They are HERE

[Ted's Cracked Head]

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In the sky! A bird? A plane? A ... UFO?
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Video: UFO over O'Hare Airport?

Jon Hilkevitch
Getting Around

January 1, 2007

It sounds like a tired joke--but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously.

A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.

Was it an alien spaceship? A weather balloon lost in the airspace over the world's second-busiest airport? A top-secret military craft? Or simply a reflection from lights that played a trick on the eyes?

Officials at United professed no knowledge of the Nov. 7 event--which was reported to the airline by as many as a dozen of its own workers--when the Tribune started asking questions recently. But the Federal Aviation Administration said its air traffic control tower at O'Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if controllers had spotted a mysterious elliptical-shaped craft sitting motionless over Concourse C of the United terminal.

No controllers saw the object, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.

The FAA is not conducting a further investigation, Cory said. The theory is the sighting was caused by a "weather phenomenon," she said.

The UFO report has sparked some chuckles among controllers in O'Hare tower.

"To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable," said O'Hare controller and union official Craig Burzych.

Some of the witnesses, interviewed by the Tribune, said they are upset that neither the government nor the airline is probing the incident.

Whatever the object was, it could have interfered with O'Hare's radar and other equipment, and even created a collision risk, they said.

The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the term that extraterrestrial-watchers nowadays prefer over Unidentified Flying Object) was first seen by a United ramp worker who was directing back a United plane at Gate C17, according to an account the worker provided to the National UFO Reporting Center.

The sighting occurred during daylight, about 4:30 p.m., just before sunset.

All the witnesses said the object was dark gray and well defined in the overcast skies. They said the craft, estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter, did not display any lights.

Some said it looked like a rotating Frisbee, while others said it did not appear to be spinning. All agreed the object made no noise and it was at a fixed position in the sky, just below the 1,900-foot cloud deck, until shooting off into the clouds.

Witnesses shaken by sighting

"I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don't understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport," said a United mechanic who was in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 that he was taxiing to a maintenance hangar when he observed the metallic-looking object above Gate C17.

"But I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an [Earth] aircraft," the mechanic said.

One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and "experienced some religious issues" over it, one co-worker said.

A United manager said he ran outside his office in Concourse B after hearing the report about the sighting on an internal airline radio frequency.

"I stood outside in the gate area not knowing what to think, just trying to figure out what it was," he said. "I knew no one would make a false call like that. But if somebody was bouncing a weather balloon or something else over O'Hare, we had to stop it because it was in very close proximity to our flight operations."

Some joke, others research

The databases of various UFO-watching groups are full of accounts filed by pilots about sightings of unknown aircraft and anomalies that affected navigational equipment onboard planes.

Whether any of the UFO incidents are real or merely the result of individual perceptions, some experts say the events pose a potential safety risk to pilots and their passengers.

"There have been documented cases where safety appears to have been implicated, and more and more we are coming to the point of view that we are dealing with an intelligent phenomenon," said Richard Haines, science director at the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, a private agency.

"We must be proactive before an aircraft goes down," said Haines, a former chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Haines is investigating the O'Hare incident. He said he has determined that no weather balloons were launched in the vicinity of O'Hare on Nov. 7.

"It's absurd that the military would be conducting aerial test flights" near the airport, Haines said.

All the witnesses to the O'Hare event, who included at least several pilots, said they are certain based on the disc's appearance and flight characteristics that it was not an airplane, helicopter, weather balloon or any other craft known to man.

United denies UFO report

They're not sure what was hanging out for several minutes in the restricted airspace, but they are upset that no one in power has taken the matter seriously.

A United spokeswoman said there is no record of the UFO report. She said United officials do not recall discussion of any such incident.

"There's nothing in the duty manager log, which is used to report unusual incidents," said United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy. "I checked around. There's no record of anything."

The pilots of the United plane being directed back from Gate C17 also were notified by United personnel of the sighting, and one of the pilots reportedly opened a windscreen in the cockpit to get a better view of the object estimated to be hovering 1,500 feet above the ground.

The object was seen to suddenly accelerate straight up through the solid overcast skies, which the FAA reported had 1,900-foot cloud ceilings at the time.

"It was like somebody punched a hole in the sky," said one United employee.

Witnesses said they had a hard time visually tracking the object as it streaked through the dense clouds.

It left behind an open hole of clear air in the cloud layer, the witnesses said, adding that the hole disappeared within a few minutes.

The United employees interviewed by the Tribune spoke on condition of anonymity.

Some said they were interviewed by United officials and instructed to write reports and draw pictures of what they observed, and that they were advised by United officials to refrain from speaking about what they saw.

