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The Air Force Alerted its nation-wide radar network today to watch for a "brilliant mystery object" that has been reported flying in a crazy pattern over, Texas, New Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico in the last two days.

By Sante Fe New Mexican 11-5-1957

Air Force officials said the latest sightings have been placed in an unexplained category pending investigation ....

A statement issued by the Air Force said: "The air defense command radar net is keeping watch ... trained personnel are investigating reports on scene." The alert coincided with the release of an official dispatch to U.S. Coast Guard headquarters reporting that the cutter "Sebado" had contacted the strange object several times by radar over the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
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Remember that riveting opening sequence in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” when air traffic controllers stared at their boards as airline pilots barely avoided colliding with something nobody wanted to talk about afterwards? A drama that unfolded over America’s northwest corridor in the early evening of Oct. 24, 2017, wasn’t quite that Hollywood. But whatever it was, the thing was flying. It had no transponder but got caught on radar. Then it erased itself and vanished from ATC screens. Immediately after that, at least three airline pilots reported seeing it. Jet fighters scrambled; by time they

By Billy Cox De Void 2-16-18

got airborne, whatever it was vanished for good, and the whole sequence probably left a few people who had to deal with it wondering if it was worth the effort.

We know all this thanks to some masterful work from Tyler Rogoway, a military aviation reporter at a non-UFO website called The War Zone. Armed with voluminous details harvested from a Freedom of Information Act request, Rogoway broke the story last November. And the updated results are so cool, De Void anticipates a Congressional suspension of FOIA laws any day now.

On Thursday, Rogoway posted audiotaped real-time chatter from eyewitnesses and official sources. It begins with the detection of an unknown flying object by Oakland Center air traffic control. It popped onto its screens at 37,000 feet, and for more than an hour, the speeding bogey drew swivels from both the Federal Aviation Administration and North American Aerospace Defense Command. It streaked for several hundred miles over northern California and Oregon, northbound. It ended when F-15s from the 142nd Fighter Wing out of Portland were dispatched on a fool’s errand to identify what at least one civilian pilot described as a big white unmarked aircraft, with few additional details.

Three months later, Rogoway has augmented his early reporting with a fascinating narrative presented in four separate videos, some syncing radar maps with recorded participant dialogue. The confusion among FAA operators is unambiguous: “You know that target south of the boundary there, that 0027 code moving very fast at 37,000?” “Yeah, look at that thing.” “Yeah, that’s, uh, crazy.” “Hmm, um, and you don’t have anything on him, huh?” “I got nothing.” “Well, we’ll look.”

Oblivious to requests for identification, the UFO merges into existing air traffic lanes and no longer expresses itself in radar pingbacks. But northbound airline pilots report seeing a distant white somethingorother that paces and maybe passes them, even as it resembles thin air to radar beacons. Although this potentially dangerous behavior fails to trip the planes’ Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems, it does alert a picket fence of other acronyms – DEN (the Domestic Events Network) and WADS (the Western Air Defense Sector, also nicknamed Bigfoot). Somewhere along the way, a command goes out to put F-15s in the sky to get some military eyes on the intruder. When an Alaska 439 pilot requests new info on the bogey, an ATC operator says it may have gone into “stealth mode or something.”

The F-15s hunted for the UFO “with the most capable air-to-air radar set in the world (AN/APG-63VC) and Sniper advanced targeting pods for long-range visual identification,” Rogoway states in his November report. “Their pilots are some of the best in the world and are highly trained in the homeland air defense mission. The fact that they ‘didn’t find anything’ is surprising to say the least. Maybe this was due to the nature of the aircraft being searched for, or the possibility that they launched long after it was first sighted, or that we simply aren’t being told the whole story.”

Rogoway’s FOIAs also produced an after-action audio gem. In this segment, an unnamed Seattle Center ATC Manager In Charge of Operations reaches out to airline pilots and FAA officials to figure out what just happened. All spoken names, phone numbers and emails are literally beeped out; but then, curious stretches of silence punctuate some of those interviews.

We also get a peek into procedural tensions during an exchange between Seattle and the FAA Air Traffic Security Coordinator. Among other things, FAA wants to know who asked for jet-fighter support. Seattle says Oakland sounded the first alert and, as the UFO entered another coverage zone, Oakland told Seattle to call WADS. Seattle said he notified WADS, but he didn’t ask for air support. FAA reminds Seattle that a “request for military assistance has to come through FAA headquarters.” Again, Seattle tells FAA he never made such a request.

