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O'Hare UFO

On November 7, 2006 a UFO was spotted by several witnesses over the O'Hare Airport in Chicago. It was even coverd on CNN and other news outlets including MSNBC. There is one confirmed picture of the sighting. From the Above Top Secret Forum:

ohareufo

Jon Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune wrote this article about the incident published on January 1st, 2007:

In the sky! A bird? A plane? A ... UFO?
by Jon Hilkevitch

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 jhilkevitch@tribune.com or c/o the Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Read recent columns at chicagotribune.com/gettingaround

John Hilkevitch published another article just one week later on January 8th about the incident as well:

UFO Report Stirs Believers, Skeptics
By John Hilkevitch
Chicago Tribune 1-10-7
Published January 8, 2007

The story last week about an unscheduled flight over O'Hare International Airport generated a universe of opinions from near and very far out.

A man in Aurora said he came home from work on the same day as the O'Hare sighting, looked skyward in his back yard and spied a shiny round object hovering between two masses of clouds. And then it disappeared.

A woman from Ireland wrote to asked what the heck was happening at "O'Hara."
A man named Montana said he had encounters with extraterrestrials in Romania and in Wichita, Kan. He expressed amazement that neither incident made the news.

It may never be known whether the phenomenon at O'Hare on Nov. 7--which was reported by numerous United Airlines employees--was an actual UFO sighting, or much ado about nothing. But readers don't seem to mind offering their opinions.

Here's a sample from the more than 400 e-mails Getting Around has received:

"For those of us researchers who are convinced that UFO sightings reported by witnesses of the caliber of those at O'Hare are not triggered by errant weather balloons, swamp gas, the planet Venus, atmospheric anomalies, secret government aircraft or outright hallucinations, your ongoing attempt to get to the bottom of what hovered that day over Gate C17 is extremely refreshing."

--C. Scott Littleton, professor of anthropology emeritus at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

"I have a different take on what happened at O'Hare. It's the obvious side-effect of the two-joint coffee break."

--Mike Maday, Spring Hill, Tenn.

"Hmm. Looks like we're being visited by advanced craft from other worlds, and not only is the U.S. government keen to cover up the details, so are many private corporations whose existence would be threatened by the free-energy technology that powers these vehicles."

--Andrew Johnson, United Kingdom

"While not directly admitting that E.T. had indeed phoned home, you appeared at least open to that possibility. It was a nice departure from the norm to see the witnesses treated as respectable observers rather than being portrayed as nuts or inebriated liars. Aliens may not have yet landed on the front lawn of the White House, but they appear to be toying with the idea if the O'Hare incident is any indication."

--John Oathout, Broken Arrow, Okla.

"I wish that people would believe what we know we saw. I'm afraid to go outside, and I can't sleep. I've purchased a large caliber pistol and have installed a top-of-the-line security system. Needless to say, I've also canceled my family's camping trip to Indiana Dunes."

--Scared in Indiana

"I would have laughed at this story about a year ago, but I saw something very similar in the Detroit area. Others saw it too. I am glad people have stood up to the downplay[ing] of this issue. I too had to give myself a reality check, but it happened, and I was on my fifth cup of coffee."

--Thomas Fullerton

"I sat on a plane at the Port Columbus, Ohio, airport for at least an hour on the afternoon of Nov. 7. This flight was scheduled to arrive at O'Hare at 4:30 p.m. (the same time as the UFO sighting) The flight was further delayed for about another hour and circled the airport waiting to land. The pilot was not able to provide us with a reason for the delays. My daughter said when she arrived at the airport to pick me up around 4:30 that there were very many military personnel at the airport."

--Dennis Goethe, Durand, Ill.

"It should be clear to everyone that the U.S. government has been lying about UFOs since the first reports. They have been here before Earth's civilization began, and they'll be here after we've trashed our planet to death."

--Eli Pine

"I am a 67-year-old woman who has lived in the Chicago area for 65 of those years. I believe in UFOs because I've seen them--long time ago, when I was about 14 years old, walking my dog on the South Side of Chicago. It was two side-by-side cigar-shaped lights in the eastern sky. I remember that sight as clearly as I remember the exact moment I heard that Mayor [Richard J.] Daley had a heart attack and that Kennedy had been shot."

--Dorothy P. Schmidt

Finally, the mayor of Roswell, N.M., where it was reported in 1947 that an alien spacecraft was recovered on a nearby ranch, said he thinks the saucer-shaped craft at O'Hare must have taken a wrong turn.

"I'm hoping they were on their way to Roswell to help us celebrate our biggest UFO festival to date," Mayor Sam LaGrone said of the event scheduled for July 5 through 8.

"Even if the gates at O'Hare were full, we have plenty of landing space here in Roswell and we welcome any alien visitors to drop in and celebrate the 60th anniversary with us," LaGrone said.

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Contact Getting Around at jhilkevitch@tribune.com or c/o the Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Read recent columns at www.chicagotribune.com/gettingaround

It seems something was definitely seen over Chicago that day. This story seems to have the turned they way most widely publicized UFO stories do, however, with denied on one side and fervent truth on the other. Dan Aykroyd is rumored to be in possession of photos and video from the incident that will be included on his next paranormal DVD.

This sighting may be the biggest one in recent memory sine the Phoenix Lights. Keep an eye out for updates on how this gets through the media.