There seems to be something very strange going on up in the skies above our heads. Something is operating up there with technology that seems to be far beyond what we are currently capable of, and such reports have gone back through the decades. One type of report that is especially relevant is those from aircraft pilots. After all, they are the ones up there, with observational skills and expertise that allows them to soberly judge what they see up in the clouds, and sometimes what they see is rather bizarre. Here we will look at a selection of very strange pilot UFO reports from the decade of the 1980s, which show that the skies are full of some pretty weird things.

In 1981, a Captain Phil Schultz was flying a TWA passenger jet on a routine flight over Lake Michigan, in the United States under ideal conditions. The flight had up until then been completely smooth, but then things would get strange. Both Schultz and his co-pilot suddenly saw in the near distance a “large, round, silver metal object with six jet black “portholes” equally spaced around the circumference,” which had apparently rapidly dropped from somewhere above them. The object was so large and in such close proximity that a collision seemed imminent, and Schultz, a veteran US Navy fighter pilot in the Korean War, took evasive action. The mysterious object then made a sharp turn and shot off out of sight. Schultz would later talk extensively with a Dr. Richard Haines, former senior scientist with NASA, about the incident, and although he had always been skeptical of similar reports by other pilots, he insisted that what he had seen was “a spaceship.”

Image by Steve Baxter

In the following year we have the case of airline captain Júlio Miguel Guerra, who in 1982 was working as a flight instructor for the Portuguese Air Force, and on this day was making a routine flight aboard a small DHC-1 Chipmunk aircraft. As he flew along, he noticed an unusual object come out of the blue to begin circling his plane and doing amazing aerial maneuvers not consistent with a normal aircraft. He would describe the object as follows:

At various times the object had been very close to me and I was able to verify that it was round with two halves shaped like two tight-fitting skullcaps. I carefully looked at the lower one, which seemed to be somewhere between red and brown with a hole or dark spot in the center. The center band looked like it had some kind of a grid, and possibly a few lights, but it was hard to tell since the sun was so bright and was reflected. It flew at a fantastic speed in a large elliptical orbit to the left, between 5,000 feet to the South and approximately 10,000 feet to the North, always from left to right, repeating this route over and over. I tried to keep it in sight.

In the meantime, he called in the incident, and two other pilots were soon in the air closing inn on his location to investigate. They also saw the object doing its inscrutable circuit, and it would then begin weaving in between the three planes, easily outmaneuvering them and moving at a speed in excess of 1,550 mph. The size of the object was estimated as being 10 feet in diameter, and after around 15 minutes of this aerial show it sped off out of sight. All three pilots would file a report on the matter, but after this the case has largely been forgotten.

From 1983 we have the rather spectacular account of an alleged UFO chase over the country of Poland. It began at approximately 11:26 a.m. on July 6, 1983, with an anomalous radar signature picked up at the Slupsk Military Airport, which appeared to be a fast-moving object blatantly invading Polish airspace. When all efforts to make radio contact with the mysterious aircraft failed, an alert was issued and a fighter jet scrambled to go up and intercept, piloted by a Cpt. Praszczalek. The pilot soon made visual contact with the object, describing it as “steel in color, rotating around its axis, ‘throwing’ as a boomerang,” and with no noticeable windows, seams, or propulsion system. This was strange and alarming enough that the order was given for the pilot to fire on the object, but just as he was about to do so it made a sudden sharp turn and disappeared from view. After this, ground control would apparently be inundated with numerous unexplained radar signals, causing panic and more jets to be scrambled, but no further visual confirmation was made. What was going on here? We may never know, because shortly after this it appears the Polish Air Force more or less buried the report, with only one of the eyewitnesses, a radar operator at the time, coming forward with the bizarre tale to Polish UFO researcher Marcin Wawrzak.

Image by Steve Baxter

A case from 1985 comes to us from the former Soviet Union, where in the early morning at around 4:10 a.m. an Aeroflot flight 8352 made visual contact with an anomalous yellow light while flying in clear and calm conditions. It was reported by the crew that this light then shot two cones of light from underneath, along with what appeared to be some sort of “blob.” These cones of light were described as being light beams or lasers of some kind, and were so bright that they were hard to look at directly and illuminated the landscape far below. As the crew looked on in astonishment, one of the beams of light veered up to train right on the airliner, as several multicolored lights approached them. The larger object from which all of these lights had apparently detached was described as “lit up like a Christmas tree,” and at around this time ground control was picking this all up on radar. The pilot would report that there was a vapor pervading the area, and would make the rather odd description of what he was seeing:

There were multiple lights of different colors and fiery zig-zags that crossed the vapor. It developed an appendage and then became a wingless cloud-aircraft with a pointed tail. The yellow and green glow, like phosphorescence, was eerily intertwined. The object seemed to change shape.

