Terrifying encounters at 40,000 feet. And so I kind of looked over my left shoulder and there's this bright light in our face. He's a pulsating orb. Look at that, dude. Look at that. Pilot accounts of UFOs taking control of their aircraft. He goes to move the yoke and the yoke is moving on itself. If it climbs any further, it will stall out. And entire jumbo jets disappearing. into thin air. How do you have a commercial airliner just vanish? Since the dawn of aviation, pilots have experienced unexplainable events in the sky. Is it possible that what they have witnessed are aliens in our airspace? When you have thousands of pilots coming forward with encounters that they've witnessed up in the sky with so-called UFOs, I think we should pay more attention to what these pilots have been saying. There is a doorway in the universe. Beyond it is the promise of truth. It demands we question everything we have ever been taught. The evidence is all around us. The future is right before our eyes. We are not alone. We have never been alone. In 2017, the New York Times broke the story of the U.S. government's secret investigations into unexplained aerial phenomena. And in the years that followed, a number of sensational UFO videos have been released or leaked to the public. Nearly all of the footage was recorded by cameras mounted on U.S. Navy fighter jets. The videos captured the public's imagination like no other UFO images that had come before them. But Navy pilots are not alone in witnessing unidentified flying objects. For decades, shocking encounters have been reported by non-military civilian pilots. This is author and researcher Mike Rixsecker. UAP sightings by commercial airline pilots are a lot more commonplace than what we generally think of. We've seen a lot of the footage from the military, but we're actually getting a lot more reports from our civilian pilots. There are more civilian pilots than military pilots, and you have an exponentially larger amount of flights with commercial airlines than you do with military airplanes. Alaska, November 17, 1986 Japan Airlines Flight 1628 is carrying cargo from Paris, France to Narita International Airport near Tokyo. The three-person crew is led by Captain Kenju Terauchi, an ex-fighter pilot with over 10,000 hours of flight time. As the 747 approaches Anchorage, Captain Terauchi notices two strange lights out of his cockpit window. Richard Dolan is a historian and author of UFOs and the National Security State. It's dark. It's very early morning before sunrise. These lights are clearly maneuvering. They are in relationship to each other. One is on top of the other, and they move directly in front of his aircraft. He's flying at about 500 miles per hour. These things are pacing him. Captain Tereuchi realizes the lights are strange, oval-shaped flying objects, and they are getting dangerously close to his aircraft. As the bright lights fill the cockpit, Captain Tereuchi radios the Anchorage Air Traffic Control Center and asks if they can identify the objects near his plane. As Tereuchi attempts a series of evasive maneuvers to avoid a potential collision, the two UFOs suddenly disappear. In their place is another object, one so large it dwarfs the 747. His words for describing it were gigantic spaceship, the size of maybe two aircraft carriers, this immense. Teruuchi sees this massive thing in the sky and he's scared. Concerned by Captain Tara Ucci's report, the air traffic controller calls NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command based at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Communications specialists at the airbase confirmed there is a very large, unidentified object on their radar screens. This is astrophysicist and aerospace engineer Dr. Travis Taylor. Traffic control told them that they could actually take whatever evasive actions they needed to to avoid collision. And they even dropped down to 4,000 feet above sea level, and the thing continued to follow them. Here is Ryan Sprague, author of Somewhere in the Skies. Air traffic control diverted another commercial flight to come look at this UFO. And by the time they got there, UFO was completely gone. Here is ancient astronaut theorist, Giorgio Suclos. One of the reasons why the JAL report is such a big deal is because the corroborating evidence is overwhelming. Not only are there eyewitness reports, but there is the records of the communication systems that Terauchi was in touch with. Actual dialogue that happened. Hey, we are up here. We see this. Are you guys seeing this on your radar? All this stuff is recorded. Once safely grounded, Captain Tereuchi, his co-pilot, and flight engineer were immediately interviewed by Alaska Federal Aviation Administration officials and other special agents. Nick Pope is a former member of the UK Ministry of Defense. There's an FAA investigation into this. There's lots of documentation. There's no real hard and fast conclusion about this. And so the pilot, perhaps out of frustration, talks to the media. In December 1986, one month after the encounter, Captain Terauchi contacted Kyoto News and said he believed the mysterious crafts were of extraterrestrial origin. The unauthorized statements prompted Japan Airlines officials to remove Captain Terauchi from pilot duty