Commercial Airline Pilot Photographs Strange Triangle UFO - Maryland

Commercial Airline Pilot Photographs Strange Triangle UFO - Maryland

Posted: 04 Sep 2014 05:30 AM PDT

This sighting and photo were reported to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) Report
Richard

Salisbury, Maryland, Saturday, August 30th, 2014, @ 20:48 hrs. (EDT) - A commercial/airline pilot and his girlfriend witness a strange looking triangular craft, with lights in its corners

NUFORC Report
Commercial pilot witnesses strange triangular craft, with lights in its corners.

COPIED E-MAILED MESSAGE/REPORT: 

Hello Mr. Davenport, 

It was nice to speak with you tonight about my sighting. My name is ((deleted)). I’m an Airline Pilot, based in Salisbury, MD. I’ve flown for three different airlines, and corporate operations since 1988.

Tonight at 20:48 local time I witnessed an equilateral triangle shaped object, due north of my position, moving east.

PILOT SIGHTINGS -- UFO over Mt. Kilimanjaro witnessed by pilot and passengers

UFO over Mt. Kilimanjaro witnessed by pilot and passengers

Date: February 19, 1951

Location: Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

One of the earliest and most spectacular reports from Africa concerns the sighting of a huge cigar-shaped UFO which hovered over famous Mt. Kilimanjaro February 19,1951. The UFO was photographed from an East African Airways plane flying in the vicinity. After remaining motionless for a considerable period of time, the object suddenly climbed steeply and disappeared. The movie film was developed and reportedly showed a clear and sizeable image of the object, according to the Natal Mercury.


The sighting was detailed in the Nairobi Sunday Post, February 25, 1951, by Capt. Jack Bicknell, pilot of the East African Airways plane. 

Extracts from Capt. Bicknell's report: 

"The Lodestar plane left Nairobi West at 7:00 a.m. At 7:20 a.m., the radio officer (D. W. Merrifield) drew my attention to a bright object like a white star hanging motionless about 10,000 feet above Kilimanjaro. My first reaction was to say nothing. We watched it for three minutes. Then we told the passengers about it. One of them had a very powerful pair of binoculars with him and he began to study it. In the meantime, we put a radio message through to Eastleigh describing it. Eastleigh asked us to check whether it was a meteorological balloon. I then examined it for several minutes through the binoculars. . . [At this point the plane had approached to within about 50 miles of the mountain]... 

PILOT SIGHTINGS -- The Bethune / Gandor Air Encounter

The Bethune / Gandor Air Encounter

Date: February 10, 1951

Location: Gandor, Newfoundland, Canada

Graham Bethune's testimony at the Disclosure Project Press Conference at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., 2001.

"About 300 miles outside of Argentina, Newfoundland, I saw a glow on the water. As we approached this glow, it turned into hundreds of circles of white lights on the water. We watched it for a while; when the lights went out, there was nothing on the water. The next thing that we saw was a yellow halo that was very small, about 15 miles away. It came up to 10,000 feet in a fraction of a second. I disengaged the autopilot and pushed the nose over, because I was going to go under it at the angle that it was coming toward me. The minute that I did that, it was up at our altitude and I could see nothing outside of the cockpit but this craft."


"I didn't know which way to go. Then all of a sudden I heard a racket. I didn't know what it was. And I said: 'What the hell was that?' One of the crewmen looked around and said: 'Everyone [in the plane] was ducking [down] and they collided [with each other]. They were all lying on the [floor of the plane]." 