FAA: “I explicitly said over the line that headquarters was not in conference with requesting military assistance at that time because I was on the DEN … I had no radar, had no target, I had nothing –” Seattle: “Yeah, we had nothing, either.” FAA: “—from anybody. So I would not send the fighters to go up and, y’know, toodle around and –” Seattle: “Right, flying around. ‘Cause we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

Afterwards, sounding slightly chastened, Seattle calls Oakland to compare notes. Oakland has Seattle’s back: “But there was definitely something out there.” Seattle: “There was definitely something there, there’s no question, because United 612, it was … off his 3 o’clock, and about 5 to 10 miles for about a hundred miles … so what we’re trying is to reach those pilots of all those aircraft to see if they can write us a little a report about what they saw …”

Oakland: “Our radar did pick up an intruder target coming in at a high speed right toward the southwest …” Seattle: “Southbound? Not northbound?” Oakland: “Southbound. And then it did an abrupt maneuver and just took off northbound. And we’re like, what? He was southbound, now he’s northbound. Weird …”

A new weapon system going out for a test spin? Hey, what if it was North Korean? They do sneaky secret stuff, right? Unfortunately, the FOIA material doesn’t get us anywhere close to an answer. The last audio clip finds Seattle talking with an official with the FAA’s Safety and Quality Assurance Group. She calls the incident “potentially significant,” says it’s “a weird enough thing that there is not a set procedure,” and “It’s not often we hear about an unknown guy up at that altitude.”

Maybe, as Skeptic James McGaha would reassure us, the mystery would solved by now if only the pilots and radar monitors had been astronomers. Anyhow, great reporting. Well done. Stay on it.
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Last November, The War Zone posted an exclusive story detailing a bizarre incident involving an unidentified aircraft that transited the skies of the Pacific Northwest in the early evening of October 25th, 2017. What started as a radar target moving at very high speed over

By Tyler Rogoway www.thedrive.com 2-20-18

Northern California turned into a series of eyewitness accounts made by nearby airline pilots traveling northward over Oregon. Even F-15 fighters were launched to intercept the mysterious intruder that quickly became invisible to radar.

Now, through the Freedom of Information Act, we present what could be one of the most insightful instances of official documentation surrounding such an encounter that had already been confirmed to have occurred by both the FAA and the USAF. These materials include fascinating audio recordings of radio transmissions and phone calls made as the incident was unfolding, as well as pilot interviews, and conversations between FAA officials made in the aftermath of the highly peculiar incident.
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David Fravor is a recognizable type. Affable, neatly dressed, with a men’s regular haircut and semi-rimless glasses, he’s a retired military man who works as a consultant in the Boston area. He could be standing in front of you in a Starbucks line and you wouldn’t notice him at all.

By Martin Finucane The Boston Globe 1-16-18

But the story he has to tell is literally out of this world.

Thirteen years ago, the Windham, N.H., resident was a veteran US Navy pilot at the controls of an F/A-18-F fighter jet flying off San Diego when he sighted an unidentified flying object and tried to intercept it.

“I want to join on it. I want to see how close I can get to it,” Fravor, 53, said, describing his thinking as he began the pursuit.

Then the object, which looked like a 4o-foot-long Tic Tac candy, “goes whoosh, and it’s gone.” he said. It accelerated rapidly and disappeared like no aircraft he had ever seen in his career.
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On the morning of 14 November 2004, Dave and his WSO launched into the clear blue Southern California sky about a hundred miles southwest of San Diego. Their Call Sign was FASTEAGLE 01. His

By Paco Chierici fightersweep.com

wingman and WSO launched just after them in FASTEAGLE 02. They climbed overhead the ship and rendezvoused in normal fashion before setting off to their assigned work area in the open ocean south of USS Nimitz. Normal day, normal ops for the pre-deployment work up cycle they were in the middle of.

What Dave didn’t know was for the past several days, Princeton had been picking up some bizarre returns on their Death Star-worthy SPY-1 radar. On several occasions beginning 10 November, the Fire Control Officer and the extremely experienced Fire Control Senior Chief had detected multiple returns descending from far above the radar’s scan volume–somewhere higher than 80,000 ft. The targets, dubbed Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs), would drop from above 80K to hover roughly 50 feet off the water in a matter of seconds.

Always over the same spot, a Lat/Long about 30NM off the coast of Baja, roughly 70nm southwest of Tijuana. At the time, the SPY-1 was the most sophisticated and powerful tactical radar on the planet. With it, they were able to track these AAVs while they descended, hovered and then zipped away at speeds, turn rates and accelerations faster than any known friendly or threat aircraft. Impossibly fast.
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... He [Sam Clovis] also claimed to have seen a UFO or, rather, to have seen proof that a UFO existed. According to the Des Moines Register, Clovis said in a radio interview in early 2014 that a UFO

By The Daily Beast 8-25-17

traveled toward him at 5,000 miles per hour, came to a complete stop, and then turned around, flying away once more at 5,000 mph.

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... Radar picked up an inverted saucer-shaped object to the right and above the descending nose cone and watched it cross the warhead's trajectory to a point which was below and to the left of it before the phantom disappeared.

Star Phoenix 7-17-1974

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The now-retired controllers say they tracked a bona fide UFO that covered 120 miles in eight seconds, or three sweeps of their radar beam!

The two U.S. Air Force air traffic controllers who were working in the RAF Bentwaters base tower in late December 1980—during the series of incidents collectively known as the Rendlesham Forest UFO Case—have finally discussed their long-held secret on camera. Ike Barker and Jim Carey first spoke to me in 2007, allowing me to record their revelations on audio tape. But their dramatic, game-changing testimony is now available on video, in an interview appearing in my new documentary film, UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed, excerpted here:

By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 10-21-16

The now-retired controllers say they tracked a bona fide UFO that covered 120 miles in eight seconds, or three sweeps of their radar beam! If that were not stunning enough, Carey says the object also made an instantaneous right-angle turn as it left the vicinity. For his part, Barker says he actually saw the amazing interloper as it briefly hovered near the air traffic control tower, describing it as an orange sphere with a series of portholes positioned around its center.