Federal agency backtracks

Like United, the FAA originally told the Tribune that it had no information on the alleged UFO sighting. But the federal agency quickly reversed its position after the newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

An internal FAA review of air-traffic communications tapes, a step toward complying with the Tribune request, turned up the call by the United supervisor to an FAA manager in the airport tower, Cory said.

Cory said the weather might have factored into what the witnesses thought they saw.

"Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," she said. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low [cloud] ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things. That's our take on it."

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Contact Getting Around at [email protected] or c/o the Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Read recent columns at chicagotribune.com/gettingaround
Copyright (c) 2007, Chicago Tribune

[GOD Loves You]

Man, I'm sure glad I fly into Midway when I go to Chicago. Rumor has it they are looking to abduct the man who uses FF as a means to help others. You better hide Rob!

[Ted's Cracked Head]

You may be right, they probably thought I was still a controller and figured I got my transfer to ORD Tower. They must not have known I was was retired. Time to go incognito for a while.

[nostradamross]

congratulations ted. i'm impressed.

[3INTBOY]

Does anyone think there are NOT other life forms at this point? I think everyone I have ever had the discussion with, even passingly has said they believe there are others "out there"

Kinda cool, as long as they aren't War of the Worlds kind of others....

3'

[Team Legacy]

Originally posted by 3INTBOY/BFDFANTASY.com:
Does anyone think there are NOT other life forms at this point? I think everyone I have ever had the discussion with, even passingly has said they believe there are others "out there"

Kinda cool, as long as they aren't War of the Worlds kind of others....

3' Put me in the group of non-believer. Why believe in something just because we saw it on TV?

The world has so many people in it, of course you're going to get some nut jobs over the years to say they've seen it, been poked by them or flat out been violated by them. Then you'll have some who are MORE credible than others who for whatever reason BELIEVE it, but I for one cannot understand why there wouldn't be to date any more convincing evidence than there is today, so for me, I would need more proof.

I mean, look, our galaxy is pretty big right? Just the distance from the Earth to the Sun is 93 MILLION miles. And we're the only planet in all that space with life. I've never heard how big the milky way is, but I'm sure its in the TRILLIONS of miles, and we're the only life that exists in TRILLIONS of miles... Isn't that a big enough number to be satisfied? I mean, one day I'm sure we'll find out there is a GAZILLION miles around us with no life besides ours, and I'm sure, even then, we'll still be sitting here, discussing it and searching for it.

My theory: There's infinitely MORE space, out there with a whole lot of nothing in it, except for us. I believe in the unique and rare explosion of life, here on Earth. I guess I never understood why it's that hard to believe. I always just assumed that the reason people believed in other life forms was because of all the good movies/shows/docudramas out there posing the questions and playing out the possibilities that allow us to bend our realities enough to believe in ol' E.T.

Honestly though, that doesn't make me want to believe any more than the thousands of people out there who believe in real life vampires and witches.

[ January 08, 2007, 01:17 PM: Message edited by: Team Legacy ]

[RiFF]

Personally, I don't believe or disbelieve that an Alien Race(s) has visited or is currently visiting our insignificant little rock. But considering our Galaxy (Milky Way) is approximately 100,000 light years is size with Billions of stars equivalent to our Sun (it takes 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to Earth) and that in the known universe there are trillions of other galaxies, all containing the same bulding blocks of life that are in our Galaxy; it seems a little naive and egotistical to believe no other intelligent life exists within the Universe. And its probably even more naive to believe that "some" of the other intelligent life in the Universe isn't farther advanced than ours. It certainly seems no other intelligent life exists within our Solar system of 8 planets (I guess Pluto got booted), but our Solar system is only a pimple on the butt of our Galaxy and our Galaxy is only a small pail of sand in the ocean of Galaxies in the Universe.

[GOD Loves You]

Scientists say if you look at the number of stars we can see in our galaxy, there's approximately the same amount of galaxies. So for every visible star, there's a galaxy just like ours.

What I've always wondered is if these "aliens" have the ability to travel throughout the universe, why would they care to come to a planet with the bragging rights of only being able to travel to the moon?? Unless, of course they interecepted a transmission of the tape being played and have a week to kill the girl! And the moon landing is about as questionable as aliens existing.
Also, it seems as though the ones being abducted are backwoods rednecks. You never hear of a person from the city being taken, only caucasians from the middle of nowhere. Of course I'm only referring to American abductions.
I know there's signs of the ancient Aztecs, Mayans, and others of the like having encounters with aliens. They've found cave drawings with cylinder objects, much like todays flying saucers. So this has been going on since the beginning of time.

I personally don't believe there's other lifeforms and ultimately don't care. Some may say this is a narrow-minded view, but they aren't currently affecting me, so why be concerned. I do wonder though if Ted's Cracked Head finished dead last this year in the bizarro world???