A second aircraft passing by would also confirm sighting the object, but what happened after this is anyone’s guess, and there is little further information on it. One of the most spectacular pilot encounters with a UFO from the 1980s comes to us from the year 1986, with Japan Airlines Flight 1628. On November 17, 1986, Flight 1628 was making a flight that was meant to take it from Paris to Reykjavik, Iceland, after which it was scheduled to move from Canada to Anchorage, Alaska, and finally back to its base in Tokyo, Japan. On board were veteran Captain Kenju Terauchi, co-pilot Takanori Tamefuji, and flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba, and on this occasion, they had no passengers, but rather a cargo of fine French wine. They made it as far as Canada without incident, but then things would take a turn for the weird.

As the flight passed over Alaska, Terauchi noticed the lights of an unidentified aircraft somewhere below them to the left, about 2,000 feet below their position. It was at first judged that this was just another plane, but the captain noticed that these lights seemed to be pacing them, after which they suddenly and inexplicably ascended very rapidly to appear right in front of them, “shooting off lights” that were so intense the cockpit actually warmed up. The two lights were described as being “amber and whitish” in color, and were rocking back and forth, matching their speed and changing from a top-down formation to a tight formation side-by-side one. Each light was described as having what appeared to be exhaust ports that intermittently shot off flames and sparks. The lights seemed to be pulsating, but they were too bright to see their overall shape. The crew notified Anchorage Air Traffic Control, who were unable to make radar confirmation of the objects. During this time, the plane experienced radio interference, and then the lights flew off to their left, and the captain would say:

There was a pale white flat light in the direction where the ships flew away, moving in a line along with us, in the same direction and same speed and at the same altitude as we were. I thought it would be impossible to find anything on an aircraft radar if a large ground radar did not show anything, but I judged the distance of the object visually and it was not very far. I set the digital weather radar distance to 20 (nautical) miles, radar angle to horizon (i.e., no depression angle). There it was on the screen. A large green and round object had appeared at 7 or 8 miles (13 km to 15 km) away, where the direction of the object was. We reported to Anchorage center that our radar caught the object within 7 or 8 miles in the 10 o’clock position. We asked them if they could catch it on ground radar, but it did not seem they could catch it at all.

Image by Steve Baxter

It was at around this time that military radar at Elmendorf Regional Operational Control Center managed to make contact with the mysterious objects, and then Flight 1628 would make visual contact with a very large unidentified object as they neared Fairbanks, of which Terauchi would say:

The lights of the city were extremely bright to eyes that were used to the dark. The cockpit lights had been turned off to eliminate window reflections of internal lights. We were just above the bright city lights and we checked the pale white light behind us. Alas! There was a silhouette of a gigantic spaceship. We must run away quickly! Anchorage Center.

Another airliner, a United Airlines passenger flight, took a look as they approached the JAL flight, but were unable to see the UFO, which by this time had apparently flown off. JAL Flight 1628 then made a landing at Anchorage at 6:20 p.m. and an investigation was launched of the strange incident. It was ultimately officially announced that the UFO was light reflecting off of clouds of ice crystals, and that the anomalous radar signatures were merely spilt radar returns from the plane itself. Terauchi and his crew would deny this, but the case was considered to be “explained” and filed away. What happened to JAL Flight 1628? You can read a more detailed account of the case I have written here.

Also from 1985 is the case of British pilot David Hastings, who in September of that year was making a flight over the Mojave Desert of the United States in a Cessna Skymaster along with his co-pilot, David Paterson. As they flew along, they noticed something out over the horizon. It at first appeared as just a speck, but this speck would soon turn out to be something far more bizarre than anything the two of them could have imagined. Hastings would say:

This speck suddenly grew extremely quickly until we saw this huge shadow go over the top of us. But the most amazing thing about it was there was no noise and absolutely no movement or turbulence at all. We looked at each other, saying, ‘What the hell was that?’

