When you oversee an aircraft worth hundreds of millions and entrusted with the care and safety of nearly 500 souls, you are not likely to put your licence and career in jeopardy by glibly radioing in to air control to tell them you have just seen a UFO zoom past your cockpit.
The first pilot to radio in reported that she and her crew saw bright lights passing their craft at phenomenal speeds, up to twice the speed of sound. And it changed direction.
At least another two aircraft crew independently radioed in the same sort of descriptions and were relieved to hear that they weren’t the only ones to file such a report.
Experts have said that it was more likely to be meteors entering the atmosphere at a low angle rather than alien spacecraft. But they always say that.
At the end of last year astronomers spotted an object zipping through the inner solar system, sweeping past the sun and heading back into outer space.
Nothing unusual in that as comets and asteroids do it all the time.
But this object was unusual. And unique. They named it Oumuamua which means “messenger from afar” in Hawaiian.
It wasn’t going around the sun in the solar system plane or disk everything else orbits in but came in from above, swung around the sun and then headed off in a trajectory that would take it out of our solar system.
It was the first interstellar object ever seen and caused much excitement. It had originally come from another solar system somewhere very far away and was using our sun as a gravity slingshot.
It also accelerated at a speed that couldn’t be explained by physics and gravity. It had its own propulsion it seemed.
It was also a very strange shape being some 400 meters long and 40 meters wide, a very large cigar shaped object. Now what does that remind you of Mr Spock?
It didn’t match an asteroid or a comet in how it behaved.
But one explanation for its ability to accelerate quicker than an ordinary object is able too was that it was an alien spacecraft using a large light sail that uses the momentum of photons generated by a star, using our sun as a gravity slingshot to send it onto its final destination.
This wasn’t a theory put forward by tinfoil hat wearing X-File watching crackpots but by a fellow who chairs the astronomy department at Harvard University.
And a lot of scientists have said this is a plausible theory.
I’d give up a lot to see a credible sighting of a UFO but haven’t yet.
Given there are 200 billion stars in our galaxy the Milky Way alone and the Hubble telescope has already detected 100 billion other galaxies so far each with billions of stars, the likelihood we are the only life in the universe is impossible. It must be teeming with life.
It has been estimated that there could be 60 billion planets in our own galaxy that could support life.
But have any of them ever been here for a visit?
Probably not. It’s a very long trip and takes an eon. But who can say they haven’t?
Our species is only 200,000 years old but in a universe 13.8 billion years old, there must be much older species who have developed unimaginable technology and been able to not destroy themselves in the process. Wouldn’t they be tempted to have a look around?
I might not have seen a UFO but I do have one degree of separation.
I have a newspaper clipping that tells me that Walter Kibblewhite who in November 1956 reported a very unusual sighting from his house. The very same house I am currently sitting in. We bought the property off Walter and his family in 1963.
Walter described a bluish silver beam of light shining into his window at 2am and when he went to investigate saw that it came from a round object hanging in the sky. It then moved swiftly away whilst rotating towards Waipukurau.
The Waipukurau of 1956 was possibly something to check out if you had travelled 100’s of light years.
Co-incidentally a fellow in Puketapu reported the same object on the same night.
Experts said the likely explanation was both men had seen the moon and Jupiter.
But they always say that.
