Somewhere in the Skies - Witness Accounts: Volume 33

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

On episode 379, it's another powerful volume of witness accounts. In this volume, we hear from the late David Biedny, former co-host of the Paracast, about his dramatic close encounter that takes several interesting twists and turns. We also hear about a very curious sighting in Michigan. Lastly, we hear directly from Michael Wallace, a former KC-135 tanker pilot who was stationed at Loring Air Force Base in 1975, who was part of an alarming UFO sighting over the base at the height of the Cold War. Special thanks to the witnesses in this episode. If you'd like to share your UFO account, contact Ryan at: [e-mail] Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/somewhereskies/videos Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Produced by LIONSGATE Copyright © 2024. Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan's bread. Let me talk about this thing that happened in 1973. It is one of the stranger UFO episodes I've ever lived through. For those of you who are familiar with Jersey, or this all started in Somerset, where I grew up. Very nice little town right next to Rutgers University, which is in New Brunswick, New Jersey. And that town has changed quite a bit, but that's a whole other topic.

Anyway, my brother, my father, myself, were in, I believe it was Models. It was this mall. Not a mall. It's a shopping center. I shouldn't say mall. Shopping Center that is on Easton Avenue. And if you know where the Somerset Diner is, and if you're standing in front of the Somerset Diner,

and you'll look across the street and to the left, there's a shopping center there that has a movie theater. And I believe it was, Maudels was there at the time. But in 1973, for the most part, that was undeveloped forest. There was nothing really there. So we were coming out of the shopping center. My father was driving the car. I was sitting up front with him, and my brother was in the back seat.

And so we're just coming out of the parking lot. I think it was JFK Boulevard or John F. Kennedy Boulevard, I think is the name of the road there on the side. Anyway, we're coming out of the shopping center and we notice that there is a disc that is rising from the trees. And when we noticed it, it was right above the tree line that seemed to be coming out. of this coming out of this forest. And it was a dark disk. It was hard to tell at that moment what the size of it was. We'll get to that in a moment.

It was taking off, basically. It was coming up from above the trees. And what I specifically noticed was that beneath this disk, there were some objects of some sort. They looked like kind of a box. And these stalks. I remember three or four of these stalks of different lengths were underneath of this disk, like attached to it.

but coming down. I don't remember there being a dome on top or anything. I don't think there was. What we really noticed were these things hanging from below it. And, of course, the fact that there was a disc taking off from the forest. And we saw this and we got concerned. I mean, my father, I mean, we all saw this. My brother, my father and I all saw this thing.

You know, my brother, my brother was very young. I was like 10 going on 11. My brother was, you know, seven going on eight. And here's my father with me and my brother in the car. And mom's at home. And so we see this thing coming up from above the trees, and my father takes the left turn on to JFK and just his driving. And we didn't stop to look at this.

Don't ask me why. I don't remember why. I think there was a level of concern at the time. But dad took the left in his driving, and my brother and I are on, you know, obviously the passenger side. I'm on the passenger side of the car. My brother's sitting right behind me. And we're looking out the window at this thing.

And as we're driving, this thing is pacing. us, still flying above the trains. It's essentially following us. It wasn't directly behind us. That happened when we took a left turn about a, I don't want to say a half mile down the road to get to our house. You'd have to take a left. And we take this left, and now this thing comes across the trees.

And now it's following us, very obviously following us and pacing us, keeping track with us. And my brother and I are getting, you know, sort of, I guess, excited is one word, a little freaked out as another word. My father is driving faster. I think my father was really surprised. I was kind of fascinated, but, and this is a thing that, you know, you have to sort of specify or qualify here. People like to think that if they're in a situation where they see a UFO,

oh, I'm going to stop and I'm going to sit there and I'm going to look at it and I'm going to be totally calm and collected. That's just not the way this stuff plays out. And it's hard to describe to people who envision this. going down a certain way. But if you're in the middle of it, what you really realize when this happens is that these are profoundly frightening things. You know, when you see something that you have never seen before, and this was at a time,

we have to call, this is an important thing to qualify. At that time, this is 1973, the level of marketing penetration of the UFO mean was not at the level that it is today. Nowadays, people look at the images of the grays, and, you know, there's little dolls, and there's little toys, and this has all been marketed, and people have been conditioned in a way, where maybe now people will be a little more open about it and maybe less frightened of it. But in 1973, this was certainly not the case. This was weird stuff. So we're driving along, and my father is indeed trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy to whatever degree he could. My brother is having a bit of a meltdown in the backseat.