Both controllers are emphatic: This was an intelligently-controlled craft whose capabilities far surpassed any current human technology. Significantly, the incident occurred the same night that USAF Lt. Col. Charles Halt—the Deputy Base Commander at Bentwaters—was leading a small group of Security Policemen through nearby Rendlesham Forest, to investigate strange lights that had been reported there. At one point, Halt described seeing an object resembling an eyeball moving through the trees, dripping a molten-metal-like substance.


Skeptics have always dismissed this “UFO sighting” as a misreported observation of the sweeping beam from the nearby Orford Ness lighthouse—despite the fact that Col. Halt has repeatedly said, as early as 1997, that the lighthouse beam was also visible during the incident, but located some 30-degrees away from the strange glowing object.

According to Halt, the eyeball eventually “exploded” and released five smaller disc-shaped craft that raced away in different directions, something confirmed by USAF Security Policeman Rick Bobo, who saw the spectacle at a distance, from the guard tower at the Bentwaters nuclear Weapons Storage Area (WSA).

After awhile, Halt says, three disc-shaped craft higher in the sky were observed doing grid search-like maneuvers. One of them approached his team, hovered above it, and directed a laser-like beam at their feet. After a few seconds, the beam clicked off and the object moved away, in the direction of the WSA. Seconds later, Halt heard excited radio chatter from guards posted at the facility, indicating that beams from the UFO were falling on or near the tactical nuclear bomb storage bunkers!


It should be noted that the late Georgina Bruni, while researching the Rendlesham Forest UFO incidents, interviewed a former British military radar operator at RAF Watton, Nigel Kerr, who admitted that an anomalous aerial object had briefly appeared on his screen—for three or four sweeps—the night that Lt. Col. Halt and his team were in the woods.


Now that the USAF air traffic controllers’ extensive, detailed testimony is also on the record, we can confidently assert that at least one genuine UFO—a high-velocity, maneuvering, hovering, spherical-shaped craft exhibiting advanced technology—was in the vicinity during the period that Halt described seeing multiple UFOs in the sky.


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The ATC scope boys said they had a “huge bogie” on the radar for more then 30 minutes. When they scrambled the old F-5’s at NAHA AFB, the object moved away quickly. (Illustration)

I was in the USAF from 1966 to 1969, 3.4 years total. I was sent to school at Sheppard AFB for about 6 months…. I was sent to a radar site on the southern tip of Okinawa to operate a prime power plant….

Reader SUbmitted Report The UFO Chronicles 11-7-2007

One night in 1967 we were working the swing shift and we stayed at the NCO Club until closing, which was close to 1:00 am. A co-worker and I David M. Jxxxxx were eating a late night snack; we had no alcohol that night. When we walked out the side door with a small girl who worked at the NCO Club (she was going to get her mop and buckets to clean the club) she exclaimed, “Ok somi yo!” (Oh my god!) She went back inside and stayed inside.

I walked with David and he said he would go get his new 35mm camera. He ran back to our barracks and I slowly walked that direction staring at this large orange colored light. It was a typical misty evening that shrouds this small mountain peak that time of year. I walked along and got to the end door of the barracks and then as I turned my head to look at David—this object just disappeared.

As he came out the second floor door, he said his camera was out of film. The radar observers working at that time were closed mouth, when we asked later that day, what did they see. Later on as time passed we got bits and pieces of information.

The people of the local islands were seeing all kinds of light that night. KSBK got many sighting reports as well as ours that early AM. KSBK went off the air at 3:00 AM or so if I remember. The scope dopes, as we called the ATC scope boys said they had a “huge bogie” on the radar for more then 30 minutes. When they scrambled the old F-5’s at NAHA AFB, the object moved away quickly. This bright light was seen all over this area and even in Taiwan that night.

They estimated that it was over 200 ft in diameter based on the ping they were getting.

When we observed the light it was difficult to estimate the size or distance as there was a misty light rain. I t was about 35 degrees above the surface and it was past the end of this escarpment of the radar site hilltop

YOZA Dake Air Station was then the longest reaching radar at this island. Raytheon had recently modified the old dish and added new panels and it had the longest over the horizon look for any site at that time as we were looking for anything Russia might launch at the USA or at this huge military encampment we had during the Vietnam War. There was over 60,000 there and or passing through.

The old Major who ran the site was telling people that the “Bogie Book” was full of unidentified objects seen on radar.

I was later sent to Offut AFB Sac HQ and I was told by some people bout th Holliman AFB UFOs that shut down some missile silos.

I was assigned to work with AFB portable generators for stand-by power. We had to go out to a site where there was a long wave radio transmitter and these guys said they saw many weird lights at night near Silver Creek, Nebraska.

The radio was designed to transmit signal all over the world in the event WWIII was to ever happen. The antenna tower was half wave and was the tallest in the world at that time.
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