While written off as sheer lunacy or a tired old joke, (by those who didn’t witness it) a strange saucer-like object hovered over O’Hare International Airport for several minutes on the afternoon of November 7, 2006. This incident occurred during daylight hours at about 4:30 p.m. just before sunset, in full view of at least a dozen United Airlines employees, some of them pilots. Each witness (independently) described the hovering object as dark gray and very well defined against a low cloud cover. Some said it appeared to be spinning while others said it didn’t appear to be rotating. All agreed however, that it did not make any sound and that it did not display any lights.
The object was estimated to be about 24 feet in diameter and hovering in a fixed position in the sky at about 1,500 feet, directly over Concourse C gate C17. According to witnesses, after several minutes the object simply shot straight up into the sky with such velocity that it punched an eerie hole in the clouds that remained open for a minute or two.
While many of the witnesses were a bit shaken by the experience, they were also perplexed as to why the government, the airline, or anyone else in power at the “Worlds Busiest Airport” is unwilling to investigate the incident. (Logically thinking, an object hovering in restricted airspace presents a safety issue.) Additionally, these otherwise credible witnesses were subjected to ridicule with the suggestions that it was just a weather balloon, another aircraft, trick of light, or simply a weather phenomenon.
Still the witnesses, including several pilots, reaffirmed that they were certain that based on the objects flight characteristics and appearance that it was not an airplane, helicopter, weather balloon, or any other craft known to man.
One airline employee who was sitting in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 said, “I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an aircraft.” A United manager said he ran out of his office in Concourse B after hearing the report on an internal airline radio frequency. “I stood outside in the gate area not knowing what to think, just trying to figure out what it was.”
Initially, the airline and FAA officials said that they had no report or record of any alleged UFO incident on Nov. 7, the FAA, however, quickly back tracked when the Chicago Tribune filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The inquiry then revealed that a call had been made by a United Airlines supervisor to an FAA manager, asking if controllers had spotted the mysterious elliptical object. The FAA maintained that none of its controllers saw anything and that a ‘preliminary review’ of radar logs shows nothing out of the ordinary.
The FAA is not conducting further investigation. Airline officials advised their employees to refrain from speaking about what they saw.
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