Article by Brian Bender July 23, 2021 (politico.com)
• The Federal Aviation Administration has a new capability called the Space Data Integrator program (see FAA data sheet here) coordinating the increase in space launches with the ordinary commercial air traffic.
Article by Luis Martinez June 25, 2021 (abcnews.go.com)
• An unclassified version of a highly anticipated report on UFOs, prepared by the U.S. intelligence community and delivered to Congress on Friday, does not provide definitive explanations for 143 UFO/UAP encounters reported by the U.S. military between 2004 and 2021. The report (see here) does not contain the words “alien” or “extraterrestrial”, and says further study or “pending scientific advances” may be needed to help explain UFOs that fall into a vague category: “other.”
• A senior U.S. government official noted that the report does not indicate that a foreign adversary had made significant technological leaps. He said that future data may lead to ‘non-Earth-related’ technologies. “We are open to other hypotheses that is meant to recognize that we have many things that we are currently unexplained,” said the official. “We are open to the possibility that some things may be unexplainable with our current level of understanding.”
• The seven-page report presented to congressional committees on Friday met a requirement Congress put in place last year requesting that the U.S. intelligence community take six months to prepare an unclassified and classified report on what the U.S. government knew about UAP/UFOs. “The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP,” said the report.
• The report reviewed 144 UAP incidents reported by U.S. military personnel in recent years. Only one could be explained and was attributed to a large deflating balloon. The report lists five hypotheses that may possibly explain some of them in the future: “airborne clutter” (birds, balloons, or drones); “natural atmospheric phenomena” (ice crystals, etc); “U.S. government or industry developmental programs”; “systems from a foreign adversary”; and the catch-all category listed as “other.”
• “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation,” the report said. However, as the UAP incidents represent “an array of aerial behaviors”, “not all UAP are the same thing… [T]here is a wide, wide range of phenomena that we observe.”
• “There is not one single explanation for UAPs, it’s rather a series of things,” said the official. “And our analytic approach to this is to create a framework in which we have considered five explanatory categories that we believe are plausible explanations for a UAP that we observe.”
• The report cited 18 incidents “that appear to demonstrate advanced technology” based on flight characteristics. In those incidents, UFOs “appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.” “In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings,” the report added. As for some of the incidents captured on video, the official said some are “propulsion that we can’t explain” though in some cases objects that appeared to be moving fast “may not be moving as quickly as it appears that they are in that video.”
• With the need for more data to analyze UFOs, the Pentagon announced new steps designed to standardize reporting and analysis of UAP reports across the military. The Pentagon’s UAP Task Force has begun to receive additional data from the Federal Aviation Administration from civilian pilots reporting “unusual or unexpected events.”
• “This report is an important first step,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who championed the drafting of the bill ordering the DNI report. “The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.” Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the committee, labeled the report “inconclusive”.
• [Editor’s Note] While the UAP Task Force report is a big ‘nothingburger’, I see two positive aspects of it. First, the report cites 18 incidents “that appear to demonstrate advanced technology” based on flight characteristics. The report includes a fifth category of UFOs as “other” – leaving room that extraterrestrials may have provided this advanced technology. Second, the report includes a category of UFOs created by “U.S. government or industry developmental programs”. So they admit that the UFOs seen by military personnel could have been manufactured by the military industrial complex, utilizing advanced technologies provided by “other”… which of course they were. The missing variable which the government is only willing to label as “other” is that this advanced technology was either provided directly by extraterrestrials or were derived from the reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial vehicles. The fact that these experimental drone craft employ extraterrestrial electromagnetic anti-gravity propulsion – which the US Navy has publicly patented under the inventor Salvatore Pais – is the ultimate conclusion that the U.S. government is trying so hard to avoid.
A highly anticipated report on UFOs, prepared by the
U.S. intelligence community and delivered to Congress on Friday, does not provide definitive explanations for 143 encounters the U.S. military reported with unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, that took place between 2004 and 2021.
