FROM THE ARCHIVES
Pilot UFO Sighting Over Tranquillity, California
Brian Vike's Note: There are thousands of aircraft flights each and
everyday, if carrying passengers, cargo or military flights of some
type. With so many flights taking place each and everyday we are lucky
if we hear a small fraction of unidentified UFO reports from pilots.
Sightings of unknown objects are being witnessed each and everyday
by ground observers, but yet we don't receive all that many pilot
reports. I would like to request that if any pilots who have been
witness to something they weren't able to explain while flying an
aircraft, would you please be so kind as to relate the information,
or your sighting report to me.
Please keep in mind that any and all personal information will be
respected and will remain private. I will not post names, emails or
anything else that you would consider personal. So if a pilot has
been witness to a UFO sighting, please do write to me, Brian Vike
at sighting@telus.net Thank you, Brian.
In the summer of 1978, I was flying for a crop dusting operation near
Tranquillity, California. At that time I had been a duster pilot for
over sixteen years, and flying nights since 1965. In central California
during the summer months, certain fields are treated after dark, mainly
to protect workers and honeybees from exposure to AG chemicals.
On the early morning of 28 July, just before three AM, I was sitting
in the cockpit of my airplane, a Rockwell Thrush Commander. The aircraft
was parked, with its engine shut down and all interior and exterior
lights off, at the south end of a one-half mile dirt runway, located
about five miles southwest of Mendota, a small town in the San Joaquin
Valley about thirty miles west of Fresno. The Thrush was lined up
with the runway, facing due north.
I had just finished spraying a quarter-section cotton field, and was
getting ready to spray another. My two girl flaggers were already
in place on the field I was about to treat, and my loader was busy
mixing a batch of pesticide to be applied on it.
It was a calm, cloudless night, typical of midsummer in the San Joaquin
Valley. The air temperature at ground level was around seventy degrees,
and the visibility was good. Although I was somewhat tired, I was
not at all sleepy. I had drunk several cups of coffee from my thermos
during the previous six hours, and I have always been sensitive to
caffeine as a stimulant.
As I sat in the cockpit, waiting for the first load to be pumped into
the hopper tank, I glanced over to my right at the crescent moon rising
in the east, and then turned back to again face north. At this time,
I noticed a dim, diffused orange glow, low in the sky to the northwest,
about forty-five degrees to the left of the aircraft nose.
My first thought was that a house, barn, or other nearby ranch building
had caught fire, but I discarded that possibility almost immediately.
I knew the area quite well (an absolute necessity for safe night AG
flying) and the glow was in the direction of the field that I was
about to spray. I had flown this same field several times before,
and knew there were no buildings in the immediate vicinity. I decided
that if it was a fire, it had to be much farther away.
This possibility was discarded a few seconds later, when the orange
glow began to slowly rise. When it was about thirty degrees above
the horizon, it started moving toward the east. At first this movement
was quite slow, but within a few seconds, it speeded up. The glow
then began to take on an elongated form, markedly longer in the vertical
plane than in the horizontal. It reminded me of a segment of searchlight
beam, except that the entire light column moved laterally, while oriented
nearly straight up and down, rather than in a radius around a fixed
light source. The length of the column seemed to be about ten to twenty
degrees of vertical sky coverage.
As the light column passed through due north, straight ahead over
the airplane nose, it continued accelerating and becoming brighter.
I then realized that I was viewing something that was totally different
from my many other nighttime sightings of missile launches, satellites,
planets, and other aircraft.
I yelled for my loader to look, but the noise of the mix rig engine
drowned out my voice, and because his attention was focused on opening
cans of pesticide on the opposite side of the mix tank, he didn't
see my frantic signals. I climbed out of the cockpit onto the left
wing, planning to jump down and run around the trailer to alert him.
Then I had the thought that if I did, I might miss a vital part of
the display, so I remained standing on the wing.
After passing abeam of the runway end, the object continued accelerating
for a short time, perhaps five to ten seconds. It then climbed slightly,
and at the same time abruptly slowed. During this phase the glow was
becoming brighter, while the vertical beam was shortening, forming
itself into a more compact mass of light.
At about forty-five degrees off to my right, the object, now considerably
brighter, and resembling a glowing ball, came to a stop for several
seconds. It then reversed course, and once again began moving, this
time back to the west.
Several seconds after starting its westward movement, and without
slowing, the ball of light instantly assumed the shape of a well-defined,
flattened sphere with pointed ends, which emitted a steady orange
glow. At this time it began a shallow descent, gathering speed and
leveling out around twenty degrees above the horizon. It flew with
its pointed ends parallel to the ground. From my position, the size
of the object looked to be about that of a large pea or small marble
when held at arms length.
When the glowing, flattened sphere was directly over the Thrush's
nose, it abruptly halted, going from a high rate of speed to a dead
stop almost instantaneously. It remained stationary for no more than
a few seconds - five at the most. Although this would have been the
best opportunity to determine the object's true size, I was unable
to make an estimate, since its distance from me was unknown. On the
report which I later submitted, I placed it at one to three miles
away, but that distance is highly speculative.