and assign him a desk job. Around the same time, John Callahan, the FAA's division chief of the Accidents and Investigations branch, learned of the incident and deemed it worthy of investigation. John Callahan went to D.C. about this, and there was a meeting that was chaired by one of the top people of the FAA. This meeting was also attended by representatives of the FBI, representatives of the CIA, and representatives of President Reagan's White House. They had audio tapes that were played between the pilot and air traffic control describing everything that was happening, and written reports. And at the end of the meeting, one of the CIA agents stood up and said, and said, this meeting never happened, and we're confiscating all of the data that has been shared here. Now, Callahan, he was a little sly, but he was within his rights. They never asked me, he said, if I had a copy of any of this myself, he said, which I did. He had a copy of the audio recordings, if nothing else, and a little over a decade later shared that with the public. This is Micah Hanks, author of The UFO Singularity. John Callahan came away with the feeling that there was essentially a kind of cover-up. The FAA didn't want the fact that this incident had occurred to get out. I've spoken to pilots who have seen amazing things out there, but never reported because of the fear of being disbelieved, being ridiculed, and perhaps being grounded. it. You won't be flying anymore. So what did they say? Most times, nothing. You have countless commercial and private airline pilots who spend an exorbitant amount of time up in the sky. And in my opinion, I think they're the best people to discern what is natural and what is not. As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, UFO encounters reported by civilian pilots provide some of the most compelling evidence that there is an extraterrestrial presence in the skies above Earth. And according to some pilots, what they've witnessed presents a serious danger. For ancient astronaut theorists UFO sightings reported by pilots are particularly intriguing Because while accounts of strange phenomena in the sky date back millennia it is only in the past century that humans have had an aerial vantage point. Here is David Childress, author of Technology of the Gods. For thousands of years, we could only observe things in the sky from the ground. But in the last hundred or so years, we've had the ability to fly. And so now we're up in the sky ourselves. We can discern natural phenomenon from powered craft. Thousands of pilots have reported observing phenomena in the sky that do not resemble any weather anomaly or man-made craft they've ever encountered. Such was the case with Captain Eric Delgado, who served as an Air Force pilot for 10 years before being hired to fly for FedEx in 2001. On the evening of March 20, 2020, Captain Delgado departed from Mexico City in a Boeing 767 bound for Memphis, Tennessee. One hour into the flight, Delgado noticed something strange in the distance. Usually when we get to altitude, we'll relax. I was conversing with my first officer, and as I'm looking at him, his eyes got really big, and his mouth kind of dropped, and I'm like, what the hell is this guy looking at? And he goes, look at the shooting star, and he stops, never finished the word star. And so I kind of looked over my left shoulder, and you can imagine a lighthouse in thin fog, kind of just a spotlight sort of that just kind of came over us. And I thought, oh my God, it's another airplane, and he's got a vector toward us. What's this clown doing? I grab the throttles, gripping it with a death grip. It's getting ready to disconnect the autopilot. And I'm looking at the screen, realizing there's nothing on the screen. Delgado immediately used his digital camera to record the astonishing sight. I thought it was a shooting star. Let it just stop. He's a pulsating orb. Look at that, dude. Look at that. Within minutes of the sighting, the orb moved towards the plane at a high rate of speed. then suddenly stopped short. My heart was racing still. Speed doesn't kill. You know, deceleration, stopping, that's what kills you. And the fact that this thing stopped like that, if there were somebody inside there, you know, on our conventional laws of physics and stopping, they wouldn't have survived the G-forces to come to a stop like that. Oh, man, look at that thing, dude. The UAP flew alongside Delgado's aircraft at an astonishing 500 miles per hour. And yet, there was no sign of a propulsion system. This thing was parked on our wingtip about 1,000, 2,000 feet, and it didn't move. With your naked eye, it was just bright, dim, bright, dim. And it was very cyclic. It didn't waver. It was the same. And you look through the camera, and now you could see features and a shape. The object continued to track Delgado's aircraft for nearly 30 miles. It's turning colors now. This thing started rotating and started changing colors and it started taking off, and so I'm zooming in as fast as I could. I'm zooming in and he's pulling away, dude. He's pulling away. This thing took off at pretty good velocity. After making a safe landing, Delgado shared his videos with Air Operations Center personnel, even though his co-pilot was reluctant to file an official