An unclassified version of the report, released on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence website, does not contain the words “alien” or “extraterrestrial” and says further study or “pending
scientific advances” may be needed to help explain what are known as unexplained aerial phenomena or UAP’s that fall into a vague category the report lists as “other.”
But a senior U.S. government official did not rule out the possibility that future data may lead to non-Earth-related technologies.
“Of the 144 reports we are dealing with here, we have no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation for them – but we will go wherever the data takes us,” said a senior U.S. government official, who also noted that they did not show that a foreign adversary had made significant technological leaps.
“We are open to other hypotheses that is meant to recognize that we have many things that we are currently unexplained,” said the official. “We are open to the possibility that some things may be unexplainable with our current level of understanding.”
The seven-page report presented to congressional committees on Friday met a requirement Congress put in place last year requesting that the U.S. intelligence community take six months to prepare an unclassified and classified report on what the U.S. government knew about UAP’s.
“The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP,” said the report.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. ExoNews.org distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107. Please contact the Editor at ExoNews with any copyright issue.
Article by Joseph Trevithick and Tyler Rogoway June 26, 2020 (thedrive.com)
• In 2019, reports emerged from US Navy pilots of UFO encounters off the East Coast and in the Middle East. (see previous ExoArticles here and here) Since then The War Zone website has collected Navy and Air Force incident reports through Freedom of Information Act requests. In this article, The War Zone has compiled 25 reports obtained through FOIA from the Air Force Safety Center.
• The UFO issue, especially involving US military aircraft, was thrust back into the public spotlight in June when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence demanded a full accounting of matters pertaining to UFOs from the Pentagon and the US Intelligence Community. (see previous ExoArticle here) The incident reports listed below may be among the information provided to the Senate Committee.
• Only the November 1, 2017 report involves a combat jet and only the April 21, 2015 report involves ‘tactical aircraft’, which The War Zone considers “extremely odd”. Fighter jets and tactical aircraft have the most capable radars and other sensors to spot and track small, unidentified objects. Additional reports may be getting passed through separate or even classified systems, outside the normal reporting channels for military aviation safety incidents. The Black Vault received a number of internal Air Force Emails via FOIA related to this topic, including one that said, “Currently the Air Force is not working any specific guidelines for reporting UAPs.”
• The 25 reports show the steady rise of lower-end drone activity – an increasing issue for commercial air operations. Regulators around the world, including the Federal Aviation Administration, have struggled to develop rules and guidelines that are practical and enforceable. This underscores the fact that small drones present real safety concerns to U.S. military activities at home, as well as abroad. The proliferation of cheap but capable drone technology enables non-state actors, in addition to the military forces of nation-states, to increasingly employ unmanned aircraft for surveillance and actual kinetic attacks on and off the battlefield. This is a threat that the DoD was astonishingly too incurious to recognize.
• #1 June 17, 2014: 27th Special Operations Wing – The 27th Special Operations Wing at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico reported an unidentified fixed-wing aircraft flying under Visual Flight Rules intruding into the nearby R5104 range area between 11:04 and 11:22am. Communications could not be established with the aircraft.
• #2 July 2, 2014: 58th Special Operations Wing – An “unidentified helicopter” flew under the two aircraft at a distance of between 100 and 300 feet near Sorocco, New Mexico. The HC-130P’s crew first spotted a bright light near the aircraft. An accompanying HH-60G crew also saw it. The light grew brighter, blinding the pilots using night-vision goggles. No communication was established with the unidentified helicopter.
• #3 July 24, 2014: 317th Airlift Group – A C-130J Hercules airlift had a near-collision with an unidentified light fixed-wing aircraft approximately eight miles to the south of Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State, during a training mission.
• #4 November 21, 2014: 121st Aerial Refueling Wing – A KC-135R tanker was given notice of a potential hazard from its Traffic Collision Avoidance System while climbing away from Wilmington Airpark near Wilmington, Ohio.
