The Chicago O’Hare International Airport UFO Sighting
YouTubeGrainy photos captured of the alleged UFO above Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
In November 2006, pilots, mechanics, and other employees at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois, witnessed a “flying saucer-like object” hovering over Concourse C of the United Airlines terminal.
A United ramp worker first spotted it around 4:30 p.m., but others quickly spied the craft as well. Witnesses described the object as dark gray and between six and 24 feet in diameter. Accounts varied as to whether it was spinning like a Frisbee or entirely still, but all agreed it was utterly silent.
Witnesses said the object hovered just below the clouds and then shot off into the sky, leaving behind a circular hole.
The Chicago Tribune reported on the sighting a few weeks later, interviewing staff at the airport about the event. One employee was so emotionally shaken by the sighting that they “experienced some religious issues.”
Workers also expressed frustration that government officials would not conduct a more thorough investigation into the incident. The Federal Aviation Administration dismissed the sighting as a “weather phenomenon,” but those who were there that day stood by what they saw.
“I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don’t understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport,” said one United mechanic. “But I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an [Earth] aircraft.”
Dr. Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium, said the incident could have been a “hole-punch cloud.”
“It’s something that occurs when a propeller or jet airplane passes through when you have uniform cloud cover and the temperature is right near the freezing point,” he told the Tribune. “They make liquid water droplets freeze and a hazy disc of ice crystals descends from a hole, and it looks like a perfect hole punched in the cloud.”
Still, others felt that the government should have taken the event more seriously and conducted an investigation.
Mark Rodeghier, scientific director at the Center for UFO Studies, said, “It’s an unknown object over O’Hare, and it’s seen by official personnel, and does United or the FAA take it seriously? Of course not, they have zero interest because UFOs can’t exist. But how can you not worry about something hovering over an airport after 9/11? It doesn’t make sense.”
The incident remains unresolved.
The Lake Michigan UFO Incident That Was Witnessed By Hundreds Of People
Bettmann/Getty ImagesMichigan has long been a hotbed for UFO sightings. A similar incident in 1966 had residents searching the skies for extraterrestrial activity.
On March 8, 1994, nearly 300 people in Michigan called 911 to report eerie lights hovering in the sky. The bright, multi-colored orbs appeared over the water and were visible as far south as the Indiana state line as they danced erratically in the night sky.
The National Weather Service (NWS) also confirmed the presence of large, unknown objects over Lake Michigan that were clearly not planes. But as quickly as the lights appeared, they vanished. To this day, no one has been able to explain the 1994 Lake Michigan UFO incident.
Sightings were reported from Ludington, Michigan, down to the Indiana state line, 150 miles away. Cindy Pravda of Grand Haven was on the phone when she saw the lights and told her friend, “I got UFOs in the backyard.”
She reported watching the lights for roughly half an hour as they danced about. Similar accounts came in from residents of Holland. Joey Graves told the Detroit Free Press that he saw “six lights out the window above the barn across the street… They were red and white and moving.”
Holland police officer Jeff Velthouse and NWS meteorologist Jack Bushong corroborated these accounts during a phone conversation that has since been made public. On the call, Bushong confirmed that he saw “three and sometimes four blips” on the radar — “and they weren’t planes.”
The lights moved erratically at speeds not possible for any known aircraft. Bushong said, “They were from five to 12,000 feet [in the air] at times, moving all over the place. Three were moving toward Chicago. I never saw anything like it before, not even when I’m doing severe weather.”
The objects appeared to come together and separate repeatedly in a seemingly endless cycle of “hovering, then jumping” and moving “about 20 miles in each jump.”
Bushong said that at their highest, the objects reached 60,000 feet and continued to move in strange patterns until they reached the south end of Lake Michigan — and then, they were gone.
