UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

She picked up the kids after finishing her last call at work — there was some whining in the back seat — and raced to her home near Annapolis for family dinnertime. In between, she answered questions about the UFO.

“My life right now is very surreal,” said Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, who is a 41-year-old mother of three, a retired fighter pilot and one of the few people who gets regularly hauled into the Pentagon or before Congress for further questioning about the day in 2004 she saw a UFO — the Pentagon prefers to call them unidentified aerial phenomena — from the seat of her Super Hornet in the skies near San Diego.

Dietrich is pragmatic, forthright and has a swaggery, pilot’s sense of humor about this thing she’s been living with for nearly 17 years.

Thanks to a bizarro little line in last year’s coronavirus relief bill, the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense are ordered to generate a report on everything the government knows about UAPs — including Dietrich’s sighting. It’s coming next month, and it’s going to be D.C.’s hottest summer read.

“Citizens have questions. It’s not classified. If I can share or help give a reasonable response, I will,” says the retired fighter pilot. (Michael Greene)

A government UFO report will be public soon — and it may be big

And now that UFOs join the pandemic and insurrection on the congressional agenda (when it comes to the weird year contest, 2021 is telling 2020 to “hold my beer”), Dietrich’s callers have moved from mostly the fringe, stalkery UFO fanatics who just want to be near her, to mainstream media freaks like me. She patiently plays along.

“I do feel a duty and obligation,” Dietrich said, when I asked her why she took my call and why she agreed to talk to “60 Minutes,” her national media debut. “I was in a taxpayer-funded aircraft, doing my job as a military officer,” she said. “Citizens have questions. It’s not classified. If I can share or help give a reasonable response, I will. I don’t want to be someone who’s saying ‘no comment.’ ”

**Dietrich in an undated photo in her aircraft. (Family photo)**

So, on to the events of Nov. 14, 2004.

She was a newly winged pilot on a regular training flight with the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group that day when something moving fast and erratically came into view.

Dietrich’s boss, Cmdr. Dave Fravor, told her to hang back and be his wingman while he flew closer in to check it out. The object began mirroring his movements and then just disappeared.

“Some days your boss asks you to swab the deck. Some days he asks you to keep high cover while he spars with a UFO,” Dietrich wrote in a tweet.

A video, just one of the recordings from that day, captures a white object shaped like a Tic Tac and the howls and exclamations of the pilots who were tracking its otherworldly motion. The video was released by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science in 2017 but has gained a lot of traction after the Pentagon verified it as authentic. It will be included in that UAP report.

“I’ve never had a Twitter,” Dietrich said, but she created an account this month as a way to step out and connect with the thousands of people obsessed with the event — and her. (Her first tweet was a charming “Radio Check,” a pilot’s version of “Is this thing on?”)

“People have found me throughout the years,” she said. “I just was an eyewitness to something in the course of my normal duties . . . that somehow makes me a portal.”

They’ve tracked her down and called her. “I’ll give you 10 minutes on the phone, then I have to go feed my kids,” she’ll tell them and then patiently recounts the events of that day in 2004.

As soon as they returned to their aircraft carrier they reported everything they saw and how it happened.

“We all collectively lost our minds,” she said. “There was no denying it, everybody had heard us on the radio.”

Over beers, during the many reunions she’s had with her commander that day, they look at each other and shake their heads. “We agree that if we had been solo, we wouldn’t have said anything,” she said.

Naval aviator humor can be brutal. And in the days after the sighting, their colleagues were merciless. They looped alien-invader movies “Men in Black” and “Independence Day” to show on the ship’s channels. They left tinfoil hats all over the place. The daily newsletters had little green men cartoons.

They had to laugh it off, she said. Because it was so weird and because even back at the ship, they saw it, too, on their radar.

Dietrich said she’s decided to be open about it now because she knows other pilots have seen similar UAPs and have kept quiet about them, afraid of the stigma. Because let’s be honest — UFOs are still firmly in the realm of conspiracy and kooky.

How UFOs went from kooky sideshow to national security concern in Washington

She’s been low-key about it all these years, answering questions on the Hill and at the Pentagon, listening patiently as debunkers found her private number and screamed at her over the phone.

She’s been teaching at George Washington University and the U.S. Naval Academy, not staring into the heavens, wondering who is out there or putting herself in the public eye — “not when I’m active duty, not when I’m teaching. I don’t want to be the faculty UFO freak.”

Plus she’s been a little busy dealing with the mess we have right here on Earth, flying more than 200 combat missions and 57 mounted combat patrols and ground assault convoy missions over two deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Navy sent her to language school, and she became the strategic architect for the civil-military stability operations team in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province.

She’s been working to promote three causes: her beloved magnet high school, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy; the foundation to help diversify aviation founded by a former classmate, Legacy Flight Academy; and Wings for Val, the foundation to promote women in aviation dedicated to Valerie Delaney, a Navy pilot from Ellicott City, Md., who died in 2013 during a training mission in Washington state.

And Dietrich is also too busy with her three kids, now 2, 4 and 6, to focus much on UFOs.

One of them was the hit of that day’s pre-K show-and-tell. He brought in the “UFO Box” she keeps, the one with the red-and-white helmet she was wearing that day in 2004.

Another was commanding her from the back seat as we spoke: “Window open!” There was a chorus of squeals and shrieks from the back seat, the soundtrack of every working mom’s life.

“No, I didn’t have time to think about it too much,” she sighed. “But I will pay someone to abduct me right now.”