• #5 February 7, 2015: 45th Space Wing – An HC-130 Combat King combat search and rescue and tanker aircraft had an encounter with what was described as “a possible remote control aircraft” with a “flashing red light”. Personnel at Patrick Air Force Base tower spotted the remote control aircraft and contacted the Brevard Country Sheriff’s Office to investigate along with the Air Force Security Forces Squadron at Patrick. They found no further evidence of the object, which had been flying an estimated 900 to 1,000 feet in the air.
• #6 April 21, 2015: 379th Air Expeditionary Wing – A KC-135R tanker at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar visually saw an “unidentified aircraft” while conducting an aerial refueling mission over Afghanistan near Kandahar, but the object did not appear on radar with the tanker plane or air traffic control.
• #7 May 15, 2015: 100th Aerial Refueling Wing – A KC-135R Stratotanker had several near collisions with an unidentified aircraft while on approach to its home base of RAF Mildenhall, UK. When the tanker descended to 2,600 feet as part of their approach, air traffic controllers warned them about another aircraft directly below them. The crew climbed to 3,600 feet to avoid the craft. The crew never visually saw the other aircraft or received any radio calls from another plane warning of a potential collision.
• #8 May 21, 2015: 452nd Air Mobility Wing – A C-17A Globemaster III airlifter had a near-collision with an “unidentified remotely piloted aircraft” while on approach to March Air Reserve Base in California. The pilot said that the flying object came within 15 feet of the aircraft, passing it above and to the left.
• #9 July 25, 2015: 129th Rescue Wing – An MC-130P Combat Shadow search and rescue tanker aircraft had to take evasive action to avoid hitting an unidentified object during a nighttime training mission near Niagara Falls International Airport in New York State. While on approach to the airport, the pilot saw through their night-vision goggles an “object [that] appeared to be illuminated by a single external light” and that looked to “be accelerating from left to right” in front of them. The pilot took evasive action and passed directly over the object.
• #10 August 13, 2015: 452nd Air Mobility Wing – A KC-135R tanker suffered a near collision with what the crew described as a “quad-copter-type drone” 100 feet below the craft while flying a pattern around March Air Reserve Base in California. It continued on in the opposite direction from the KC-135R and “disappeared from sight.”
• #11 January 15, 2016: 45th Space Wing Wing – An American detachment at RAF Ascension Island, a territory of the United Kingdom in the South Atlantic Ocean, reported seeing an “unauthorized personal drone” at two separate locations. The RAF pilots did not see the drone nor did it interfere with their landing, but the 45th Space Wing described the incident as having a “high accident potential.”
• #12 April 21, 2016: 193rd Special Operations Wing – An EC-130J(SJ) aircraft had a near collision with a small drone flying at around 4,000 feet while in contact with aircraft controllers at Philadelphia International Airport. The crew initially thought they saw a bird, until they saw a flashing red light pass 3 feet above the left wing.
• #13 January 25, 2017: 27th Special Operations Wing – An unidentified private fixed-wing aircraft flying at around 10,000 feet intruded into restricted airspace near Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico at 4:10pm. Cannon’s Radar Approach Control lost the signal from the aircraft’s transponder by 4:37.
• #14 June 9, 2017: 12th Flying Training Wing – A T-6A Texan II trainer had a near collision with a “red unmanned aerial system” while flying south of the Mobile Bay Bridge in Alabama. “The UAS was spotted approximately one half to one wingtip away from the EA [Event Aircraft] and was co-altitude.”
• #15 November 1, 2017: 48th Fighter Wing – An F-15E Strike performed evasive maneuvers to avoid colliding with an “unidentified flying object” while flying near its home base at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom. “The object passed over the right side of the aircraft with an estimated minimal separation of 100 feet.”