PILOT SIGHTINGS -- Airline pilots observe fast-moving, disc-shaped UFO over Arkansas

Airline pilots observe fast-moving, disc-shaped UFO over Arkansas

Date: March 20, 1950

Location: Stuttgaart, Arkansas, USA

Source: U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book Special Report #14 (Battelle Institute Study), 1955

On March 20, 1950, a Reserve Air Force Captain and an airlines Captain were flying a commercial airlines flight. At 21:26, the airline Captain directed the attention of the Reserve Air Force Captain to an object which apparently was flying at high speed, approaching the airliner from the south on a north heading. The Reserve Air Force Captain focused his attention on the object. Both crew members watched it as it passed in front of them and went out of sight to the right. The observation, which lasted about 25 to 35 seconds, occurred about 15 miles north of a medium-sized city. When the object passed in front of the airliner, it was not more than 1/2 mile distant and at an altitude of about 1000 feet higher than the airliner. 

PILOT SIGHTINGS -- The Gorman Dogfight

The Gorman Dogfight

Date: October 1, 1948

Location: Fargo, North Dakota, USA

On this date in 1948, Lieutenant George F. Gorman wrote a letter stating, “...the Air Materiel Command has issued orders classifying the information as Secret. And this makes it a General Court Martial to release any more information. The Command has asked that my commanding officer and myself be court-martialed for releasing what information we did.”

The incident the young lieutenant was referring to has since become known as the Gorman Dogfight, one of the early “classics” in UFO history.


On the evening of October 1st, 1948, Lieutenant Gorman was returning from a cross-country flight with his squadron of North Dakota Air National Guard. When the pilots got to Hector airport in Fargo, Gorman decided to log some night-flying time, so he stayed up and circled his F-51 around the city. As he was preparing to land, the control tower advised him that a Piper Cub was in the air. Gorman saw the Piper 500 feet below, but then what appeared to be the taillight of another plane flashed by on the right. The tower insisted there weren’t any other planes in the sky, so Gorman told them he wanted to investigate and took off after the moving light. 

PILOT SIGHTINGS -- The Chiles-Whitted Case

The Chiles-Whitted Case

 

Date:  July 24, 1948

Location: Montgomery, Alabama, USA

Another one of the famous airline sightings of earlier years is the Chiles-Whitted Eastern Airlines case (Refs. 3, 5, G , 10, 23, 24, 25, 26). An Eastern DC-3, en route from Houston to Atlanta, was flying at an altitude of about 5,000 ft.. near Montgomery at 2:45 a.m. The pilot, Capt. Clarence S. Chiles, and the co-pilot, John B. Whitted, both of whom now fly jets for Eastern, were experienced fliers (for example, Chiles then had 8500 hours in the air, and both had wartime military flying duty behind them.). I interviewed both Chiles and Whitted earlier this year to crosscheck the many points of interests in this case. Space precludes a full account of all relevant details. 

Chiles pointed out to me that they first saw the object coming out of a distant squall line area which they were just reconnoitering. At first, they thought it was a jet, whose exhaust was somehow accounting for the advancing glow that had first caught their eyes. Coming almost directly at them at nearly their flight altitude, it passed off their starboard wing at a distance on which the two men could not closely agree: one felt it was under 1000 ft., the other put it at several times that. But both agreed, then and in my 1968 interview, that the object was some kind of vehicle. They saw no wings or empennage, but both were struck by a pair of rows of windows or some apparent openings from which there came a bright glow "like burning magnesium." The object had a pointed "nose", and from the nose to the rear along its underside there was a bluish glow. Out of the rear end came an orange-red exhaust or wake that extended back by about the same distance as the object's length.

PILOT SIGHTINGS -- The Thomas Mantell Incident (aircraft crashes after chasing UFO)

The Thomas Mantell Incident (aircraft crashes after chasing UFO)

Date: January 7, 1948

Location: Godman Air Force Base, Kentucky, United States

The Thomas Mantell incident began at 1.20pm. On the 7th. January, 1948. when the control tower operators at Godman Field Army Air Force Base, Kentucky sighted a strange unidentified airborne object hovering in the sky close to the base. Several senior officers were summoned, and the base Operations and Intelligence Officer were soon joined by the Commanding Officer, but none were able to identify the slowly rotating object.


