5 UFO Sightings That Even Non-Crazy People Find Creepy

5 The Chiles-Whitted UFO Encounter

It's not all that uncommon for airline pilots to spot UFOs. After all, some guy who flies with Southwestern isn't immune to mistaking a meteor for an alien craft if he's never seen a meteor before. But then you have a case like the Chiles-Witted encounter.

Named after commercial airline pilots and World War II veterans Clarence Chiles and Charles Whitted, this sighting occurred in the wee hours of July 24, 1948, when both Chiles and co-pilot Whitted reported having to evade, what could only be described as a giant, flying ... dildo.

The Unsettling Evidence:

First off all, the below facts are not from the pages of Holy Shit UFOs Are Real Weekly or any other group of alien enthusiasts. This is from the Air Force's own investigation into the sighting.

So right off the bat we have the fact that there were two experienced pilots both reporting the same thing: that a weird-ass craft was flying alongside them, very closely. It wasn't some vague flashing light that zipped past. Both men claimed they got a good, long (10 to 15 seconds) look at it. If you think it's because both men had been dropping the same acid minutes earlier, know that one of the passengers in the plane (one of the few who were awake at the time) also saw it. Everyone involved described it as a rocket like ship, conical in shape with two decks lined with windows, which produced an almost blinding light from beneath the ship.

The pilots got on the radio and, trying not to sound crazy, asked if there were any experimental craft in the area (there weren't, or at least none that flight control knew about).

OK, so maybe everybody on the plane got together and came up with a hoax so they'd get their name in the paper later. Well, when Air Force investigators started poking around, they found yet another witness on the ground (a guy named Walter Massey, who worked as a member of the ground crew at a nearby Air Force base) who claimed to have seen the same object, reporting it an hour before Chiles and Whitted.

Then, strangest of all, they found out that the same object (right down to the two rows of windows) was spotted in the Netherlands. Well, they probably just heard about the Chiles-Whitted sighting and wanted to jump on the bandwagon, right? Only if they had a time machine: it was reported a month earlier. What the hell?

The Official Explanation:

First the military dismissed the Chiles-Whitted encounter as a weather balloon, but then they retracted that explanation and floated the idea that it was a meteor. The pilots flatly rejected this theory, both having seen meteors before and knowing that they tended to not have windows.

After investigating it, the Air Force famously concluded that it was in fact an alien spacecraft. After investigators handed in that report, superiors handed it right back with a proverbial "BULLSHIT" stamped on it in red. They pointed out that just because we don't know what the object was, doesn't mean it's little green men.

That seems reasonable. But still ... what the hell was it? To this day, we have no idea.

4 The Green Fireball Sightings

The Green Fireball Sightings refer to a series of, you guessed it, green fireballs which were witnessed in the skies above New Mexico between December 1948 and April 1955. They were seen by, well, just about everybody.

Hundreds of military scientists, astronomers and enlisted personnel, along with members of the general public, reported looking on as the giant parade of WTF was unraveling in the sky above them.

Now, as a rational person looking at the above picture, you immediately think "meteor." Or maybe a comet. It's streaking across the sky, it's on fire, that's the sort of thing we expect from time to time, right? That's what the government thought, too, so they brought in a meteor expert named Dr. Lincoln LaPaz.

The Unsettling Evidence:

LaPaz spent years on the subject and decided that the rate in which the fireballs were being sighted, combined with the slow speeds and lack of rock bits trailing the objects, meant they weren't behaving in a matter fitting of meteors... or that of any natural phenomena.

The Air Force's investigation into the fireballs was hilariously named Project Twinkle, but the Air Force didn't find anything funny about the situation: A lot of these sightings were over the Los Alamos National Laboratory, aka The Place Where We Were Working On Giant City-Vaporizing Bombs (many of the sightings were from staff working there). The government decided whether it was aliens or the Russians or angels getting cast out of Heaven, they wanted to get to the bottom of that shit.

After a couple of years of looking into it, however, they knew nothing more than when they started: There were balls, they were green, and on fire.

The Official Explanation:

The Air Force shut down the investigation and finally wrote off the phenomena as sunspots or some new kind of meteor or something. LaPaz (their meteor expert) insisted that none of that made sense, and would continue to do so for years. The balls were spotted over and over again even after the investigation shut down, and each time someone would go interview poor Dr. LaPaz who would repeat his long list of reasons why they're not meteors.

