by Charles Lear
Pilot UFO sightings have been a constant in the world of UFOlogy ever since the sighting in 1947, that started the public fascination with the subject, by Kenneth Arnold, who was flying in his own plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State. Even though these are often single witness sightings, researchers generally take them seriously, as pilots, especially a commercial pilots, risk their reputations and continued employment by coming forward. But, what about airplane passengers? In the case of passenger sightings, you often have multiple witnesses, or at least one witness that can corroborate the pilot report.
An instance where a passenger witness came forward to back up a pilot report occurred in 1948 in the case of the classic Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter. On July 24, 1948, pilot Clarence Chiles and co-pilot John Whitted, were flying a DC-3 over Alabama. At about 2:45 a.m., Chiles spotted a red glow up ahead and brought Whitted’s attention to what he assumed was an Army jet. It closed in on the DC-3 quickly, shot past the right side of the plane, and then, with a burst of flame coming out of its rear, climbed up into the clouds. The pilots reported that the object was torpedo-shaped, had no wings, was 100 feet long, and 25 to 30 feet in diameter. Passenger Clarence L. McKelvie added to the credibility of the sighting by reporting that he saw a bright light streak by his window at that time. He later appeared in the documentary, “UFOs: It Has Begun,” (A 1976 and 1979 re-release of the 1974 documentary “UFOs: Past, Present, and Future.”) and there he says he spoke with one of the pilots and his description matches theirs.
A case with multiple passenger witnesses occurred over Africa in 1951. At around 7:20 a.m., on February 5, radio officer D. W. Merrifeld spotted a bright, white star-like object hanging over Mount Kilamanjaro and pointed it out to Captain Jack Bicknell. They were flying an East African Airways Lodestar with nine passengers aboard.
After watching for about three minutes, they alerted the passengers. One of the passengers had a pair of high-powered binoculars, which he used to get a more detailed look. When the object was first spotted, the plane was about 85 miles away from the mountain. When they were about 50 miles away, Bicknell took a look through the binoculars himself. His description of the object to a reporter from the Nairobi (Kenya) Sunday Post appears in the February 25, 1951 edition.
According to Bicknell, he saw a metallic, bullet-shaped object over 200 feet long. It was dull silver-colored with dark vertical lines at regular intervals and had a square cut vertical fin on one end. It remained stationary for approximately 17 minutes while the passengers took turns looking at it through the binoculars, and two of the passengers took pictures. It then moved off to the east, ascending as it did so, and “disappeared” at around 40,000 feet.
Another case involving a passenger filming a UFO, this time with a motion picture camera, occurred in 1966. On April 2, 1966, Thomas Oldfield and his wife were flying for the first time, and she was filming the view out their window. She managed to capture a cigar-shaped object with vertical fins top and bottom, fore and aft, keeping pace with the plane just behind it. It is seen for about two seconds and then it turns away from the plane and seems to collapse into itself and disappear.
As striking as the footage is, according to the CBS Report “UFO: Friend Foe or Fantasy” hosted by Walter Cronkite, a few days after the Oldfields captured their footage, a BBC cameraman sat in the same seat and captured something similar. It was determined that the image was caused by a reflection of the plane’s tail section, which was distorted by the convexities of the window and the camera lens.
Recent footage of alleged UFOs filmed by plane passengers is plentiful on the internet, and while there are some intriguing videos, the lack of backstory or follow- up investigation in most instances leaves it up to the viewer to asses their validity. An instance where a video was investigated involved a dramatic incident allegedly captured on January 17, 2021, by a passenger aboard a Singapore Airlines plane as it was landing in Zurich, Switzerland. It was posted on Twitter on January 21, 2021 and later embedded in the news posts of the Independent and the India Times. During the video, the pilot can be heard instructing the passengers to brace themselves. The plane dips to the right and passengers can be heard panicking. Then, a small white object shoots past just under the wing, and an expletive is uttered, seemingly from the person filming.
As convincing as it might seem, this video has been debunked by AFP Fact Check. According to their research, the video was originally posted on YouTube in 2015 titled, “Hard Banking Take Off – Lufthansa A320 departs Zurich.” The 2021 posting is a mirrored version with a Singapore Airlines logo pasted over the Lufthansa logo, different audio, and an added in, formerly non-existent UFO. AFP contacted Singapore Airlines and a spokesperson confirmed that their pilots weren’t the ones making the announcements in the video.
Another case where passengers came forward to back up a pilot report comes from 2007. On April 23, Captain Ray Bowyer was on the way to Alderney, the third largest of the Channel Islands, after taking off from Southampton, England. He was flying a G-XTOR, which carries a maximum of 18 passengers, on a routine 45- minute Aurigny Air Services flight. At around 2:00 p.m., approximately twenty minutes away from Alderney, Bowyer saw a bright yellow light at his 12 o’clock in the direction of Guernsey. He thought it might be an airplane or a reflection from the ground, but it persisted long enough that he concluded the light was being emitted from that position and not reflected.
Bowyer checked with nearby Jersey Air Traffic Control and was told there had just been a similar report from a pilot 25 miles to the south. According to Paul Kelly, the controller on duty at the time, as reported on the news website, The Register, there was no radar return, but if the object was stationary, it would have been screened out.
A passenger behind Bowyer was also seeing the first object and pointed out a second, identical object behind the first. Bowyer described the objects, seen for about fifteen minutes, this way:
Both objects were of a flattened disk shape, with a dark area to [their] right. They were brilliant yellow, with light emanating from within, and I estimated them to be up to possibly a mile across.
On November 12, 2007, Bowyer addressed the U.S. National Press Club where he described the sighting and said that many of his passengers had seen the objects. He told those assembled that “at twelve miles distance, these objects were becoming uncomfortably large and I was glad to descend and land the aircraft.”
The case was investigated and examined in great detail by Jean-Francoise Baure, David Clarke, Paul Fuller, and Martin Shough, who published their findings in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 291–308, 2008. According to the investigators, the passenger behind Bowyer and a couple in the next row were able to see both objects but refused to be identified. A couple seated three rows back, John and Kate Russell were willing to go on record as witnesses but disputed Bowyer’s estimate of size feeling what they’d seen were “nothing like as large.”
So, next time you’re on an airplane and you see a UFO, it might be nice to let your pilots know. You might be giving them some helpful support.