• #16 January 20, 2018: 47th Flying Training Wing – A T-1 Jayhawk training jet reported a near-collision with an “unidentifiable unmanned drone” while on approach to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport in Arizona, 4.2 miles from the airport’s runway. The aircraft was flying at 1,300 feet and flew right under the drone. Both pilots identified it as a UAV due to the fact it was hovering, and they saw a small white steady light emanating as they passed underneath it.
• #17 February 7, 2018: 71st Flying Training Wing – A T-38C Talon jet trainer had a near collision with a drone while on approach to Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma, coming within 300 feet of the jet trainer.
• #18 February 5, 2018: 325th Fighter Wing – The pilot of a transient US Navy T-6A Texan II aircraft was on approach to Tyndall Air Force Base at 1000 feet when they spotted an unmanned aircraft 1,200 feet off his left wing. The pilot “noticed sun glint off of metal, this is when he realized the black object was not a bird and that it was moving to the southeast.”
• #19 March 26, 2018: 45th Space Wing – The pilot of a civilian helicopter flying near Patrick Air Force Base in Florida “had a model airplane come within about 100 feet.” All the other major details about this incident are redacted, but it appears to have led to the issuance of a formal Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) regarding the potentially hazardous situation.
• #20 September 10, 2018: 86th Airlift Wing – A C-130Js had a near collision with an unidentified unmanned aerial vehicle while flying near Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The report describes the drone as “spherical with an approximated 6 feet diameter top mounted rotor.”
• #21 March 6, 2019: 12th Flying Training Wing – A T-1 Jayhawk training jet reported seeing “a quad copter or non-traditional aircraft” that was “silver in color” while flying in Mississippi on a low-level training flight. “The UAS was stationary or near stationary” and was seen within one nautical mile of the T-1 hovering at around 1,500 feet.
• #22 March 13, 2019: 445th Airlift Wing – A C-17A Globemaster III airlifter had to take evasive action to avoid a small drone during a training sortie on March 13, 2019. The aircraft was flying at approximately 3,500 feet over Ohio. “The pilot flying (PF) observed a white sUAS [small unmanned aerial system] with either brown or black accents or propellers just below the [Aircraft]…. within 50 feet.”
• #23 March 21, 2019: 552nd Air Control Wing – An E-3B Sentry flying at 3,000 feet reported that a “DJI style quad-copter/unmanned aerial system” passed by the aircraft approximately 20 feet below its number four engine. The crew also told air traffic controllers at Oklahoma City Approach that “they came close to one.”
• #24 July 25, 2019: 445th Airlift Wing – A C-17A Globemaster III airlifter, when departing RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, “visually acquired an orange colored small unmanned aerial system as it passed approximately 50′ below the left wing” after climbing out to an altitude of 7,500 feet. “
• #25 September 9, 2019: 109th Airlift Wing – An LC-130H Hercules airlifter reported a near-miss with a quad-copter-type drone while conducting a proficiency flight around Albany International Airport. During a climb out at 1,100 feet, the crew spotted the drone, yellow in color, approximately 300 feet away laterally and between 100 and 200 feet below.
Last year, reports emerged about Navy fighter pilots having numerous encounters with unidentified flying objects while flying in restricted airspace off the East Coast of the United States. Details remain limited, though The War Zone has been steadily collecting more and more information that could help explain many of those incidents. At the same time, curiously, there haven’t been virtually any revelations about similar encounters with other U.S. military services’ flying branches, especially the Air Force, which is the entity primarily responsible for safeguarding America’s airspace.
In May, The War Zone was first to publish details from a number of hazard reports from the Naval Safety Center, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). regarding interactions between that service’s aircraft and unknown aerial craft that offered an additional look into what might be happening, why, and how these encounters were or weren’t getting reported. We can now share information from 25 similar reports obtained through the FOIA from the Air Force Safety Center.
