The article below was published in the daily newspaper The National Ledger, Apache Junction, Arizona, USA, on January 4, 2007.
Thursday, January 4th, 2007
Keith Walters Jones
I felt like I was watching Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in 'Men in Black' when I first read the story about the O'Hare UFO controversy. According to all of the reports coming out of the incident, the Federal government is going with the inevitable "weather" as an excuse for what witnesses saw.
Okay then, here is the Hollywood tie-in. In 'Men in Black' Agent J tells a woman that she didn't see a UFO. He uses his "standard issue neuralyzer," to erase what the woman believes she saw and tell her it was something easily explainable.
"All right, Beatrice, there was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus."
Cue the feds in Chicago, specifically FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory. "Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," Cory said of the sighting. "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."
The FAA is not investigating, Cory said. Someone give the woman a 'standard issue neuralyzer.'
In a shocking development, there are loads of witnesses according to the Chicago Tribune. "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 (Earthly) aircraft," the mechanic said.
One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and "experienced some religious issues" over it, one co-worker said.
Another said, "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."
There is much more here at a very well done piece by Jon Hilkevitch.
He does note in the piece that like United, the FAA originally told the Chicago 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.
Since I wasn't there - I can't even begin to guess what these folks saw. But they certainly believe they witnessed something other than the 'weather.'