After its momentary halt, the object again accelerated. Within a few
seconds it had resumed its previous high speed, but appeared to have
turned ninety degrees, and was now climbing directly away from me
at a very steep angle. Its heading was due north, and as it rose,
it attained what looked to be the highest speed reached during the
entire time it had been in view.
Because of the unknown size and distance of the object, and the fact
that it was climbing at an angle directly away from me, this speed
was impossible to estimate accurately. Judging from the rate at which
it seemed to grow smaller though, it looked to be travelling about
three to five times faster than a jet airliner at an altitude of around
thirty thousand feet, as seen from the ground.
During this climb, the object also reached its maximum brightness,
only very slightly less than that of the crescent moon. As it continued
to rise, it began to dim. It finally vanished from my sight high above
the horizon (about sixty to seventy degrees), over the glow of the
lights of Firebaugh, another small town about 12 miles due north of
my position.
The total time which the object remained in view, from my first sighting
of the diffused mass of light until the final disappearance of the
flattened sphere, seemed to be about 40-50 seconds, but an accurate
estimate is quite difficult. It could have been somewhat shorter,
but almost certainly wasn't longer.
Throughout the episode, I remained relatively calm, but was filled
with awe when I realized that I had just witnessed a phenomenon about
which I had previously only read, and, up to that time, was not at
all certain actually existed.
As soon as the object disappeared, I jumped off the wing and asked
my loader if he had seen anything. He had not, and when I told him
what I had witnessed, he was disappointed, to say the least. He finished
mixing the batch of pesticide, and I sprayed four loads on the field.
I then sprayed another quarter-section located northeast of the strip
without further incident.
After returning to Tranquillity, I sought out my two flaggers, and
asked them if they had seen anything unusual the previous night. They
were both very evasive and reluctant to answer my questions, and kept
trying to change the subject. I finally got them to admit that they
had also seen the object. Their view of it had been better than my
own, since they described it as somewhat larger and brighter than
it had appeared from my location. From this, I estimated that they
were closer to it than I had been, although it had still remained
to the north of them.
With further questioning, the fact emerged that they had also seen
the same object on the previous two nights, while flagging for another
pilot. The girls described it very aptly as "a little, flat,
flying football." They had told no one else of these previous
sightings, and remained very reluctant to discuss them with me. I
later talked with the other pilot, who stated that he had seen nothing
out of the ordinary on either night.
Several nights later, at around midnight, I was in the air, returning
to Tranquillity from the western edge of the valley. I was heading
almost due east, flying at about five hundred feet. Suddenly, to the
south, just off my right wing, at what seemed to be considerable distance
away, I again sighted a column of diffused light. This time, the glow
was more yellowish than orange. It appeared to move very slowly to
the west, and I waited for a few seconds to see if another bright,
oval shape would materialize from it. This did not occur. I then turned
the airplane toward the light column, and flashed my two field lights
of six hundred watts each. It immediately disappeared, and I saw no
further evidence of the phenomenon.
A few days afterward, I wrote to the National Investigative Committee
on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), and reported the first sighting. Since
the second light column had seemed rather far away, and was visible
for only a short time, I didn't mention it. I later made out a NICAP
report form and returned it. There was no reply from the organization,
and I later learned that NICAP became non-operational the next year.
That sighting of 28 July made a very deep and lasting impression.
I can still see the glowing orange, flattened sphere as vividly in
my mind as it appeared on that early morning many years ago. I have
no doubt that the device (or whatever it was) was real - there is
absolutely no way that it could have been a product of my imagination.
Twelve years previously, I had flown in the Sudan with some AG pilots
who mentioned seeing somewhat similar objects in Arkansas and Florida.
Around that same time, many persons in the Mendota-Tranquillity area
claimed to have seen, over a period of several nights, a gigantic,
black object, with strange, multi-colored flashing lights. It moved
slowly, making no sound, and was so huge that it obscured a significant
portion of the night sky. (This fits the "mother ship" description
of which I later read in various UFO accounts.) I never saw this vehicle,
so I can't verify its existence, but it was the talk of all of the
little towns on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley for many weeks
afterward.
Over the years, I have seen two other unusual objects during night
AG flying operations in the same general area. I once observed a bright
blue light descend slowly to the ground from a high altitude, and
watched, for a minute or so, a group of several bright white lights
in a perfect "L" formation. They were flying very high and
very fast, much faster than any known conventional aircraft. Neither
of these incidents had the visual and psychological impact of the
1978 sighting however.
As I write this, I have spent over 35 years in agricultural aviation,
and accumulated more than eleven thousand hours of AG flying time,
several thousand of these at night. During the many thousands of hours
I have spent outdoors after dark, I have seen hundreds of satellites,
about thirty missile launches from Vandenberg AFB, all of the visible
planets under widely varying sky conditions, and many thousands of
military and civilian aircraft in all modes of flight. What I saw
on that early July morning was totally unlike anything else I have
ever observed in the night sky.
