,000 feet, and if I'm no closer I'll abandon the 

chase." A few minutes later Mantell's airplane crashed, earning him the 

dubious distinction as the world's first "UFO martyr."

Project Blue Book proposed that Mantell succumbed to hypoxia, or oxygen 

starvation, and crashed while chasing the planet Venus, but later evidence

indicates he was pursuing a top-secret, high-atmosphere Skyhook balloon. The

balloons, designed for upper-atmosphere research, were later used by the CIA

for surveillance. At altitudes of 70,000 feet or more, the translucent 

plastic balloons would often be swept rapidly along by the jet stream.

Mantell wasn't the last pilot to die while pursuing, or being pursued by, an

alleged UFO. At 6:19 p.m. on Saturday, October 21, 1978, Frederick Valentich

of Melbourne, Australia, took off from Moorabbin Airport aboard a rented 

Cessena 182 bound for nearby King Island. He planned to pick up a load of 

crayfish for his fellow officers at the Air Training Corps, where he was a

flight instructor. An experienced daytime pilot with an unrestricted license

and instrument rating, Valentich, 20, was relatively inexperienced at night

flying. He was also a UFO enthusiast who, his father said later, had claimed

a UFO sighting 10 months before his disappearance.

Out of Melbourne, Valentich paralleled Cape Otway before heading over open

water for King Island, where he was scheduled to land at 7:28. At 7:06 he

radioed Melbourne Flight Service, asking, "Is there any known traffic in my

area below 5,000 feet? Seems to be a large aircraft." Ground control asked

what kind. "I cannot confirm," Valentich replied. "It has four bright lights

that appear to be landing lights...[and] has just passed over me about 1,000

feet above... at the speed it's traveling are there any RAAF [Royal 

Australian Air Force] aircraft in the vicinity?"

"Negative," answered Melbourne. "Confirm you cannot identify aircraft?"

Valentich replied in the affirmative, adding three minutes later, "It's not

an aircraft, it's ..." At that point there was a brief break in the recorded

transmission that was later released to the Australian press.

"It is flying past," Valentich continued. "It has a long shape. Cannot 

identify more than that... coming for me now. It seems to be stationary.

I'm orbiting and the thing is orbiting on top of me. It has a green light 

and sort of metallic light on the outside." The pilot then informed air 

traffic controllers that the object had vanished. At 7:12 he was back on the

air, reporting his "engine is rough-idling and coughing." Ground control 

asked what his intentions were; Valentich said, "Proceeding King Island.

Unknown aircraft now hovering on top of me." His radio transmission ended

in a jarring 17-second metallic noise. Neither pilot nor airplane has been

seen or heard from since. Some have attempted to explain away the incident

as a hoax or a suicide, while others have suggested that the inexperienced

night pilot, overcome by vertigo, may have turned upside down and seen the

reflections of his own lights before the engine of his Cessna failed.

Haines has published a book about the Valentich incident, "Melbourne

Episode: Case Study of a Missing Pilot," and he is in the midst of another 

compiling all of AIRCAT's cases. Most are variations on ufology's two

major themes: daylight disks and nocturnal lights. The first involves what

appears to be objects in the shape of disks, spheres, or elliptical forms.

Nocturnal lights normally appear as single, continuously visible white light

sources. Sometimes the lights are also detected by ground or airborne radar

and less frequently, accompanied by radio static and brief engine 

interruption, such as that experienced by Valentich. Most sightings involve 

two or more witnesses and last slightly more than five minutes, long enough 

in most cases, says Haines, to eliminate a number of explanations, such as 

meteors and balloons.

One case from the AIRCAT files involved a pilot--call him Captain Gray-who

had logged more than 21,000 hours in a 31-year career. On July 4, 1981, he

was piloting a passenger flight in a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, cruising on

automatic pilot at 37,000 feet. The flight was bound from San Francisco to

New York's Kennedy Airport, approaching the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.

The lake below was obscured by clouds, but ahead and above the sky was clear.

Suddenly, from ahead and to the left of the aircraft, a silvery disk 

"splashed into view full size...like the atmosphere opened up," Gray said 

later. He leaned forward, blurting out, "What's that?"

Appearing at first like a sombrero viewed from the top, the object rolled as

it approached the airplane along an arc that carried it toward and then 

abruptly away from the L-1011. From the side, the disk appeared ten times 

wider than it was thick, with six evenly spaced, jet black portholes along 

its edge. A bright splash of sunlight flared off the top left end of the 

object. As it disappeared, seemingly in a shallow climb, Gray noticed what 

looked like the dark smudge of a contrail.

"Did you just see anything?" Gray asked his first officer. "Yes," he replied,

"a very bright light flash." The flight engineer, his view blocked, had seen 

nothing.

The overriding question for ufologists is whether a sighting like Captain

Gray's is a natural phenomenon or an object that displays evidence of in-

telligence. "As a scientist I have to be cautious," says Haines. "But when

AIRCAT is made public, I think the technical-minded can read between the

lines."

Haines retorts that Captain Gray was a skeptic before his own UFO confront-

ation. But afterwards, "there was no doubt in his mind whatsoever' that what 

he had seen was an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Captain Terauchi of JAL flight 1628 was equally convinced that he had 

encountered an extraterrestrial craft in the skies above Alaska. Skeptics are 

not so sure, citing the fact that Terauchi had reported seeing UFOs on two 

previous occasions--and would report yet another sighting the following 

January, again over Alaska. (He would later explain his second Alaskan 

encounter as city lights reflecting off ice crystals in the clouds.)          

That pilots, as well as ground observers, have seen something in the skies is

undeniable. The question of what they have seen has yet to be satisfactorily

resolved. Maybe it never will be. It may even be irrelevant. As Jacques 

Valle, who has written several books on the subject, once said,"It no longer 

matters whether UFOs are real or not, because people BEHAVE as if they were, 

anyway."

 

                *** END ***     12/3/87