This whole issue, especially regarding U.S. military aircraft encountering unidentified objects when flying over or near the United States proper, was thrust back into the public consciousness just this week. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said that it was looking to get a full accounting of the issue from the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Pentagon. As part of a report accompanying the latest draft of the Senate version Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, the Committee members included language asking for a detailed review of exactly what information about these kinds of incidents exists now, how new data is getting collected, how this is all shared within the federal government, and what threats these aerial objects might pose, including whether they might reflect technological breakthroughs by potential adversaries. These Air Force reports, as well as the previously disclosed ones that the Navy has on file, could easily be among the information that the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense might end up compiling for Senators to review.
The 25 reports that The War Zone obtained, which cover various types of incidents around the world and come from the Air Force Safety Automated System (AFSAS) database, came in response to a request that asked for copies of “any flight incident, hazard, or similar reports that the Air Force Safety Center received during the calendar years 2013 to 2019 that deal with encounters that any Air Force aircraft had anywhere in the world with any unidentified aerial objects.”
This date range was meant to capture a snapshot of similar experiences that the Air Force might have been having around when Navy pilots said they saw a spike in the number of encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, more commonly known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, off the East Coast of the United States through the end of the most recent complete calendar year.
Personal identifying information is redacted throughout the Air Force reports. “Safety investigation boards’ Findings, Evaluations, Analyses, Conclusions, and Recommendations are exempt from disclosure,” the Air Force Safety Center also said in a letter accompanying the release, citing various Air Force and Department of Defense regulations, as well as relevant FOIA case law, which you can read in full, with certain personal information redacted by us, here.
“All other privileged portions of the report have been withheld according to established laws,” the letter added. “Unfortunately, some pages are virtually illegible due to the quality of the microfilm record and our capability to reproduce it.”
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by KTVA Web Staff March 21st 2019 (ktva.com)
• On the evening of March 29th, 18 year-old Adonus Baugh noticed something “falling” from the sky over Anchorage, Alaska, and video recorded it. A pair of smoke plumes seem to be following it (pictured above). Baugh submitted the video footage to local CBS news affiliate KYVA channel 11 Alaska checked with various federal agencies who also could not identify the object. (see 3:03 minute video of the falling object below)
• Federal Aviation Administration officials said the object seen in the video was not an aircraft, and that the FAA didn’t receive any reports of aviation issues Tuesday night. Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson spokeswoman Erin Eaton who monitors a variety of aircraft operating from the base, ranging from F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to C-130 Hercules and C-17 Globemaster III transports as well as E-3 Sentry AWACS command jets, said, “That doesn’t look like any of our planes.”
• In the original video, two people discuss the falling object: “You see that? It’s something falling,” a woman says. “Yeah, definitely falling,” a male voice agrees. Bebe Kang saw it and said, “It really didn’t look like a plane or a jet.” King later deleted her post, ‘because she “didn’t want people to think I was seeing aliens.”’
• Peter Davidson, of the National UFO Reporting Center, says it is only a parallax view of “a high-altitude jet airliner, with a contrail behind it.”
• [Editor’s Note] Or could it be another spacecraft shot down in a near-earth space battle between a Deep State Secret Space Program faction and the SSP Alliance?
An object was recorded in the skies over Anchorage Tuesday night, but the truth wasn’t out there when KTVA checked with various federal agencies.
A video submitted to KTVA Wednesday by Adonus Baugh shows a plume following an object tracking across local skies as two people discuss it.
“You see that? It’s something falling,” a woman asks.
“Yeah, definitely falling,” a male voice agrees.
Facebook user Bebe Kang said in a since-deleted Alaska Scanner Joe post, containing two photos of the object, that she saw it at 8:23 p.m. Tuesday.
“It didn’t look like an airplane or one of those jets. It was big, super slow and RED!!” Kang wrote. “I tried to get a video but it got further and smaller.”
On Wednesday, Kang said she deleted the photos because she “didn’t want people to think I was seeing aliens.”
“I really just thought it might be an asteroid,” Kang wrote.
Kang saw the object as she was headed west on Dimond Boulevard, but her photos didn’t do it justice.
