Do pilots believe in UFOs? Many of them do and here is my close encounter story

Network dude great thread, have you heard this interview with Dr Richard Haines from NARCAP - he does go into quite a bit of detail about military/civilian pilot sightings and the 3400 actual unknown reports collated from aviation professionals.

originally posted by: butcherguy

I know a man that worked for the US government for 30 years, working on the high powered radar sets that we used for tracking Soviet missile tests during the Cold War.

He said that there were multiple times that he had tracked contacts that flew at phenomenal speeds that weren't even possible for missiles. I inquired if it was possible that he was seeing meteors. He said these things changed course, maneuvered.

Have also heard that before Butcherguy and there are some other statements here from Air Traffic Controllers which seem to suggest something very serious is going on - Orkojoker's thread below about John Lester's poll of 50 commercial pilots (and 1000 government radar operators) is also well worth a read if you've not seen it before.


The UFO Poll You Probably Haven't Heard Of

originally posted by: Jinzetsu

Why not have cameras fitted on planes? Would solve a tremendous amount of problems and would be great to see what pilots report as UFOs. As interesting as they are, when I read a pilot story I know thats all it is, just a story, no video or even pictures. So simple mounted cameras would be very handy.

Great idea Jinzetsu and there are already quite a number of incidents out there where UFOs could be (or have been) captured on mounted gun camera - the trouble is 'not one frame' of the footage has ever been declassified.


Missing Gun Camera UFO Footage?

originally posted by: SubSea
I have a very difficult time understanding why anyone who has access to the internet
could question the presence of UFOs/Alien life on Earth. All one has to do is a minimal
amount of digging through the BS to see the likes of Paul Helyer, former Canadian Defense
minister, former astronauts and literally hundreds of former black ops informers reveal
what they know about the subject.

They are here, they have been coming here for thousands of years. A close personal friend
of mine worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, he tells me there have been
at least 3 advanced civilizations on Earth that were wiped out hundreds of millions of years
ago and that some of the "visitors" are the descendants of those civilizations and the ones
that managed to escape whatever brought them to an end. So much is hidden from the
general public for such stupid reasons.

Exactly. These people are so socially conditioned they can't see the mountains of evidence pointing to alien contact being a reality.

It's absurd to hear someone say they don't see any "real" evidence. Aliens have abducted millions of people in the last seventy years, they are altering the genetic make-up of the human race, they are creating a hybrid species so they can live on earth undetected and rule the planet, and what did the people do? They slept through the invasion, played video games and twittered.

Congratulations, dummy nation. You were conquered, and don't even realize your new rulers exist.

originally posted by: karl 12
Network dude great thread, have you heard this interview with Dr Richard Haines from NARCAP - he does go into quite a bit of detail about military/civilian pilot sightings and the 3400 actual unknown reports collated from aviation professionals.

I've long had an open issue with Haines over what I see as a careless approach to raw data assessment.

Each case needs to be examined individually before "the big picture" can be drawn. I quote Vallee from page 196: "Good science is a science of measurement.... UFO research cannot get anywhere until its practitioners recognize the need for a solid taxonomy that can be reliably applied." In this brief treatment, I believe I have established that Vallee (and you) have failed to meet these standards, that you (and your Russian colleagues) have proven incapable of filtering out one particular artificial stimulus (rocket/space events) from the body of reports, so who knows how many others also remain imbedded within the data? Any taxonomist with that kind of error rate would be laughed out of any real scientific field.

Full open letter [20+ years ago] here --

www.outtahear.com...

originally posted by: SubSea
I have a very difficult time understanding why anyone who has access to the internet

could question the presence of UFOs/Alien life on Earth. All one has to do is a minimal

amount of digging through the BS to see the likes of Paul Helyer, former Canadian Defense

minister, former astronauts and literally hundreds of former black ops informers reveal

what they know about the subject. ....

You are correct, with a MINIMUM amounty of digging you find such stories. But with
the astronauts, say, where have you ever seen ANY independent corroboration of their
narratives -- or do they get a pass on being checkup up on?

