FAA Releases Recordings of Oregon UFO Event That Scrambled F-15s
On October 25, 2017, the FAA picked up an unidentified target moving rapidly across radar from northern California toward Portland, Ore. Several commercial pilots were able to visually confirm the object from their aircraft, stating they could not make out any identifying markings, but that the craft appeared to be entirely white and moving at high speed.
Now, the FAA has disclosed documentation and audio files between the pilots and air traffic controllers, giving more detail about the UFO that remains shrouded in mystery still to this day.
Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the astute investigative work of The Drive‘s aviation branch The War Zone, we have more insight into the events that transpired that day, the reactions that led to the contact of NORAD, and the scrambling of several Air Force F-15 fighter jets to intercept the unidentified craft.
Before losing the UFO on radar after initial detection, traffic controllers placed the object at a cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, quickly confirmed by pilots at similar altitudes who witnessed the craft anywhere between five and 15 miles off their wings. Over the course of another half hour and several hundred miles, other pilots confirmed sightings of the craft, eventually leading to the Air Force’s response.
The recordings obtained by The War Zone‘s FOIA request contain minutes of dead audio, which Tyler Rogoway, the investigative journalist covering the story, says he is unsure whether these can be attributed to recording anomalies or whether the tapes were edited.
But what one does manage to distinguish in the recordings is that despite numerous eyewitnesses accounts, no pilot was able to make out what type of craft they saw.
“If it was like a Lear type airframe I probably would not have seen it this clear. This was a white airplane and it was big,” said a Southwest Airlines pilot who witnessed it. “And it was moving at a clip too, because we were keeping pace with it, it was probably moving a little faster than we were, but we weren’t converging with them, but it was a larger aircraft.”
The Drive also published recordings that occurred after the event, investigating its handling by various flight controllers, pilots, and FAA officials. Within them, one of the takeaways seemed to be a disagreement or dissatisfaction with the way the F-15 launch orders occurred.
During one of the closing remarks on tape, a female administrator reassures a colleague who felt he was being blamed by saying, “[t]his is a weird enough thing that there’s not a set procedure, I think you guys did the right thing in doing all the notifications the way you did…”
The FAA controller then asks if he should file the incident as an “aircraft” operating at altitude speed, or whether it would be more appropriate to file it as “something else.” His colleague confirms that “aircraft” is probably appropriate, but that it’s not common they hear about an “unknown guy up at that altitude.”
Around this time last year, two commercial airline pilots reported a similar occurrence over the Arizona desert, which the FAA again could not explain, though in this case the Air Force refrained from scrambling fighter jets.
Both situations seem to add to the notion that, though these events may be rare, there continue to be unexplained instances of unidentified aerial phenomena picked up by pilots and air traffic controllers alike. These events seem to potentially corroborate the bizarre tic-tac UFO encounters described by fighter pilots in the “GO-FAST” and “GIMBAL” videos disclosed by former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, who headed a clandestine Pentagon program to study such occurrences.
And according to Elizondo, there is still much more to come…
For more on the imminent exposure of UFO technology watch Disclosure with Dr. Steven Greer:
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After Decades of Dismissal, NASA Finally Studying UFOs
On the heels of the first public UFO hearing on Capitol Hill in more than 50 years, NASA has just announced it will form its own independent team to study UFOs, or UAPs as the government now calls them.
Writing in a release, NASA says it will study, “[O]bservations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena – from a scientific perspective”
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’S associate administrator for science added, “We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s the very definition of what science is. That’s what we do.”
