Retired RAF Pilot’s Close Encounters With UFOs – One Shaped Like the Michelin Man
Article by Stephen Moyes July 12, 2020 (thesun.co.uk)
• Retired RAF pilot Brian Burdett, 83, who flew a Prime Minister, VIPs and the public around the world in a 47-year career, has revealed his own close encounter with a UFO shaped like ‘Michelin Man’.
• In 1970, Burdett was flying a Royal Air Force VC10 at 35,000ft, in a southerly route, 25 miles north of the island of Corsica off of western Italy, when he, his co-pilot, navigator and flight engineer all saw a shiny ‘oil drum’ shaped object hovering motionless in the sky. “All four of us on the flight deck saw exactly what I saw, obviously, and agreed with my description,” said Burdett.
• Speaking for the first time about the sighting, Burdett said, “Imagine a 56 gallon oil drum, the ones that come up to your hip and have those little bulges at regular intervals; imagine Michelin Man. …[I]t was suspended in our 11 o’clock position and above us.” “We concluded it could have been a mile or several (miles away) depending on its size, whatever that was. We lost sight of it when we could crane our heads no higher.” “It was motionless relative to us.”
• Burdett reported the incident to Nice, France Air Traffic Control. Two fighter jets were scrambled to intercept the UFO but the pilots saw nothing on radar. However, a Pan-Am jetliner “reported that he could see exactly what I saw and agreed with me.”
• “It was so unnatural and out of the ordinary and beyond our normal expectations of what things are or appear to be. You had to see it to not believe it,” says Burdett. “There is no doubt in my mind” that it was extraterrestrial or something not developed on this planet.
• But as a pilot, Burdett was no stranger to encountering strange objects in the sky. In 1951, Burdett noticed a light in the sky in the distance which shot off at warp speed. In 1957, while being briefed at RAF Trimingham with some visiting pilots from Belgium, alarms sounded when radar picked up a ’white return’ on the screen. It shot in a northerly direction from Holland at a massive speed and then stopped dead, then shot out again at massive speed toward northern England. “We were immediately ushered out.”
• There have been over 3,500 documented sightings of UFOs by military, civilian and commercial airline pilots, but researchers believe many more pilots are reluctant to report them officially for fear of ridicule or damage to their careers.
• Burdett has written about his close encounters in his book, Forty-Seven Years Aloft. He says, “I’ve never believed pilots are reluctant to report strange sightings. …[T]hey would always report them, in my opinion.” Burdett’s final flight was into Los Angeles in an Airbus 340, in December 2000, having 22,500 hours in his log book.
A retired RAF pilot who flew a Prime Minister, VIPs and the public around the world in a 47-year career has revealed
his own close encounter with a UFO shaped like ‘Michelin Man’.
Brian Burdett, 83, was flying a Royal Air Force VC10 at 35,000ft when the strange ‘oil drum’ shaped object appeared 25 miles north of Corsica.
He was en-route from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and was carrying RAF service personnel and their families to and from Singapore. They were daily flights.
Brian, who was acting Squadron Leader, was left baffled by the object which looked like a bright shiny oil drum.
Speaking for the first time about the sighting, he said: “Imagine a 56 gallon oil drum, the ones that come up to your hip and have those little bulges at regular intervals; imagine Michelin Man.
“Imagine also that it was not black or dirty but shining bright with an immense glare. It was suspended in our 11 o’clock position and above us.
“In real terms, had it been the real thing its apparent size put it 20 feet away but the inability to sense its relative distance was eerie because we could not work it out.
“We concluded it could have been a mile or several depending on its size, whatever that was. We lost sight of it when we could crane our heads no higher.
“It was impossible to focus on it in any normal way. The impression was that it could have been any size and at any distance. As I said, it was eerie.It was motionless relative to us.”
He reported the incident to Nice ATC and two fighter jets were scrambled to intercept the UFO but the pilots saw nothing on radar.
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