Let's see, Ed Mitchell has never seen a UFO and insists none of his Gemini and Apollo
astronaut buddies did, either, on all their space flights.

Let's see, Gordon Cooper says he saved the space shuttle program from a lethal
design flaw by relaying a telepathic warning from space aliens, does that sound OK?

Let's see, most of the other astronaut quotations on the internet are fictional.

This is the kind of evidence you demand we rely on? How come?

How about you go BEYOND 'the minimum' and do some REAL research on such stories?

a reply to: JimOberg

Do you know if Vallee was ever copied on that letter or whether he ever saw it?

Because he seems, to me, to be extremely conscientious in his desire to research UFO phenomena thru a thoroughly scientific lens - so I wonder whether in cases which can be attributed to "(rocket/space events)", it might simply be that no one brought that data to his attention at the time he was 'actively' researching...

And I realize that it is incumbent upon the researcher to 'collect' data, rather than rely on others to 'relay' it -

- but Vallee's UFO research always took a back burner to his family and job (his books in no way afforded him a living), and with that plus the consideration that such research in the 60's, 70's, and 80's (when he was 'active') was a much more time consuming process.
It's understandable that a particular 'aspect' of research might be overlooked - especially if no one had offered any suggestion or expertise in those regards.

Along with all of that, one of Vallee's prime concerns has always been to cut thru the 'noise' of UFO investigation by eliminating as many variables ('explainable' cases) as possible in order to more efficiently sort the 'wheat from the chaff' -

- my point being that unlike many (perhaps most) who investigate UFO phenomena, Jacques Vallee has never been 'invested' in the idea of 'proving' their existence, he just wants to know what they are...

...thus, I feel fairly confident in saying that he would never sacrifice his scientific principles (in order to have an 'un-debunkable' case) by purposely ignoring the sort of confirmable evidence that you have presented for various sightings.


Of course, my estimation of Vallee could be wrong - but I seriously do not think it is...

I mean, having read all of his books and as many interviews as possible - I just don't think you could find a more conscientious, trustworthy, scientifically 'oriented' person in the field of UFO investigations than Jacques Vallee.


edit to say: mods please don't say it's off topic - it took me over an hour to compose.

originally posted by: and14263
Me old man was a pilot for 30 years, no UFO stories.

Literally saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Well, when I say 'Saw nothing out of the ordinary..." I mean specifically UFOs.

I'm a pilot, flew in the AF for 28 years to every part of the world many times over. I worked and lived with aircrew for about the last 40 years, I even know a guy that was at Bentwaters when that incident happened. After all this time I have never seen anything personally and never had anyone I know speak of anything remotely UFO related.

So this does kind of drives my skepticism though I would love for it all to be true.

originally posted by: lostgirl....


...thus, I feel fairly confident in saying that he would never sacrifice his scientific principles (in order to have an 'un-debunkable' case) by purposely ignoring the sort of confirmable evidence that you have presented for various sightings.

I totally agree, Jacques and I happened to both be at the Technological Institute at Northwestern U. simo [I was there 1966-1970 doing PhD work in Engineering Science on a NASA grant, he was teaching in the next door Industrial Engineering department, but we didn't discuss UFOs then -- since then, we've had a cordial email relationship.

My point isn't to accuse anyone of malpractice, but to remind us all that any number of explanation categories were still unrecognized then and others probably still even today.

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: and14263
Me old man was a pilot for 30 years, no UFO stories.

Literally saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Well, when I say 'Saw nothing out of the ordinary..." I mean specifically UFOs.

I'm a pilot, flew in the AF for 28 years to every part of the world many times over. I worked and lived with aircrew for about the last 40 years, I even know a guy that was at Bentwaters when that incident happened. After all this time I have never seen anything personally and never had anyone I know speak of anything remotely UFO related.

So this does kind of drives my skepticism though I would love for it all to be true.

Thanks for your service. I wore the blue 1964-1978, all domestic assignments.

I don't think we know enough real statistics to judge 'pilot accuracy', except to say that it seems pilots err, when they err, on the side of caution -- as they should. If they misjudge distance to an obscure bogie, it's usually to take countermeasures against the most hazardous possible interpretation, a prudent response.