Hastings would grab his camera and snap two photographs through the window in the direction he believed the mysterious craft to be, and when they were developed one of the photos would show a cigar-shaped craft of some sort. The case has never been fully explained. Indeed, none of these cases have ever really been explained, and their mysteries are only further propelled by the fact that they come from extremely reliable witnesses in the form of seasoned pilots. These are people who have no reason to lie, and indeed who often opt not to report their strange experiences for fear of tarnishing their reputations. Indeed, this is one reason for why so many pilot UFO encounters have been lost, because they simply don’t want to deal with it and are silenced. What is going on in the skies and what are these pilots experiencing up there? There may come a time when we have some answers, but for now it remains a perplexing enigma.

Over the years (decades, in fact) there have been more than a few reports of people supposedly murdered for what they knew about UFOs. Intriguing and interesting, for sure. But, how much truth is there to these high-profile claims? That’s the theme of today’s article. We’ll begin with one of the most high-profile deaths in Ufology: that of the late alien abduction investigator-researcher-writer Professor John E. Mack. I’ll come straight to the point: Mack was not wiped out by some kind of ruthless hit-team. Anyone who thinks that such a thing could have happened is an idiot. No, hang on, that’s an insult to an idiot. Mack died because of an unfortunate set of circumstances on the night of September 27, 2004 in bustling London, England. Let’s get things into perspective: it was late at night. It was dark. And when he was hit by a vehicle – as he crossed the road by foot, no less – on a busy London road Mack had no chance of survival. There’s something else, too; something very important that many might not think of. Almost certainly, when Mack crossed the road he looked the wrong way. In the U.K. we drive on the left, while in the U.S. it’s the right. That’s what sealed Mack’s death. And not the Men in Black. Mack’s life was snuffed out all because of the way he turned his head at the wrong time. Worse still, the driver who hit Mack was under the influence of booze. Sometimes, a series of events come together – in the worst ways possible – and lead to the death of a well-known figure. In this case, Mack.

Dr John E. Mack, pioneering researcher of the abduction phenomenon.

Now, let’s look at Morris K. Jessup. He was someone who was well-known in Ufology in the 1950s. His books included The Case for the UFO and The Expanding Case for the UFO. His interests involved ancient levitation, modern-day Saucer stories, and the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment.” You know the one: the invisible ship that spawned an entire phenomenon. And a couple of movies. The first movie, in 1984, was good fun and entertainment. The follow-up was total garbage. As for Jessup, his life ended in 1959. In the early evening of April 20, the lifeless body of  Jessup was found in his car, which was parked in the Matheson Hammock Park in Miami, Florida. The car’s engine was still running and a hosepipe, affixed to the exhaust, had been fed through the driver’s side window. Jessup was dead from the effects of carbon-monoxide. Jessup’s body was found by a man named John Goode, who worked at the park. Shocked at the sight before him, Goode quickly called the police, who arrived in no time at all. It was all too late. It didn’t take long before ufologists were saying Jessup’s death was not just suspicious, but extremely suspicious. We need to look into Jessup’s private life for the answers. All of us have our lives away from things like Bigfoot, Nessie and aliens. And, sometimes, those lives don’t go well. That’s exactly what happened with Jessup. As the mid-to-late 1950s progressed, Jessup’s marriage began having problems. He had a car accident, something that played on him for a long time. His publisher turned down several of his ideas for future books. Paranoia set in that he was being watched. And, finally, the time came when Jessup couldn’t take it anymore. He took his life. No assassination. No murder. Just a tragic death provoked by a man whose turmoil became out of control.

Morris K. Jessup

That all said, there are some deaths in Ufology that I do think could have had suspicious endings. Take, for example, Miriam Bush, a figure in the world’s most famous UFO case: Roswell, of course. Miriam knew the truth of what happened back in 1947 on the Foster Ranch, saw the damaged bodies (human or alien), and was told to stay quiet. Or else. It didn’t stop her from telling her family of at least some parts of the story. And she started to take to the booze. To a significant degree. Unfortunately, Miriam was never really able to get rid of that ufological albatross. In the final month of 1989, Miriam headed off to San Jose, California. She had fears she was being watched. She probably was. The day after she hit the road, Miriam was found dead in her motel-room. A plastic bag was covered her head. The conclusion: suicide. Yeah, right. For me, the death of Miriam Bush is one that we should take a very close and careful look at.

