It has been hard for me to remember what exactly got me “into” UFOs, and when, but a recent episode of Ancient Aliens — which has never been my thing, but which I am trying (again) to get into — I was reminded of the most likely contender: the 2006 sighting at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.
In November, 2006, I was a sophomore in college at Illinois Wesleyan University, a small school two hours south of Chicago, and therefore my friends were people from various Chicago suburbs. That fall, I shared a room with four such friends in a pretty but run-down campus house that required its residents to apply in groups with a proposal stating some shared passion. Ours was “cooking” (I never cooked); the actors lived downstairs. I was, however, very passionate about my friend group of five, though we soon butted heads, and two-fifths moved to another dorm room when we started the spring semester.
News of the sighting seems not to have surfaced until early January, 2007, when I would have been home on winter break, but I must have found the Chicago Tribune story later, because I remember reading it at my desk in that big room. From there, a frenzy: I read the CBS News version, and NBC, and NPR. I remember alerting my two remaining roommates, who did not really care, but made a nice show of pretending. That they weren’t very interested was unfathomable to me: this was their hometown airport, and the witnesses were pilots and airline workers — people who know very well what Earth-based aircraft look like. This wasn’t a rogue light flying over the woods in the dark. This was daytime. At a major international airport.
The craft was classic saucer, with all the features I know and love: dark gray and disc-shaped, huge, hovering, silent. Witnesses described it as unlit, and said it shot upward at an impossible trajectory, leaving a saucer-shaped hole in the clouds.
“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," said one mechanic, per the Tribune. The same article quotes another worker’s claim that a United employee “experienced some religious issues" over it (!!!).
When contacted for comment over the sighting, the FAA initially denied there were any reports of a UFO sighting, only backtracking after a FOIA request by the Tribune.
Federal officials later claimed it was a weather phenomenon. Then-FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory told the Tribune, "Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon… That night [ed. note: it was daytime] was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low [cloud] ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things.” One suggestion was that witnesses saw a “hole-punch cloud,” a rare weather phenomena seen here, and below.
Does this seem, to you, like something a dozen-plus airport workers and pilots might mistake for a solid gray aircraft? Hmmmmmm. (My answer, obviously, is NO!!!!!!)
It was this case that inspired me, 15 years ago, to start watching The X-Files, to familiarize myself with the works of James Fox, to hold my breath for every moving light in the night sky. Something — maybe — is out there, ignored and unignorable. There are 93 billion light-years’ worth of space around us. What if one of its residents visited the world’s most connected airport one winter day in 2006? It’s thrilling, I think, not knowing who or what or where from or why — the way these stories drop off the news with no clear answer given. I love the idea that there might be no answer. It keeps me looking up.
Odds & Ends
Olivia Culpo fucked up my UFO Google alert this week.
xo
Katie