When I was lecturing at the NTSB on aerospace safety and accidents, I was told by an instructor there that their accident investigation teams often preferred incident eyewitness accounts from non-aviation personnel because they would narrate their perceptions straight, since they in general didn't recognize the significance of the details they saw. Pilots, on the other hand [he told me], often are mentally are keyed up to solve problems that could impact them personally [could even kill them], and they know the subtle cues of flight anomalies, and they could quickly come up with a favored theory for the event, often subconsciously editing their memories to stress or downplay aspects of their perceptions to 'make sense' of what they had seen. This was usually a subconscious bias motivated by wanting to be helpful, but sometimes had the opposite effect.

Does that make any sense to you, or was it just the whining of a disgruntled and frustrated old bureaucrat?

a reply to: JimOberg

Oh my gosh, I didn't mean to imply that you were 'accusing' anyone of anything!

My thought while reading the letter was 'doubt' that the receiver would want to pass it on to anyone - so I was just genuinely curious whether Vallee would have had opportunity to correlate the stuff you had written there into his corresponding case files...

...and then I felt the need to go into detail for readers of the thread who, not being as familiar with Jacques Vallee's estimable character, could get a mistaken impression from the letter.

My sincere apologies, if I offended you!

--- Apologies to you as well OP - back to the topic now...

a reply to: raedar

Well done for having the initiative to check.

This casts some doubt on the veracity of the story quoted in the OP. It doesn't mean 'Captain Andy' is lying, but maybe not all the facts are exactly as he recalls them.

originally posted by: JimOberg
Does that make any sense to you, or was it just the whining of a disgruntled and frustrated old bureaucrat?

Actually it does... I have always disagreed with the old "professionals make better eye witnesses" theory. When I say I never seen anything, it is just that, I have actually never seen a single thing... The other side is pilots talk, a lot. There typically isn't anything they keep secret, we love to tell stories. I know there are a few that do suggest they seen a UFO, but when you look at the fact that we are talking about a vast group of people who have spent, in many cases, 10,000 of hours looking out their windows that have the same experience as me just doesn't give much to any kind of credibility.

a reply to: Xtrozero

I would have thought that pilots would at least be better at eliminating ordinary things that are sometimes reported as UFOs, such as sundogs and flocks of geese. Though the A-7 refuelling story told earlier was a bit of an eye-opener.

a reply to: network dude

Here's one you might find interesting; I uploaded it years back. A flight of P-47s were asked to check if another aircraft was in the air with them after the control tower observed an object. This pilot recalls seeing the object and manoeuvring to get a better view. He ascends from roughly 7000ft to 15000ft before the object rises vertically and disappears from sight.



What makes it doubly interesting is listening to him trying to rationalise what he saw. He errs against conventional, prosaic explanations and does so reluctantly if my ear judges it correctly.

originally posted by: Astyanax
a reply to: Xtrozero

I would have thought that pilots would at least be better at eliminating ordinary things that are sometimes reported as UFOs, such as sundogs and flocks of geese. Though the A-7 refuelling story told earlier was a bit of an eye-opener.

I think the best eyewitness is one who just states the facts as they saw them with no personal deductions or interpretations...I think this could lead to professional bias.

a reply to: network dude

I was at a party years ago that was chock full of pilots. I had to ask. You know, of course :-)

I asked a few people - some said flat out no, some said yes absolutely and were really interested in talking about it

I asked this one guy if he'd ever seen anything special up there...he looked at me with this partial, restrained grin and a look in his eye that could have meant:

Oh, god yes - but I'm going to get into it...you wouldn't believe me anyhow

Or - you're an annoying idiot that I'd like to swat away, but I'm at a party so I'm going to be polite

Like so much in life - could've gone either way. I'll never know

:-)

originally posted by: network dude
a reply to: Irishhaf

What airframe did/do you work with? I was com-nav on C-130's, but when my work was slow, I acted as a crew chief to pass the time. (doing BPO's, fueling, tire changes and the like)

Oh, the irony.... Just today I had a conversation with a C-130 pilot about this very topic.