“But it was much more awesome to see in person,” she wrote. “It really didn’t look like a plane or a jet.”
3:03 minute video of object falling in Anchorage sky (ShantiUniverse)
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by Tyler Rogoway February 15, 2018 (thedrive.com)
• This article gives a play-by-play of a UFO event that occurred on October 25th, 2017 over Northern California and Oregon, according to the radar images and lengthy voice recordings of FAA officials, Air Force radar operators, and airline pilots as they track a white aircraft at 37,000 ft.- bigger and faster than a Boeing 737. These recordings provide compelling insight how such an event is actually handled in real-time by Air Force and FAA officials. What it does not provide are explanations. Air control officials are completely puzzled as to what this UFO might have been.
• It began at 4:30pm PST when Oakland Center (California) Sector 31 first detected the target on radar traveling at very high speed due north up the eastern border of California in the vicinity of Mt Shasta. When it reaches the Oregon border, the “intruder” drops off radar. Over the next half hour air traffic control tracks the UFO through visual sightings reported by airline crews. Air Force F-15 fighter jets are scrambled out of Portland International Airport in northern Oregon.
• Commercial aircraft Alaska Airlines 525 cannot get a visual. United 612 can see it but cannot make it out. The Southwest 4712 crew has the best view of the large white UFO. It follows the Southwest flight at a visible distance all the way from Mt Shasta to the Portland International Airport. The Southwest pilot remarks that in 30 years of flying, he has never seen anything like it.
• At this point, the commercial aircraft lose sight of the UFO, the F-15’s apparently are not able to intercept, and radar is never able to reacquire the UFO. Seattle Center’s Manager In Charge of Operations is heard talking with Seattle Center and the three commercial airline pilots trying to figure out what just happened. An official with the FAA’s Quality Assurance Group, the division that specifically deals with unique aerial phenomenon, could only say, “Wow. That’s weird.”
Last November, The War Zone posted an exclusive story detailing a bizarre incident involving an unidentified aircraft that transited the skies of the Pacific Northwest in the early evening of October 25th, 2017. What started as a radar target moving at very high speed over Northern California turned into a series of eyewitness accounts made by nearby airline pilots traveling northward over Oregon. Even F-15 fighters were launched to intercept the mysterious intruder that quickly became invisible to radar.
Now, through the Freedom of Information Act, we present what could be one of the most insightful instances of official documentation surrounding such an encounter that had already been confirmed to have occurred by both the FAA and the USAF. These materials include fascinating audio recordings of radio transmissions and phone calls made as the incident was unfolding, as well as pilot interviews, and conversations between FAA officials made in the aftermath of the highly peculiar incident.
Fast forward three months later, and now we have so much more evidence that adds incredible depth and color to our original report and the limited radio recordings we originally had to go off of. Via our Freedom of Information Act Request we received hours of audio, all with unique elements that add to this story. What we have done is packaged that audio, as well as the radar data provided, into four separate videos. We will highlight some of the big takeaways from each video in our piece, but we cannot stress enough how interesting and eye opening this audio is to listen to in full, so we highly recommend you do so by watching each video in its entirety.
The first video includes audio from the initial spotting of the object as it ripped its way across Northern California at high speed, before it took a turn north and merged with nearby air traffic and disappeared from radar. Once again, beyond becoming invisible to radar, this aircraft had no transponder broadcasting nor did it ever communicate verbally with air traffic controllers. The audio in the video goes on to be sync’d in real-time with radar data obtained via our FOIA request.
Oakland Center Sector 31 first detected the target around 4:30pm PST. Below is a chart showing where Oakland Center’s high altitude sectors are situated around Northern California. Sector 31 spans roughly from Sacramento up towards Redding, before its northern edge, which is near the border with Oregon, terminates and Seattle Center’s airspace begins. To the east, the airspace sits along the California-Nevada border. This makes sense as the craft was eventually tracked by airline pilots as it made its way up over Crater Lake and towards the Willamette Valley.