LaPaz thought they were some kind of radical new Soviet aircraft, or something else that didn't just occur in nature. Another theory turned up later that maybe it was some weird effect caused by nuclear fallout (which would make sense considering where they were being spotted) but "glowing green balls of fallout" isn't a known phenomenon, either.

In short, nobody knows.

3 The Gorman Dogfight

On October 1, 1948, in the skies over Fargo, North Dakota, World War II veteran and resident badass George F. Gorman claimed he wound up in a game of chicken with a small, blinking orb of light. Or as he put it: "A man-made craft that, while governed by the laws of inertia, was still able to not only out maneuver his own aircraft, but climb at a much higher rate and remain active at a much higher altitude."

The Unsettling Evidence:

As Air Force records show, along with Gorman's testimony there were two other witnesses who were working in the Air Plane Control Tower (they saw the object, but nothing showed on their radar), and the pilot and passenger of yet another plane who happened to be in the area.

Gorman claimed he chased the object all around the sky, saying at one point it flew right for him, zipping overhead at the last minute. Later he said it turned and flew toward him again, before rapidly breaking off and changing direction. He briefly lost sight of the object, then found it had climbed much higher in the sky.

When he landed, somebody ran a Geiger counter over his plane and found slightly elevated levels of radiation, at which point everyone got really nervous (though investigators would later conclude that may be normal for planes just returning from flight, since you're less shielded from natural radiation the higher in the atmosphere you go).

The Official Explanation:

The short answer is weather balloon (seriously, when you look into it you find weather balloons seem to single-handedly fuel the UFO industry). The long answer is that the Air Force decided that Gorman, a highly regarded fighter pilot and World War II veteran, had gotten really, really confused.

Their theory was that he got disoriented while flying, and the erratic movements he perceived the glowing UFO to be making were actually a result of him flying erratically himself, causing the stationary weather balloon to appear to zip back and forth in his windshield. When he lost sight of the UFO and picked it up later, the theory went that he was actually chasing the planet Jupiter. We're assuming he didn't catch it.

In other words, they're saying he was pretty much the world's shittiest fighter pilot, since you'd think the ability to tell the difference between a hostile aircraft and a celestial object would be one of the first things they teach you in fighter pilot school (you waste a ton of bullets otherwise).

To be fair, however, there is some precedent for that sort of thing. A pilot by the name of Captain Thomas F. Mantell actually freaking died this way. He and a few other planes were dispatched to check out a UFO in January of 1948. The object was too high in the sky for their planes, but Mantell, either having huge balls or a burning hatred of aliens, went after it. Finally at 25,000 feet, he blacked out and his plane crashed. Holy crap! He was killed by aliens!

Well, before he went out, he had time to radio in that the craft was "metallic and tremendous in size." And it was. The Air Force had forgotten to mention they were testing a new weather balloon in the area, one that happened to be huge and covered in a reflective silver surface. Just one of those wacky misunderstandings that would have made for a funny story later, had it not caused a guy to die in a horrific plane crash.

2 The Washington D.C. UFO Incident

Between July 13 and 29, 1952, a series of UFO sightings were reported over Washington D.C. Witnesses would include an Air Force pilot, people on the ground and, in case you're the type to never trusts the testimony of fallible human beings, we have readings from two separate radar stations.

The Unsettling Evidence:

The first substantiated report came on July 19, when air traffic controller Edward Nugent, of Washington National Airport...

... noticed seven unidentifiable objects on his radar. The objects were not following established flight paths and, in typical UFO sighting fashion, were being too radical in their movements to be ordinary aircraft. Meanwhile, at Andrew's Air Force Base, air traffic controllers were also tracking several unidentifiable objects. According to the military's report on the incident, both towers were tracking an object that was hovering over a radio beacon, before it vanished from both radars at the exact same time.

Even more interesting is that almost the exact same thing happened on July 26, only a week later. The same airports, the same radar readings, the same unidentified objects all on the same fucking day of the week. Two fighter jets were sent this time, one of which saw nothing. The other, however, reported four orbs of light zipping around. The pilot even called in to ask if he should, you know, shoot them down or something, before they streaked out of sight.

That was enough to attract the attention of President Harry Truman. By now the Air Force had launched Project Blue Book, a massive investigation into pretty much every UFO sighting ever, with the goal of finding out once and for all what was going on. If that sounds like X-Files stuff, remember it's not that the government believed an Independence Day scenario was coming. It was more worried about some kind of radical new Russian spy aircraft.