report. There was still a stigma behind the whole thing. Are they going to ground us? Are they going to ask for our medical? Are we going to have to go see somebody? So I could understand where he was coming from. In recent years, we've seen military pilots being encouraged to come forward and talk about things they've seen. The same has not necessarily always extended to commercial pilots because there isn't an interest in collecting information from those pilots the same as there would be with military pilots, where in the interest of national security, if you see something, say something. But traditionally, when commercial pilots contacted the FAA, they have been told, hey, you need to talk to civilian UFO researchers, or they don't actually have a clear idea of where else they can even log those reports. So it's a very different situation. Captain Delgado decided not to give the video to the FAA, and instead turned it over to the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, or NARCAP, a civilian organization made up of volunteers who investigate the unidentified aerial sightings. They concluded that the glowing object was consistent with that of an exotic aircraft with a plasma exterior that could disrupt radar signals. I think I saw some intelligent anomaly. It's amazing. I'd like to know more of the science and the physics behind what I was looking at, maybe. but you know see the footage and form your own opinions. Things need to change because pilots should be at the forefront of being free enough to come forward to report what they saw. The FAA has never conducted an official investigation into Pilot Delgado's incident, but would they take notice if a UFO sighting affected an entire airport? O'Hare International Airport, November 7, 2006 A ramp employee for United Airlines Flight 446 spots a metallic, saucer-shaped object hovering over Gate C-17 between 1,000 and 1,900 feet in the air. Within minutes, Federal authorities received nearly a dozen panicked phone calls from airport personnel. Here you have pilots, here you have people working at the airport, and civilians going to get on their flights all witness a UFO hovering directly over one of the gates at the airport. This UFO was cylindrical in shape, it was metallic. Witnesses estimated the object to be between 16 and 24 feet in diameter. Suddenly, this thing just accelerates vertically and punches a hole through the cloud. Everyone's staggered by this. Now, there is a meteorological phenomenon called a hole-punch cloud, but that doesn't really fit with the idea that there was this metallic craft hovering before this happened. Stephen Greenstreet is an investigative journalist for The New York Times. The hole punch cloud is a real phenomena, but the weather conditions needed to produce a hole punch cloud weren't there that day. They weren't there that day, and so that explanation doesn't make any sense at all. William Henry is an author and investigative mythologist. The Chicago Tribune, they end up filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the FAA, and lo and behold, they get a recording. There was a disc out there flying around. There was a what? There was a disc flying outside above Charlie 17. So if you guys see it out there. A disc? Like a Frisbee? Like a UFO type thing. So we have a United Airlines supervisor on the phone with the FAA controller using the word UFO. So once again, we have a scenario where the FAA and we have United Airlines personnel in this case saying, there's nothing to see here, but in fact, there was. Is it possible that the U.S. government has been concealing evidence about UAP sightings near our airports? According to UFO researchers, it would fit a disturbing pattern of ignoring what many believe are serious threats to the millions of people who travel the skies every day. Threats that are surprisingly well documented and sometimes even caught on tape. For decades, civilian pilots have been frustrated by the Federal Aviation Administration's refusal to investigate encounters between commercial airlines and unidentified flying objects. Skeptics argue that these encounters lack hard data like telemetry, radar, and audio recordings that would warrant an investigation. But there have, in fact, been numerous incidents where viable evidence has been collected, including an event involving two aircraft traveling over the state of Arizona. In 2018, flying over Arizona, you've got a Learjet, you've got an American Airlines jet, and something zips over the Learjet right over top. And they immediately call ATC. I don't know what it was. It wasn't an airplane, but it was the task was going out in the direction. And the radar tower says, we don't see anything. We don't know what the heck it is. And so the radar tower calls the American Airlines jet behind that plane and says, hey, look out for a second. Objects should be coming your way. American 1095, let me know if you see anything pass over you here in the next 15 miles. The pilot of the American Airlines jet initially responds, requesting clarification. You don't think anything passes over? American 1095, affirmative. We had an aircraft in front of you that reported something passed over him, and we didn't have any targets, so just let me know if you see anything passed over