Moving onto the 1990s, there was the death of Danny Casolaro. It was midway through 1991 when the lifeless corpse of a middle-aged man was found in a hotel room in the Martinsburg, West Virginia Sheraton Inn. Specifically, his body was lying in the shower. It was a grim sight for the maid that made the discovery. The man, it seemed, had committed suicide: his wrists were cut deep, something which effectively meant that without anyone to help him, the man was doomed. And, he was. It didn’t take more than a few moments for hotel staff to figure out who, exactly, the man was. He was identified by the person on the front-desk as Danny Casolaro. He was an investigative journalist of the Woodward and Bernstein variety. At the time, Casolaro was pursuing a dangerous group of people that he called “The Octopus.” Supposedly, they engineered the JFK assassination, Watergate, the Lockerbie, Scotland Jumbo Jet 747 crash over Scotland in 1988, and much more. As Casolaro continued his research, he found himself finding more and more UFO links to the Octopus, such as tales of UFOs, alien autopsies, Area 51 and much more. Casolaro was right on the edge of writing a book on all of this when death decided to come along. Two cases that I suspect were suspicious and two that weren’t. In other words, we have to be very careful as to how we handle such delicate events and incidents. Just because someone in Ufology dies, it doesn’t mean it has to be under suspicious circumstances. But, on the other side of the coin, we shouldn’t ignore such grim possibilities.

Danny Casolaro

For centuries, since the very first ships started making their way towards the horizon and to the edges of our own maps, there have been strange phenomena reported from the vast unknown expanses of our oceans. All manner of stories of sea creatures, unusual anomalies, and others have been brought back by vessels, and one of the more intriguing types of stories has been that of something apparently under intelligent control operating beneath the waves. Called USOs, or “Unidentified Submerged Objects,” these are mysterious objects and lights moving about underwater and inspiring awe just as their aerial brethren the UFOs do in the skies above our heads. Some of the more spectacular such accounts of USOs come from various ships at sea of all types, and here we will look at one of the more unusual and unexplained mysteries of the ocean depths.

A very early encounter with something strange in the water comes to us from way back in 1902, with a ship called the SS Fort Salisbury. In October of that year, the vessel was cruising off the rugged coast of West Africa through the Gulf of Guinea in calm seas when something very strange would occur at around 3:05 a.m. It was then that the crew was alerted by a lookout to a massive dark object a few hundred feet off their starboard side. When an officer by the name of Andrew Rayner came to look, he could see that whatever it was, it was truly huge, an estimated 500 to 600 feet in length. He would also note that “it had two lights, one at each end, a mechanism of some kind, or perhaps fins, and was making a commotion in the water.” He also noticed that it had a metallic surface. He would write of the object in his journal as follows:

This was about all he was able to see, because the enormous mechanical anomalous object then slowly sank into the black depths below. Considering that there would have been no submarines like that at the time, it is hard to tell just what this ship could have observed. It has been suggested it may have been a large sinking ship, but there was no report of such a lost vessel reported in the Lloyds Registry, and no record of a ship going missing, something that would have certainly shown up in the records for something so massive. The strange case remains unexplained.

Another odd report comes from 1947, off the coast of Malta. In June of that year, an unnamed fishing vessel was about 20 miles off the southern coast, engaged in the routine business of pulling in their nets. As the nets came up, one of the crew alerted the others to something strange bobbing about out on the water’s surface, which appeared to be what they described as a “black submarine” floating about in the waves. It was an unsettling enough sight that the crew finished hauling in their nets and went about starting up the engines to get out of there, and at that moment there was a bright flash of light from the anomalous black shape. This light was bright enough to illuminate the object and the surrounding vicinity, showing it to be smooth, black, and metallic, and there were also small figures now visible upon it, which seemed to be wearing some type of apparatus around their waists and were described as “little men.” As the frightened fishermen looked on, these diminutive figures, described as about the size of 10-year-old children, seemed to scramble into the craft, after which it began to glow so brightly that they could barely look directly at it. The object and is bizarre crew then quickly submerged and disappeared under the waves to not be seen again.