The Official Explanation:

Project Blue Book was headed by Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt, and the best guess he could come up with for the D.C. sightings was that the radar was giving false readings due to a temperature inversion (where a layer of warm, moist air covers a layer of cool, dry air, close to the ground, which can reflect radar signals). This didn't account for the eyewitness sightings, of course, or for the fact that temperature inversions are common but radars never pick them up.

So the government's official position wound up being that there was a meteor storm or some other phenomena at the exact same time, by pure coincidence, there was an unrelated radar error causing the false signals. Mystery solved! Though we should point out that among the people who didn't buy the explanation included Ruppelt and the personnel who were manning the freaking radar stations.

It didn't matter. By 1952, the government was sick of the UFO thing. The nation had UFO fever and every time something lit up in the sky, hundreds and hundreds of people would call and claim Mars was attacking. The entire point of Project Blue Book was to debunk as many of these as possible and get all those cranks to stop bothering them.

It worked like a charm! There were no more UFO sightings after 1952, right?

1 The Valentich Disappearance

OK, so there were a few thousand after that. And one of them has to be the weirdest of all: the Valentich Disappearance.

History has seen its fair share of aircraft, and even boats, disappearing into the great abyss that is our mighty oceans. So it wouldn't be surprising to hear that on October 21, 1978, a Cessna 182 light aircraft piloted by Australian Frederick Valentich pulled a Houdini and disappeared right the fuck out of thin air.

That is, until you take into account his final radio transmissions, which are about the creepiest thing you'll ever read.

The Unsettling Evidence:

In his final words with Melbourne Air Traffic Control, which can be read in its creepy-ass entirety here, Valentich described being followed by a UFO:

Valentich: Melbourne, this is Delta Sierra Juliet. Is there any known traffic below five thousand?
Melbourne: No known traffic.
Valentich: I am... seems to be a large aircraft below five thousand.
Melbourne: What type of aircraft is it?
Valentich: I cannot affirm. It is four bright... it seems to me like landing lights.

Like Gorman, Valentich claimed the aircraft was intentionally buzzing him, zipping past, getting too close and going incredibly fast. At one point Valentich said the aircraft stopped in mid-air, and he orbited around it to get a good look:

Valentich: It's got a green light and sort of metallic like... it's all shiny on the outside... ... it just vanished...

Later:

Valentich: Ah... Melbourne that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again... (two seconds open microphone)... it is hovering and it's not an aircraft...

Those were Valentich's last words to Air Traffic Control, and maybe his last words to anyone. What followed were 17 seconds of a metallic scraping sound. Neither Valentich nor his plane were ever seen again. The investigation has been one, long, frustrating dead end. No wreckage of the plane has been found, but he was close enough to the ocean that he could have wound up crashing there. Of course, he was close enough to land for lots and lots of eyewitnesses to come forward to say they saw the EXACT same UFO Valentich reported ... which would be great if they weren't all coming forward after the story had hit the newspapers. They even had two experts examine the 17 seconds of metallic scraping at the end of the radio transmission. The conclusion was a shrug and, "Yep, that's pretty fuckin' weird, isn't it?"

The Official Explanation:

One of the cruel realities of life is that it's pretty easy to blame whoever isn't around to defend themselves. So "Valentich was crazy/stupid/disoriented" immediately becomes the default explanation. For instance, some have suggested Valentich became disoriented and was actually flying upside down the entire time. The lights he saw being his own in the reflection of the ocean.

This would, of course, make him an even worse pilot than George "I tried to shoot down Jupiter" Gorman.

Some have suggested it was an elaborate suicide, the UFO thing a final hoax to keep people talking. Or maybe he just imagined the whole thing from the start. Who knows? He's not around for us to ask.

Our favorite theory is that the guy just got fed up with his life and flew off to go start a new one somewhere where nobody knew him. Who hasn't felt like doing that?

Or, maybe it was aliens.

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For more of the unexplainable, check out The 5 Creepiest Unsolved Crimes Nobody Can Explain and 6 Insane Discoveries That Science Can't Explain.

Make sure to stop by Linkstorm (Updated 08.06.10) to figure out what really happened to Ross.

And find out which famous prime minister may have hidden a UFO report over at AOL Weird News.

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