Unidentified Flying Threats
By Nick Pope
This is the text of an op-ed that Nick Pope was
commissioned to write for The New York Times. It was published on July 29, 2008.
It caused immediate controversy, not least because of its juxtaposition with a
feature entitled "Can Obama Run The Offense?"
On the afternoon of Nov. 7, 2006, pilots and airport employees at O'Hare
International Airport in Chicago saw a disc-like object hovering over the tarmac
for several minutes. Because nothing was tracked on radar, the Federal Aviation
Administration did not investigate. Yet radar is not a reliable detector of all
aircraft.
Stealth planes are designed to be invisible to radar, and many radar systems
filter out signals not matching the normal characteristics of aircraft. Did it
really make sense to entirely ignore the observations of several witnesses?
A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to
disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment's thought. But in the United States,
this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds
of unidentified aircraft - a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or
anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States.
The American government has not investigated U.F.O. sightings since 1969, when
the U.S. Air Force ended Project Blue Book, an effort to scientifically analyze
all sightings to see if any posed a threat to national security. Britain and
France, in contrast, continue to investigate U.F.O. sightings, because of
concerns that some sightings might be attributable to foreign military aircraft
breaching their airspace, or to foreign space-based systems of interest to the
intelligence community.
Most of the incidents investigated in Britain have been easily explained as
misidentifications of stars and planets, aircraft lights, satellites and
meteors, but some cases have raised national security or air safety issues.
On Dec. 26, 1980, for instance, several witnesses at two U.S. Air Force bases in
England reported seeing a U.F.O. land. An examination of the site turned up
indentations in the ground and a level of radiation in the area that was
significantly higher than ordinary.
More witnesses at the same base reported the U.F.O. again on subsequent nights.
The deputy base commander reported that the aircraft aimed light beams into the
most highly sensitive area of the base - a clear security breach.
On March 30 and 31, 1993, there was a wave of U.F.O. sightings over Britain. One
witness described a triangular-shaped craft that flew slowly over an air force
base before accelerating away to the horizon in an instant, many times faster
than a jet aircraft.
The British military reported, "There would seem to be some evidence on this
occasion that an unidentified object (or objects) of unknown origin was
operating over the U.K."
On April 23, 2007, a commercial airline pilot and some of his passengers
reported a huge cigar-shaped U.F.O. - the pilot estimated it to be a mile wide -
near the Channel Islands. At the time, air traffic controllers reported to the
pilot that radar picked up something, but that it was "unknown traffic."
In addition, there have been several incidents of near misses between U.F.O.'s
and known aircraft - enough to prompt the Ministry of Defense and the British
Civil Aviation Authority to advise pilots, if they encounter anything, "not to
maneuver, other than to place the object astern, if possible."
The United States is no less vulnerable than Britain and France to threats to
security and air safety. The U.S. Air Force or the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration should reopen investigations of U.F.O. phenomena. It would
not imply that the country has suddenly started believing in little green men.
It would simply recognize the possibility that radar alone cannot always tell us
what's out there.