At the time a flight of four P-51 fighters were on a routine training flight under the supervision of Flight Commander Captain Thomas Mantell. They were flying towards Godman Field when at approximately 2.45pm, the control tower officer in charge ordered them to investigate the strange object. Captain Mantell acknowledged, but a short time later one of the pilots requested permission to brake away as he was running low on fuel, leaving the three remaining aircraft to head in the direction of the strange object. 

PILOT SIGHTINGS -- United Airlines Flight 105 pilots witness formation of disc-shaped objects

 

United Airlines Flight 105 pilots witness formation of disc-shaped objects

Date: July 4, 1947 

Location: Emmet, Idaho, United States

Only about a week after the now-famous Mt. Rainier sighting by private pilot Kenneth Arnold, a United Air Lines DC-3 crew sighted two separate formations of wingless discs, shortly after takeoff from Boise (Refs. 8, 10, 22, 28). I located and interviewed the pilot, Capt. Emil J. Smith, now with United's New York office. He confirmed the reliability of previously published accounts. United Flight 105 had left Boise at 9:04 p.m. 

About eight minutes out, en route to Seattle, roughly over Emmett, Idaho, Co-pilot Stevens, who spotted the first of two groups of objects, turned on his landing lights under the initial impression the objects were aircraft. But, studying them against the twilight sky, Smith and Stevens soon realized that neither wings nor tails were visible on the five objects ahead. 

After calling a stewardess, in order to get a third confirming witness, they watched the formation a bit longer, called Ontario, Oregon CAA to try to get ground-confirmation, and then saw the formation spurt ahead and disappear at high speed off to the west. 

Smith emphasized to me that there were no cloud phenomena to confuse them here and that they observed these objects long enough to be quite certain that they were no conventional aircraft. They appeared "flat on the bottom, rounded on top", he told me, and he added that there seemed to be perceptible "roughness" of some sort on top, though he could not refine that description. 

Almost immediately after they lost sight of the first five, a second formation of four (three in line and a fourth off to the side) moved in ahead of their position, again traveling westward but at a somewhat higher altitude than the DC-3's 8000 ft. These passed quickly out of sight to the west at speeds which they felt were far beyond then-known speeds. 

Smith emphasized that they were never certain of sizes and distances, but that they had the general impression that these disc-like craft were appreciably larger than ordinary aircraft. Smith emphasized that he had not taken seriously the previous week's news accounts that coined the since-persistent term, "flying saucer." But, after seeing this total of nine unconventional, high-speed wingless craft on the evening of 7/4/47, he became much more interested in the matter. 

Nevertheless, in talking with me, he stressed that he would not speculate on their real nature or origin. I have spoken with United Air Lines personnel who have known Smith for years and vouch for his complete reliability.

PILOT SIGHTINGS -- The 1947 Kenneth Arnold UFO Sighting

The 1947 Kenneth Arnold UFO Sighting
Date: June 24, 1947
Location: Near Mt. Rainier, Washington, United States


On June 24, 1947, he was returning home from a business trip when he made a detour into the Yakima, Washington area to help in an aerial search for a missing C-46 marine transport plane that was believed to have gone down in the area.

At around 3:00 in the afternoon, he was flying at about 9,000 feet, near Mount Rainier, when a flash of light caught his eye. He turned and saw a procession of nine very strange objects flying from north to south in front of his plane. They were flat and rather heel-shaped, very shiny, and they moved erratically, like a "saucer would if you skipped it across water." You can see Arnold's drawing of what he saw here. Arnold estimated their size at about two-thirds that of a DC-4, and he calculated their speed at over 1500 mph by timing their travel between two mountain peaks of known distance.

When he arrived at Yakima, Washington, Arnold told several other pilots about his sighting. The consensus among them was that it was some type of military "secret weapon". However, Arnold would later find that the U.S. military was as mystified by the objects as he himself was.

In Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold went to make a report to the FBI, but the local office was closed, so he talked to the editor of the East Oregonian newspaper instead and it was the editor who put the story on the newswires.