UFO sightings increase 67 percent in 3 years

The Mutual UFO Network — the largest privately funded UFO research organization in the world — tells The Huffington Post that more people than ever are reporting unidentified flying objects, mostly in the United States and Canada. “Over the past year, we’ve been averaging 500 sighting reports a month, compared to about 300 three years ago [67 percent],” MUFON international director Clifford Clift said.

It’s generally accepted that 95 percent of all sightings are easily dismissed. Some turn out to be conventional aircraft, others are satellites or weather balloons — and then there are the hoaxers with Photoshopped concoctions. However, the remaining 5 percent of all UFO reports aren’t as easily explained. And many of them are reported by commercial and military pilots.

Pilots have reported different types of brushes with unexplained objects, according to Haines’ years of discussions with them.

“One is an encounter where the airplane is flying along, minding its own business, usually on autopilot, when the phenomenon will come alongside, approach the airplane, pace it, sometimes do maneuvers around it and then fly away,” Haines said.

“That’s very important because it implies an intelligence behind the phenomena that is selecting the airplane as a focus of attention or interest,” he added.

And that seems to be what happened during a highly publicized 1986 case where a Japan Airlines 747 crew was flying over Alaska when they encountered and reported two UFOs pacing their airplane to Anchorage air traffic controllers. Then the pilot reported the appearance of a third, huge circular craft.

“When the controller checked with military people, they said they did have a target [on radar] — not just one target, but a double primary target,” said John Callahan, former head of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Accidents, Evaluations and Investigations Division in the 1980s.

“When the pilot first reported the UFO, he said it was a huge ball of light and about four times bigger than the 747 he was flying,” Callahan told The Huffington Post.

The more than 30-minute close encounter ended when the UFO vanished. But the most telling part of this case is the aftermath when Callahan was contacted by the CIA.

“I get a call from this guy in the CIA who tells me he wants to talk to me about the UFO. I said, ‘What UFO?’ He said, ‘The one that was in Alaska.’”

The next day, Callahan found himself at a meeting with individuals from Pres. Ronald Reagan’s scientific staff, the CIA and FBI, where he was told to hand all the materials about the case over to them.

“After I showed them the materials three times, one of the scientists stood up asking questions about the radar. Finally, another man stepped forward and said, ‘OK,’ and he pointed to the screen and said, ‘This event never happened. We were never here. We’re confiscating all this data and you’re all sworn to secrecy.’

“I asked him what he thought it [the object] was, and he said, ‘It’s a UFO. Look at them [pointing to the scientists], they’re drooling and can’t wait to get into this data. This is the first time they ever had more than a minute of radar data on a UFO before.’”

Callahan says he then urged the CIA agent to let him contact the media about the UFO event. “‘Oh, you can’t do that!’ he said. I asked why not? He said, ‘It would frighten the American public — they can’t know about this.’ So they picked up all the stuff and left,” Callahan recalled.

Read more HERE.

The picture comes from Unconventional Flying Objects, a scientific analysis, a book by late Paul R. Hill, a well respected scientist who made a significant contribution to American space program – mainly as an aeronautics expert – from the early beginnings when NASA was still called NACA, until he retired from NASA in 1970.