In the audio the Oakland Center controller notes that it is near his boundary, so it seems the aircraft’s first appearance officially occurred near the border of Oakland Center Sector 31 and Seattle Center Sector 13 or 14. The target was moving “very fast at 37,000” feet when it was first detected.
The “intruder” quickly dropped off radar and that’s when the visual sightings made by airline crews began. They continued for roughly half an hour and over hundreds of miles. The exchanges between nearby pilots and air traffic control regarding the unidentified aircraft were constant in the audio, with the same description coming back time and again—that of a white aircraft cruising at around 37,000 feet that is too far away to tell the type or if it has markings of any kind on it.
At roughly 27:30 into the video we get our first indication that the F-15s out of PDX are about to scramble, with the air traffic controller noting this while talking to another FAA controller, during which the controller also reiterates that there has still been no radar contact with the aircraft. The controller also repeatedly asks aircrews nearby to check their Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems for the aircraft, which all come back negative.
The F-15s first appear on radar as they climb out of Portland to the south at time index 33:33 as “Rock” flight—a common call-sign used for the alert F-15s stationed at PDX. Alaska 439 asks for an update on the unidentified aircraft and the controller notes they still have nothing on him, saying colloquially that it must be in a kind of “stealth mode or something.” It’s also interesting that the F-15s first went south when it seems as if the object would have been north of PDX by the time they finally launched.
This second video is just the radar data in its raw form. It starts before the sync’d recording begins above so we thought we would post it in full so our readers can take a closer look if they want.
Next we move into some very interesting recordings of FAA phone calls that occurred as all of this was taking place. We edited out dead space in the audio between phone calls and bleeped the names of those who named themselves. Aside from that, the audio is unedited by us, although we cannot be certain if parts were redacted by the FAA or not. There were a few strange areas where conversations went mute and it’s not clear if this was edited or just an anomaly. The primary person talking in most of these calls is the Operations Manager In Charge for Seattle Center at the time that the incident took place.
The first call is to Oakland Center, and it occurs early on after the initial radar detection and as pilots began spotting the craft visually. He also mentions that “air defense” is looking for the target now too (on radar), so it shows how early the military was involved in the encounter.
You will notice that the term “DEN” is referred to repeatedly in these recordings. That is the Domestic Events Network, a sort of hotline system that is used to bridge the FAA with federal authorities, namely the military. You will also hear the term “WADS” and the nickname/call-sign “Bigfoot.” This refers to the Western Air Defense sector of NORAD that monitors the airspace over a huge swath of territory in the United States and Canada. Based out of McChord AFB in Washington, WADS scrambles the fighters when needed and works to direct them to their targets of interest during domestic air sovereignty missions, among other responsibilities.
When the Manager In Charge is asked if he was asking for military assistance by another FAA controller, the tape goes blank. The same inquiry is heard moments later, and it goes silent again before another call begins. Although it really doesn’t have much impact on the greater mystery, who asked for the F-15s to scramble and when, comes up in the next video in an exchange between the same manager and an FAA official.
In the final set of calls in the video we hear controllers talking about how the Air Force wants to set up an air patrol over Battle Ground, Washington, which is a dozen miles directly north of PDX. We know the F-15s headed south initially, so it isn’t clear if this call came after they initially headed in that direction or before they were even airborne and the plan changed later on for some reason. Once again “Rock” refers to the call-sign of the alert fighters.
Finally, we get to our last and most interesting of our evidence videos. It contains the calls made after the incident occurred. Seattle Center’s Manager In Charge of Operations tries to figure out what happened exactly. In doing so he talks once again with Seattle Center and the trio of airline pilots that spotted the craft visually and has some very interesting conversations with the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization Security office and the agency’s Safety and Quality Assurance Group.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, HEAR FLIGHT CONTROL AUDIO/ FAA PHONE CALLS, AND SEE RADAR VIDEO
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