Big City Sightings: Chicago
Mysterious saucer-shaped object hovers over O’Hare
Pawel Gaul
By: Patrick J. Kiger
Published June 8, 2012
At 4:30 on the afternoon of November 7, 2006,
approximately a dozen United Airlines employees watched as a saucer-shaped
object hovered low over a gate at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport for
several minutes and then suddenly disappeared into the clouds, according to a
Chicago Tribune article and eyewitness reports filed with the National UFO
Reporting Center.
A United supervisor was concerned to report the
sighting to the O’Hare control tower, but Federal Aviation Administration
official later told the Tribune that radar operators were unable to pick up the
UFO on their equipment. The FAA opted not to further investigate,
ascribing the sighting to a “weather phenomenon,” spokesperson Elizabeth Isham
Cory told the Tribune.
But the witnesses were not so easily convinced that
the sighting was some sort of atmospheric mirage.
"I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don't
understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport," one witness
told the Tribune. "But I know that what I saw, and what a lot of other
people saw…. and it definitely was not an aircraft” of terrestrial origin.
The details of the incident can be pieced together
from both the Tribune article and two separate reports filed with the National
UFO Reporting Center, a group that gathers information on such sightings
nationwide.
At around the same time, according to one of the
reports in the NUFORC datebase, a United employee who was working at the gate
looked up and was startled to see the saucer hovering directly overhead at
approximately 500 to 1,000 feet in altitude. He described it as looking like a
metallic Frisbee, and said that the object rotated silently and had no lights.
The employee informed pilots at the gate, who opened
their windows and observed the object as well. Then he called the airline’s
operations center at the airport. A United manager who was in his office
quickly ran out to see.
The manager told NUFORC that he saw “a relatively
small object” hovering in place over C17, at an estimated altitude of 1,000
feet. “After about a minute, I saw the aircraft zip to the east and
disappeared,” the manager recalled. The manager then went out to the tarmac and
interviewed the employee who originally had reported the object, and also
talked to other witnesses as well.
At about the same time, a United mechanic told NUFORC
and the Tribune that he was in in the cockpit of a Boeing 777, which he was
taxiing back to a maintenance hangar, when he heard radio chatter about the
sighting, and then looked out the aircraft window to see the object.
In the NUFORC report, he described it as “a dark gray
hazy round object” and observed that “it was holding very steady and appeared
to be trying to stay close to the cloud cover.”
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