Since then, I have read hundreds of books dealing with all aspects
of UFOs. Many of them contain accounts that are inconsistent and contradictory,
while others are obviously outright fantasy. A few, however, seem
to be authentic. Unlike most other UFO researchers, my search for
the truth behind the many thousands of documented appearances of these
phenomena is driven by the certain knowledge that they in fact exist.
To date, despite many years of research, I am still unable to form
a definite opinion as to the substance and meaning of these mysterious
and logic-defying objects. I hope, however, to somehow correlate the
mass of at-times conflicting information, and determine their true
origin and purpose, before I make that last flight West.
END
After the above article was first published, (name removed by Brian
Vike) received a letter from a 25,000 hour commercial pilot who had
sighted what was essentially the same phenomenon on a night in January
of 1978, six months before my own experience.
He was on a charter flight with several passengers aboard and cruising
at 8500 feet when, at about 9 PM, he looked to the west of his course
and saw a similar cycle of light begin. He started to turn toward
it to get a better view, but his passengers had no desire whatever
to get any closer…they became quite agitated and “strongly
objected,” so he reluctantly turned away from the spectacle
so as to calm them down. By the time he got back on his original heading,
the light show was over. He also mentioned that he had seen a flight
of “silvery disks” somewhere over north central Washington
sometime in the 1950’s.
(Name removed by Brian Vike) also got a letter from a distinguished
professor at a northern California university, who dismissed my sighting
as “only the aurora borealis, or northern lights.” I have
seen the northern lights a number of times. Once, when they were exceptionally
strong, they even appeared on the horizon in southern California.
Of course, they bear no resemblance whatever to what I saw in the
sky that morning, and anyone reading the article who has also seen
the northern lights should have been able to comprehend that there
was a vast difference between them. Some professor! Some aurora borealis!
Since the article first appeared, I have had one more sighting of
something that remains unexplained in my mind. My wife also saw it,
and is likewise at a loss to explain it.
On an early summer evening, we were lying on our backs on a lawn,
watching the passage of the linked space shuttle/space station as
they passed overhead. It was a very bright object, and had appeared
exactly at the time forecast.
About 15 seconds after it had passed directly above us, we saw a bright
white, flashing light on approximately the same track as the linked
vehicles, but some distance behind them. It was nearly directly overhead
also. The light didn’t move in the same direction however. Instead,
it flashed, disappeared, and then flashed again in another location
some distance away from its original position. This cycle repeated
itself about five or six times, with the light appearing at a different
part of the sky each time, then the object disappeared.
I mailed an account of this sighting to the National Aviation Reporting
Center on Anomalous Phenomena, an organization which gathers reports
of unexplained aerial object sighting from all over the world. They
mostly come from airline pilots. The reply stated that this same “flashing,
disappearing/reappearing light” was one of the most common objects
reported by a large number of pilots, none of whom were able to explain
it. Neither was NARCAP.
Although I have been searching for 40 years, I myself am no wiser
as to the origin or purpose of these various unidentified flying objects
which are being reported with increasing frequency all over the world.
However, since there is nothing in the universe that is “supernatural,”
I am convinced that they are a part of some larger phenomena yet to
be discovered.
An Unexplained Sighting Over Northern Alabama
(Published in September 1995)
Whenever I travel by airline, I always try to get a window seat, because
I like to look out on the ever-changing clouds and sky and watch the
ground passing below. Thus, on 21 April 1994, at approximately 1310
EDT, I was in the rearmost right window seat of a Delta Lockheed L-1011.
The aircraft was nearly full of passengers, heading west/northwest
on a flight from Atlanta to Salt Lake City.
We were in a climb to cruising altitude, passing through approximately
18/20,000 feet, when I suddenly saw, almost directly below, two seemingly
circular bright, glowing white objects, with no visible wings or tail
surfaces, moving toward the northeast at a very high speed. I spotted
them just after they had passed under the airplane.
Because I have no knowledge of their size, or their distance from
the aircraft, it's hard to say how far below they actually were, or
at what speed they were traveling. I can tell you that they were moving
very fast though...much faster than the fastest military fighter aircraft
would be capable of flying, especially at that relatively low altitude.
Besides that, with only a few exceptions for test and tactical ranges
in several of the western states, supersonic flight is forbidden over
the continental US, and these machines were traveling at a speed which
was obviously much higher than the speed of sound would have been
at that altitude. And of course all military aircraft of all the services
are now coated with either radar-absorptive or camouflage paint, and
thus are either a uniform dull grey or a dull gray/green mottled color
combination.
Although these objects were flying together, they were not in a close
formation, such as tactical military aircraft would normally be, but
approximately 3-5 degrees apart. As they moved away below, they seemed
to drift a little farther away from each other.
I watched them disappear in the distance, and then looked forward
along the row of seats to see if anyone ahead of me was pointing,
gesturing, or giving some indication that they had also seen the objects.
No one was...all of the other passengers had the window shades down
and were watching some dumb Whoopee Goldberg movie. Evidently I was
the only one looking out the window.
While this didn't have the same impact as my previous sighting of
July 1978, it was still an exciting experience. I only wish I had
seen an indication that someone else on that airplane had sighted
the machines...or whatever they were.
Credit: From The Brian Vike Archives & Sightings.com