He was excited, but not knowing what to make of it. And I can tell you that I was fascinated, but I was a little scared because there's this realization now that this thing is following us. So we're driving along. We're taking turns to get to my house. And for anybody interested in specifics, we had a house on 27 Patton Drive. You can look this up on the Internet. I'll certainly on Google Earth. We're a 27 Patton Drive.

Really nice little neighborhood. Still is a nice neighborhood. very, very squarely middle class, slightly upper middle class, but you know, nothing pretentious. Anyway, so we're driving and this thing, we're taking turns, multiple turns to get to the house, and this thing is taking the turns with us. It essentially was behind us off to the side, and it wasn't very high up in the air. I'm going to guess it was maybe 400 feet up, maybe 300 feet up. And what I remember is the stalks underneath of it, because that's kind of what I could see.

I could see the outline of the disc. It was a dark disk. It wasn't shiny metallic. It was darker. I couldn't tell if it was really shiny at all, even though it was dark. It seemed fairly mad. And, well, so this is the thing that's following us, and it's not going in front of us.

It's kind of maintaining a certain distance. We take the turn on to Patton Drive, and we go up to the house, and my father would always park in the driveway outside. Across the street from us, there was a family called the Ferris's. And this plays into the story in a moment, because Mr. Ferris was out on the front lawn mowing his lawn.

He had his little, you know, gas lawnmower going, and not the kind you sat in. It was the kind, you know, you actually, I don't say a manual lawnmower, but it was the kind, not the kind you drove by sitting on it. It was just one of those old, like, Toro-style, you know, lawnmowers that you moved around with your hands, and it was gas-powered, obviously. So he was mowing the lawn, and we come up to the house, we pull into the driveway,

and my father bolts out of the car and goes running in the house, get my mother, leaving my brother in the back seat, who's now, as I remember crying, my brother was not happy about this, that dad, like, bailed out of the car to go grab my mother. But I get out of the car and I move away from the car, walking, you know, kind of moving back towards the street because at this point, the disc moves into position over our house. And it is now hovering. I want to tell you maybe 200 feet, maybe 300 feet above our house. And it's silent and it's hanging in the air right above our house.

And I remember I'm looking at this and I don't know what to think at this point. I sort of was frozen in place. Part of me desperately wanted to run the house and hide. I remember that feeling very strongly. But the other half of me was really fascinated by this because how often you get to see something like this. And I'm looking up at it. And I hear a sound come from behind me. And what had happened was, apparently, Mr. Ferris turned, saw this thing hanging above our house. And he let go of his lawnmower. Just like let it go. And it kept going. And it smacked into his car that was parked in

his driveway. And I heard this lawnmower hit in the car. I turn around and I see Mr. Ferris looking up at this thing and his mouth is hanging open. Now, who knows of Mr. Ferris is still alive? I'm guess in the man he's probably not alive anymore. He was older than my father, older than my parents. I'd be curious to know, I don't think they had kids. I really honestly right now, I don't remember if they had kids, they weren't my age because I wasn't friendly with them. You know, when you're a kid at that age, when you're like 10, 11 years old, you know, if you don't interact directly to people, they're not even on your radar, basically, so to speak. So, you know, essentially, I'd be curious to know if Mr. Ferris is still alive, have you ever heard.

this podcast or if he had kids that heard him tell his story because I'm sure that he told people about this and we'll get to that in a moment. Anyway, he saw this thing. He lets go of his lawnmower, hits his car. He's like standing his lawn staring up at this. So I turned back around and it's still hovering above the house. And my father comes out with my mother and my mother runs to the car to get Barry, but she's looking up at this thing too. Again, you kind of couldn't help it. But she also heard Barry crying in the car and she ran to grab him. And this is where things get really strange because I'm looking up at this thing and to my right and from behind me all of a sudden I hear this really loud sound and it's a helicopter. This helicopter came out of, I guess basically nowhere.

This thing came screaming out of nowhere. I don't want to tell you it was a black helicopter. It was a dark helicopter with no markings. That much I can tell you. It was a dark color. I don't remember seeing any numbers or anything on this thing. This helicopter comes screaming out of nowhere at a very low altitude, and it's making a B-line right for this disc.