Twitter: @petulad

There have been countless pieces of photographic evidence of alleged UFOs put forward over the decades. At times they seem to be pretty much a dime a dozen, some of them held up as possibly real, others obvious hoaxes. Over the years there have been some photos that, regardless of their credibility, have managed to become much discussed and iconic, even after they have been proven to be faked. One series of such controversial photos emerged in 1993, and would cause quite the stir that reverberates through the field of Ufology to this day.

One morning in March of 1993, 69-year-old Eric Thomason got up and headed out to Maslin Beach, in Southern Australia, along with his son’s camera equipment, a Kodak S50 with a Fuji 100 ASA-film. His destination was an old abandoned mine called the Maslin Old Quarry, in order to take some photographs, as well as take some photos of the sunrise at a cliff called Ochre Point. Despite having no formal photography training and being a complete novice, he was planning to submit his photos to a photo contest in the magazine Southern Times-Messenger, but he was immediately disappointed to arrive at the beach to thick cloud cover that obscured the sunrise. He decided to come back and try again the next day, but it was similarly cloudy, useless for taking photos, but as he stared out over the cloudy grey sea in frustration, he saw something very odd.

Maslin Beach, Australia

As he looked out over the water from his vantage point high on the cliff, he claims that a strange object rose up from beneath the waves, and he could see it so clearly that the water dripping off of it was clearly visible. He would estimate it as being about 40 meters in diameter, He watched in awe as the mysterious object floated over the water and began hovering in his direction, and he would say of the appearance of this bizarre sight to the Swedish UFO magazine UFO-Aktuellt :

I saw a movement on the surface on the water, and something looking like the tower on an atomic submarine emerged. I could feel water dripping from the craft. When the object rose from the water, I was able to see how three legs were pointing out from the hull. I was also able to see how it was spinning, and how the three legs were pulled in.

He took his first photograph of the object, which was at this point apparently about 400 meters away, and things would only get stranger from there. As it grew closer, he says that he was afraid that the object would do something to him, perhaps even abduct him, as it was getting a little too close for comfort, so he started making his way down the slope. It was then that he saw a second smaller object, which took up a position under the larger object, after which it rose up into it. Throughout this all, Thomason was taking photos, and he explains how the scene played out:

I had heard of people being abducted by UFOs, so I climbed down a slope nearby. From there I could see how the light-grey object came flying somewhat south of me, and came to a halt over the mine. At that very moment I spotted yet another object, north of the first one. That’s when I snapped my second picture, but since the light from the sunrise was straight into my view-finder I moved a little to the left. I could see three lights on the exterior of the larger object and how it shone around the opening. Shortly after I’d taken the fourth and last photograph the larger object rose straight up and disappeared over me. When that happened, I could feel water dripping from the craft down on me.

One of the photographs

After this he hurried home, not telling anyone about what he had seen. He quickly had his film developed, wondering if the objects had even managed to show up in his pictures at all, but the photos proved to be remarkably clear. He even managed to notice a third object in the pictures that he had not noticed in his initial excitement during the encounter. He would say of this:

When the film had been developed, I noticed yet another object on the first photograph, which I hadn’t seen during the incident itself. A black dot in the distance, halfway between the object and the edge of the photograph, which might have been an airplane several kilometers away, or the smaller object on its way to intercept with the larger one.

Despite the amazing photos he had taken of what he claims to be UFOs, he did not come forward with his story for two months, not even telling his own wife, thinking that no one would believe him and wanting to avoid ridicule. It was only after watching a UFO program on TV that he decided to come forward to tell his strange story, first going to UFO-Aktuellt, after which his story made the rounds in other news services. The pictures he had taken were widely circulated and they had people mystified at the time, as they were some of the clearest photographs of alleged UFOs ever taken up to that point. To the general populace it was all pretty damn spectacular, and he even claimed to have sent the negatives to be analyzed by Kodak, drumming up even more interest. However, of course the skeptics were not far behind in all of this.

Another of the Maslin Beach photographs

One of the main criticisms of the Maslin Beach photographs is that they are almost too clear, and appear to be very staged, indeed they seem to be pretty well-shot for a man who claims to have had no photography experience, snapping pictures at moving objects while cowering in fear of his life. Making the startling clarity even more suspicious is that the camera he claims to have been using was a Kodak S50, which was a cheap camera with limited features, featuring pretty much a shutter button and that’s about it. No focus control or zoom in feature, nothing, and they have a large depth of field. In the first photo, which was allegedly taken from a distance of 400 meters away, the object is perfectly clear, while the background is fuzzy, but this doesn’t make sense because on that particular type of camera the object and horizon should both be equally in focus. Another criticism was that several people brought up the fact that the objects look suspiciously like a part of the ventilation system for private boats, nearly identical, in fact, although no one has been able to find a part like this that is an exact match. There were even those who pointed out that a string is vaguely visible in the first of the series of photos. In short, they just look really fake. The consensus was that he had built fake UFOs from both parts and staged the fake pictures, possibly even using some sort of remote-controlled craft but through it all Thomason has stood by his story and insisted his photos are genuine.

Looking at these photos now, they seem to be certainly faked, despite those who still continue to defend them. However, they are important in that they show just how far some hoaxes can go. At the time these were released, they made huge waves, and a lot of people bought it. Such fakes serve to dilute the worth of photographic evidence, especially in more modern times in which it seems to be getting easier and easier to fake such things. It has all caused us to be more vigilant and to keep our wits about us. Hopefully, this will make us better able to ferret out the hoaxes from what is possibly real, but it is still unfortunate that these hoaxes continue to happen, and because of them it doesn’t seem like photos alone will ever be accepted as hard evidence for UFOs.

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