In 1963, we have the case of the Thrift, a collier from Aberdeen, Scotland, which on November 22 of that year was travelling through the area with a load of coal off the Girdle Ness peninsula, just south of the entrance to Aberdeen’s harbor, in Scotland. The crew noticed a flashing red light that seemed to be travelling around 20 feet over the waves in the near distance, going at a high rate of speed past their port side. As the astonished crew looked on at this curious sight, the light then did a sudden vertical ascent into the water with a splash, after which it could be seen to travel down through the water out of sight into the dim depths. Thinking that an aircraft had gone down and sunk, the Thrift sent a lifeboat and search crew to the spot where it had gone down, but no trace of debris could be found. What did this crew see out there? Who knows?

One very strange encounter between a vessel and a USO involved an actual alleged collision with the unidentified object. On February 3, 1965, the 70-ton trawler Star of Freedom was about 15 miles southeast of the island of Barra, in in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, traveling at about 9 knots at the time, when the entire vessel was rocked by a collision with something beneath the surface. It was obviously something very large, as the collision actually lifted the massive ship’s bow from the water and left a huge hole in the hull. A distress call was immediately made, and efforts to pump the water put into effect, but the vessel was eventually beached at Castlebay Harbor. It was a major collision, but the object that they hit remained hidden beneath he waves. At the time, the ship’s captain, a George Wood, thought they must have surely hit a submarine, but both the U.S. and British Navies denied having any subs in the area at the time. Considering this, and the fact that they were nowhere near land at the time, what could they have possibly hit that would so severely damage a 70-ton vessel and lift it out of the water? It remains unknown.

In more recent years we have a case from 1991, off the west coast of South America. The case, which was reported to the files of the site UFO Casebook, comes from a witness who claims that at the time he had been an operations and intelligence petty officer serving aboard the Knox-class destroyer escort the USS Kirk FF1087, and that they had been part of a drug interdiction force, which consisted of the USS Kirk and three other Naval vessels. Their primary mission was to patrol using a network of radar to track and then intercept drug-running aircraft flying out of Columbia, Panama and Guatemala, as well as to engage any smuggling ships they were able to find. The witness says that his primary duties took place within the CIC, or the Combat Information Center, which he and 22 other specialists manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with them rotating between two 11-man shifts.

USS Kirk FF1087

The witness claims that he was on CIC duty at 2 a.m. on the morning of December 16, and it was a quiet night with nothing going on. He says he took a break to go up to the ship’s bridge, and at the time the entire vessel was in a state called “darkened ship,” with all of the exterior lights turned off, as well as those on the bridge, meaning the area was only faintly illuminated by instrument panels. He began talking casually with the officer of the deck, and this is when things would suddenly get weird. He says:

All of a sudden and out of nowhere, like a huge flash from a camera, emanating from the starboard bow sea level upward was a huge flash of red glowing light, which lit up our entire ship. It only lit up our ship, not the surrounding ocean, just our ship. It happened so fast, that the OOD, the navigator and I were speechless for about 5 seconds, at which time I looked at the OOD and asked him if he just saw that light. He stated yes in a sullen voice. I then asked the navigator and he replied yes. I then took the navigator’s sound powered headset, and asked the forward and aft look outs, if they had just seen the same red flash, to which the forward look out stated, “YES! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?” Aft lookout said yes as well. I then immediately contacted CIC, and asked the CIC officer if we had any aircraft or surface ships in our vicinity, to which he replied clear as a whistle. I asked if we had any submarine activity in the area, to which he replied, no.

What had just happened did not make any sense. The flash emanated from the sea, directly off of our starboard bow (like it was touching our bow), and ascended upwardly so rapidly, creating the effect of the bright red flash. The other weird aspect of this event was that only our ship was lit up within the red flash, not the surrounding sea, but our vessel only. Up until this event, I did not believe in UFOs or USOs. I have no doubt that our ship, steaming along at 12 knots, came right up on a submerged unidentifiable aircraft. I don’t think the aircraft or USO had any idea we were sailing up to them. I think whatever it was, took off in a very unplanned and fast manner, and wanted to quickly identify us, thus the flash.

In the end, after much consideration they decided not to wake the captain, merely logging it as an “unexplained phenomenon.” Indeed, all of these cases could be filed away as such, and there has never been any solid explanation for any of them. We are left to wonder just what these vessels might have encountered out there on the water and beneath it. What is going on in reports such as these and can we make any sense of it? Are there forces that are beyond our comprehension using the oceans or our world for some inscrutable purpose? There is no way to really know for sure, and in the meantime cases of USOs keep coming in. Perhaps in our quest for answers to the UFO phenomenon, in addition to watching the skies, we should also watch below the waves.