The Mystery:
Was a UFO once spotted at O’Hare Airport?
Was a UFO once spotted at O’Hare Airport? Geoffrey Baer heads out to the tarmac to investigate, with the help of the reporter who broke the story and Tom Skilling.
Aviation workers had their very own close encounter on an overcast day on November 7, 2006. More than a dozen workers, including air traffic controllers, pilots, mechanics, and baggage personnel, saw a peculiar, saucer-like object above Concourse C in the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare International Airport. Jon Hilkevitch, a Chicago Tribune transportation reporter, investigated the story and found that the employees all recounted the same thing. “They all said it was a saucer-shaped, gray disc hovering maybe 1,400 feet above Gate C17 in the United terminal,” Hilkevitch told Geoffrey Baer. “Then, with what they described as just this immense energy, this alleged object just broke through the clouds.” The object, which according to witnesses was somewhere between 6 and 24 feet in diameter, made no noise. When it shot upward, it left a noticeable hole in the thick layer of clouds that blanketed the sky that day. According to Hilkevitch, both United Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration said there were no reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (the more current term for UFOs) at O’Hare that day. The FAA speculated it might have been a “hole punch cloud,” also called a fallstreak hole, which is a strange formation created when something like an aircraft passes through the supercooled water droplets in the cloud. The droplets are instantly turned into ice crystals, which precipitate out, leaving a hole in the cloud. But when Hilkevitch filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the air traffic control recordings, the tapes revealed that employees did in fact report and discuss “a disc out there flying around.” Still, neither United nor the FAA conducted an investigation.
