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.