you. Then, just moments later, the American Airlines pilot radios back to air traffic control. It American 1095 yeah something just passed over us Like I don know what it was but at least 2 3 feet above us but yeah I passed that over the top of us Okay American 1095 thank you This incident is significant because there are audio recordings of the whole incident. And the pilots actually use the word UFO when they're talking to the control tower. UFO. According to researchers, the Arizona encounter was never openly investigated by the government, despite the evidence presented in the recordings between the two pilots and air traffic control. Neither was another incident. This one so serious, it required a call to the U.S. Air Force. The Oregon Coast, October 25, 2017. A radar operator spots a fast-moving unidentified object in a busy commercial flight path. There were no pilots involved in that initial reporting. It was just a tower controller and a radar center operator, and they're going back and forth. The radar operator contacts air traffic control in Seattle, Washington. Do you know that target south of the boundary there, that 0027 code moving very fast at 37,000? Oh, look at that thing. Yeah, that's crazy. Huh. And you don't have anything on him, huh? I got nothing. Well, we'll look. The object has no call sign. It has no transponder. It's not communicating. What is this object? Pilots in the air start picking it up visually. Multiple pilots from multiple airlines flying both north and south up the coast. And they see this huge white object moving extremely fast at 37,000 feet. The pilots could see a white light that was coming at them and moving around. And they reported it to the control tower. And pilots said that it was moving erratically. Yeah, F-9-6-12, I mean, we can see it, but there's no identification on it, just that it's there. This object was a little bit too close for comfort. And so they tried to communicate with it. All the things that this object should have given off, if it was an authorized aircraft, a U.S. aircraft, a commercial aircraft, weren't there. It was just silent. and so the military scrambled two F-15 fighters to go intercept this thing. Now you don't do that lightly. This is a big call. This is the sort of thing that you do on a 9-11 type event. So what happened? Why did they take this one so seriously that a fighter interceptor was sent up to try and take a look? The F-15s raced to intercept the UFO, But this proves more difficult than expected. Once the jets were on their way, this UFO suddenly shot off in a different direction and was very fast and was able to make these quick turns and at very high speeds. At one point, this object changes direction. It's flying southbound and then turns and goes northbound. So the F-15 fighters, they go there, They go there and at the last minute, as best anyone can guess, turns and zips out over the Pacific Ocean. Observers are shocked that F-15s, among the nation's fastest and most sophisticated fighter jets, are unable to catch up with the mysterious object. Where this guy ended up, we don't know. Oh, he's going to do that now. No. The fighters scrambled. They went out looking around a little bit, but we lost anybody having sight of the aircraft. Wow, that's weird. It's really weird, yeah. What's great about this is the audio tapes, which were released via the Freedom of Information Act. When you hear the process happen, from initial sighting to the scrambling of military jets, it's fascinating to hear that happen. What should we do? It goes to the Air Force. It goes to NORAD. It's there and seen by so many, and then it's gone. These two incidents are considered to be among a multitude of reports where analyzable data, including radar, radio transmissions, telemetry, and eyewitness accounts, offer compelling evidence of unidentified aerial phenomena. Yet, to the public's knowledge, these dangerous encounters have never been investigated by the government. UFO experts believe the flying public is at significant risk, and as evidence, point to a mysterious case where a pilot experienced his worst nightmare, 10,000 feet in the air. Zihuantaneo, Mexico May 3, 1975 After dropping off passengers at this seaport town on the Pacific coast, pilot Carlos De Los Santos embarks on a return trip to Mexico City in his Piper PA-24 Comanche. The weather conditions are clear and visibility is good as De Los Santos cruises at 10,000 feet. One hour into the flight, he witnesses something unusual, a gray wingless object off the left side of his plane. And as he approaches Mexico City, he notices basically a small flying saucer just above his left wing. It's not as large as his aircraft. And he's flying a fairly small aircraft. And he's like, what is this? And then he looks over to his right and he sees another one. And then he looks ahead of them and there's one coming at him. It goes below his aircraft, and he feels a bump under his aircraft. And he's scared out of his mind. Anyone would be. He then realizes that he's not really in control of his aircraft. His aircraft is moving in a way that seems to respond to these objects, not to him. Bill Burns, Ph.D., is an author and ufologist. He goes to move the yoke, and the yoke is moving on itself. The plane starts climbing to 3,000 