It comes right for the disc. I turn around, and this is something that really needs to be mentioned. What happened is this helicopter goes right for the UFO, right for this disc, and I'm watching this happen right in front of me. I mean, it's just like with them. I'm saying maybe what? 30 feet away from my house, maybe 40 feet away from the house. house. This is, the disc is maybe a few hundred feet, maybe two, three hundred feet above the house.

This helicopter comes rushing out of nowhere and it goes right to the disc. That disc went from being fully stopped to full velocity with no acceleration. This thing shot straight up and within maybe two seconds was completely gone. It made no sound doing it. And again, this is really relevant point. And this is where my brain, you know, when I think about this episode, this is the part that really stands out in my mind. This is the part that is as graphic as if it had happened yesterday. Because to see an object hovering stationary and then not gain acceleration and then go fast, but to see it simply go from stopped to full speed is something that your brain has no visual reference for.

In fact, your brain tells you something is dramatically wrong. It's not something you've ever seen. You know, you see a jet airliner take off and you see it gain speed. You watch, you know, imagine a car that was stopped and all of a sudden it goes from zero to 60 in zero seconds. Your brain has no reference for it. Puff, straight up, and within two, maybe three seconds tops, it is completely gone. and now there's a helicopter hovering above our house.

And in sharp contrast to the disc, the helicopter is very loud, real loud. As loud as it was, maybe I want to tell you, and I can't be exact about this, maybe 10 seconds goes by, maybe it was 5 seconds, and we hear a loud speaker, and it was really loud because that helicopter was hanging right above the house and that was loud as hell. All of a sudden this voice comes out, go back in your home as I remember it. It might have been slightly

different from that, but, you know, go in your home, go back in your homes. And my mother grabs me. My mother's got my brother and we all go in the house and we are all highly traumatized. It's like, oh my God, what just happened? And we heard the helicopter hung around for another few

minutes. We could hear it because it was right above the house. It moved around a little bit. And then we finally, after, I want to tell you, three or four minutes, it flew away. And it was gone. And we're just losing it. And I remember my father gets on the phone. And the first thing he does was to call the police.

Call the police. What do you know? Who lives for something like this? You don't know what to do. You call the cops. So you call the police. And what I remember happening was that the police kind of laughed him off the phone. They're like, oh, yeah, you saw what?

Yes, sir. Maybe you should call someone else. My father, I remember my father getting off the phone very, very frustrated. He's like, they don't want to know. And he turned my mother, Faye, they're laughing at me. My mother said, well, call the newspaper. They'll want to know. So my father, as I remember, calls the local paper.

We had, you know, like everybody else who got the paper back, and everybody used to get the paper, right? This was a different time. So my father calls the local paper and tries to talk to him about it, and they basically did pretty much the same thing, sort of laughed him off the phone. You know, and I don't know. I have to believe someone else.

saw this thing. You know, this thing followed us for a good distance. It was flying over a fairly populated area. This is like one of the greatest parts of the mystery of it to me. Like, what was that helicopter? Was it really a helicopter? I mean, this is where things, this is where the high weirdness factor comes in. I mean, was that helicopter a screen memory? I can't tell you. I mean, I don't think so. I remember the helicopter being really loud, being a very physical object. And, and again, the important part was the sound and the level of sound of that helicopter versus the complete lack of sound of the disc. Very noticeable, sharp contrasts.

And then to see that disc move with the speed it did, to this day, I've never seen anything else like that in my life. And that's why I have such a vivid memory of it because it shatters all perceptions of what is normal. It's just completely, there's no reference point for it. Anyway, so we're sitting there talking, and we were kind of flipped out. And all of a sudden there's a knock on the door. And I remember that knock on the door,

we all look at each other like, oh God, you know, what the hell is that? My father went to the door and he comes back and it's Mr. Ferris from across the street. I remember he came in and I hear him at the front door, Lou, what the hell was going on? Because he came over to us and he wanted to know what was that thing. And he hung out with us for a while. And at some point his wife came over. But Mr. Ferris came over alone. And this was a crazy thing that went on and we were talking in the kitchen.