meters. That's the ceiling of the Piper. If it climbs any further, it will stall out. He will lose control. The plane will fall out of the sky. He's actually becoming afraid because his cabin's not pressurized. You get to a certain altitude, he's going to have a hard time breathing. The theory is that the UFO that came under the plane took control of his plane. And the UFO's own magnetic envelope is lifting the plane higher and higher and higher. So Los Santos is in a panic. He's giving mayday calls. Mayday, mayday, mayday. He's telling them, there are these unidentified objects at my wingtips and below me. and I don't know what to do. As the private plane races towards a mountainous area, the three UAPs disengage from Carlos' plane and veer off towards the Mount Popocopetl volcano at lightning speed. As the objects disappear from sight, Carlos regains control of the plane, but he quickly realizes his ordeal isn't over. He can't initiate his landing here because of the impact that one of these objects made on his aircraft. He has to circle around the airport about 10 times, and he uses a screwdriver to push the lever to get his landing gear to come down. And he successfully lands his aircraft. It's kind of an amazing thing there. So he lands his aircraft. And the story doesn't end here. Now, he would have had his whole career reputation ruined, probably, with this, except for the fact that Mexican air traffic control tracked these objects also, and this came out to support him. This story became a huge news story in Mexico. Didn't really make much impact in the United States, but it was a very big story in Mexico. Years later, De Los Santos revealed that in the aftermath of the event, he was twice approached by mysterious figures, warning him not to speak about his experience. The first occasion was just before he was scheduled to be interviewed by a Mexican television station. The second happened when De Los Santos was set to meet with the famous UFO investigator, J. Allen Hynek. Hynek was into the case. A lot of people were following this case. And just before he was going to meet with Hynek at some hotel, he gets another encounter from one of these men in black, these tall, pasty, white-skinned guys, who warned him, don't talk about this. He was threatened, and he did actually stop talking about this for a little while after that, but as time went by, he's talked about it. It's just one of the most incredible aviation UAP stories that you're ever going to hear, and he got out of it alive. Pilot Carlos de los Santos ultimately emerged from his harrowing midair encounter unscathed, but similar confrontations between civilian planes and UFOs have led to tragic consequences including injuries crashes and even loss of life The National UFO Reporting Center, or New Fork, has counted at least 100 cases in the U.S. where flight safety was impaired because of close calls with unidentified aerial phenomena. and in at least one instant, it appears a collision with a UFO caused fatal results. Mobile, Alabama, October 23, 2002. Former NYPD pilot and flight instructor Thomas Prezios departs from Mobile Downtown Airport, piloting a single-engine Cessna with the call sign Nightship 282. The story of Night Ship 282 is quite alarming. A Hollywood script writer couldn't come up with this one. We have a NYPD pilot, a freight hauler, very experienced flight instructor, hauling documents from Mobile, Alabama, up north to Montgomery. Routine flight. Due to poor visibility, Prezios was flying by his instruments. Just one minute into the flight, he spotted something in the distance and immediately radioed air traffic control. He saw what looked like another plane in the sky. It was just confirming that that was another plane up there. And then all of a sudden, he's alarmed. He's panicked. Something is coming at him. This pilot sees an object in front of him on a collision course with his plane. What does he do? He radios a request for permission to deviate. I must deviate. I must deviate, he says over the radio. He deviates. Silence. The transmission goes dead. Five minutes after takeoff, night ship 282 crashes into Big Batteau Bay. Tragically, Thomas Prezios is killed on impact. When investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board or NTSB, arrive at the scene, they discover parts of the Cessna scattered over an area of nearly 200 yards. The plane is not just demolished, it's almost vaporized. Something obviously hit the plane, the props are damaged, the wings are damaged, the fuselage is damaged, wholesale damage inside the mechanics of the airplane. It becomes apparent he has collided with something in midair. A midair collision of such extreme force would naturally send two wrecks spiraling to the ground. But an extensive search of the area produced only one aircraft. No other wreckage was ever found. No other craft which would have presumably done this. The most bizarre thing about this is that there are these strange red markings all over parts of the aircraft. These red markings have not been identified as far as I can tell. And they're in a variety of places of the aircraft. The NTSB suggested that whatever it hit was this color red or had this red coating on it. And when it hit, it rubbed off on this guy's craft. They also found pieces of metal in the wings that didn't belong to the plane. Various pieces of metal were embedded in the crashed plane that weren't part of that plane. So something metal, something red. But at the end of the day, a mystery. This is Gary Hesseltine, VP for the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research. Clearly, this is one of the rare occasions where there was a collision that obliterated a plane, killed the pilot. And the FAA, the aviation authorities and investigations that followed could not explain it and to this day cannot explain it. You have to wonder if this incident, which caused the death of the pilot, wasn't also some extraterrestrial incident where perhaps a flying saucer or other craft hit this plane or the plane itself hit the craft. For UFO researchers, the tragic case of Thomas Prezios raises the question. Is it possible that there have been other fatal collisions with UFOs that have gone unreported or happened before the pilot could radio air traffic control? As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, it is a question worth investigating, given the number of highly unusual encounters pilots have started sharing with the public. And while the FAA continues to dismiss such reports, another government agency, one focused on outer space, is taking notice of possible extraterrestrial activity on Earth. In recent years, more and more pilots are coming forward to say that unidentified aerial phenomena pose a serious risk to the flying public. The Federal Aviation Administration, however, continues to downplay the danger. The FAA is all about flight safety, and yet they don't accept UFO or UAP reports from civilians. The FAA is essentially telling you, civilian, I don't care what you've encountered, and And we don't have to keep statistics on it, and we therefore don't have to do anything about this impossible phenomenon, which we don't know what we could do. The FAA does not want civilians reporting UFOs because they don't want the public stirring the pot. This is something that could, in theory, become actionable through FOIA requests, for example. You can have a civilian saying, I'd like to know how many civilians are reporting UFOs to the FAA. And then what do they do? How many thousands of reports are they going to be releasing? They don't want to get into that at all. I think it goes to this idea not of air traffic safety, but not wanting to alarm the public. But now that the U.S. government is paying serious attention to UAP encounters reported by military pilots, at least one agency is ready to listen to civilian pilots as well. And to the surprise of many, it is America's top space agency, NASA. In October 2022, NASA assembled a team of 16 scientists and experts for a first-of-its-kind investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena. In order to collect new data, the space agency also announced it is taking over management of the Aviation Safety Reporting System, or ASRS, a public service website that encourages pilots to submit anonymous reports regarding UAP sightings. NASA has something now called the Aviation Safety Reporting System. And this is a mechanism whereby pilots can report UFO sightings anonymously if they choose. And it says on the website, this is non-punitive. We will not come after you for this. There's no comeback. Just make your report. It suggests to me that there's something else out there. NASA knows about it and they want to know more about it. And so they are sort of surreptitiously saying, we'll listen to your story now. We're collecting a database now of what is happening in our skies. And so that is why I think NASA is ultimately taking the lead on this. People are saying, why NASA? Why not the FAA? Does it perhaps tie in with the fact that NASA is now studying UFOs? Maybe an indication, an intriguing clue, that a lot of the incidents of most import happen in the real upper atmosphere, where we are going into space. I don't know, but in a sense that's not the point. The point is we now have this receptive environment into which pilots can finally speak out about the UFOs that they are seeing on a very frequent basis. As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, encouraging commercial pilots to come forward with their stories may finally provide critical proof that civilian aircraft do, in fact, encounter UAPs in our skies. There's a deep history of UFO sightings, and the obvious threat to aviation is becoming more and more prevalent. We have to start taking these reports incredibly seriously because pilots, crews and passengers could be at risk. I challenge anybody to take anything you have and put it out there. Don't hesitate because maybe you're going to open the door to bigger and better things for mankind. As more civilian pilots come forward to report their encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, will it be revealed that such incidents occur far more often than we would ever imagine? And if so, could bringing these incidents to light also bring us one step closer to learning what the truth about just who, or what, has been occupying our airspace for thousands of years? Perhaps, one day soon, the strange craft in our skies will descend to Earth, And when they do, we will know for certain that we are not alone.