And my memory was that we were up fairly late that night. talking about this. And there's another completely, well, not a separate element to us, but there's an important element to this, which is to mention that we had these next door neighbors, the Kohlers. It was Betty, Jack, Teresa, and Steve Kohler. Teresa and Steve were the kids. Teresa was kind of like my surrogate sister growing up. A lot of stories about her. And Jack Kohler was a very high-up executive at the Associated Press. Now, there's a whole, interesting, a really interesting political story tied to this. When Reagan took over the White House, when Reagan became president, Reagan's press secretary, this is my, and we found this out after we moved

away, Jack and my father were good buddies. But Jack was tapped to go be the White House press secretary for the Reagan White House and went and took that job until apparently it was discovered. And this was something even my mother didn't know. Now, Jack was German. My mother was a German, the National War in Berlin. And so her and Jack spoke German all the time to each other. And that was part of the friendship that we had with them, where they would practice Germanly each other. And what we found out years later,

this is what happened. It's really crazy stuff. And I'll tie it back into this other story in a moment. So Jack goes to be the press secretary for the White House. And he was in that job. I think it was a little over a year until it's discovered. Somehow someone figured out or came out that Jack had been a member of the Hitler youth growing up in Germany.

And all of a sudden, he's gone from the White House. And in fact, Jack basically vanished. And I bring up Jack Kohler because my father got in touch with Jack. He said, Jack, you know, this thing happened. Jack basically said to him, you don't want to pursue this loop. You don't want to do it. Because my father wanted to find out, like, why did the, you know, why had the police sort of joked him off the phone?

They laughed him off the phone. Why did the newspaper not want to know about it? So I remember him talking to Jack Kohler about this, and Jack said, Lou, you don't even want to pursue this. I don't even want to talk about it. You don't want to pursue it. There was this real deep discomfort on Jack's part to even discuss this with my father. He didn't want to talk about it, which I found to be very curious.

Anyway, I'm dying to know if there was anybody else who lived in Somerset, in 73. And this would have been, the time of year was summertime. Because I remember that, you know, I remember we weren't wearing heavy clothes or anything. It was fairly warm out. So this would have been summertime. I'm dying to know if anybody who lived in Somerset in 1973 in that general area. And so if you think about the Somerset Diner and you think about Pat and Drive and how to get between those two places, anybody who lived in that area that would have been outside then would very likely have seen this.

I was there. I don't know what the hell happened. I don't know what this was. I don't. And I'll go on record saying, I have no explanation for this. I am just recounting an experience from my life. I don't proclaim to understand this even, and I don't. But I know what I saw.

So, I mean, you know, my brother, and I didn't tell him I was going to talk about this on air. He doesn't know that I'm doing this right now. He and I've talked about this episode, though, in recent years. And he said he had a memory of this, but it wasn't as clear as mine, which stands to reason. He was younger. It was a different level of perception going on. But this was my first really big UFO experience. And it was a doozy, man.

It was a heavy one. And there are some elements of it that really, as I said, remained with me. The speed, the one really big call-out thing was the speed that this thing moved away was straight up. And the fact that there was no sonic boom, the fact that there was no acceleration, if I had a guess, I would say that there were some clues that this episode gave me about, what these things are to some extent in that if you're going to have a craft that's going to be able to move through air and not produce a sonic boom, what that suggests to me is A, this thing might have been changing the density of the air in the trajectory path in which it was going to move. B, that when this thing actually moved, it was less than a completely material object.

And again, I'm not claiming that this is an act. I'm just saying there's a clue there. I've lived through these things and I feel compelled to talk about them. And I'm not exactly even sure why. I think for no other reason to get them off my chest, it feels good to talk about this stuff. Hey, Ryan, this is Luke in Michigan. I'm calling to tell you a UFO story that I have, that I just saw a couple nights ago and I feel like I need to report it to someone. So you're the best person I know for that.

So my brother and I was Saturday night two nights ago, and we were having a bonfire in my front yard. Now, I live in a rural part of northern Michigan, sort of in a neighborhood that's out in the woods. And we have a little shared access to a small lake. So my brother is a photographer, and he wanted to go take pictures of the stars. It was about 10.30 at night. So we went down to the shared access at our lake. and we walked over a little bridge, the creek, and we were standing on the small beach there,

looking at the stars, and he had set up his camera on a tripod. And I said something like, well, it would be a good night to see a UFO. And my brother said, yeah, it would be, but we're not going to see one. The only thing we were going to see is stars. And then literally like 10 seconds later, he said,

but what about those stars? And he pointed to the northward, west of us and there were four what looked like stars that began moving away from each other. So they were like spreading out at a consistent rate, right? And they did that for maybe 10 to 15 seconds and then they gradually faded out from view, which I don't know if they were, you know, somehow disappearing or just getting too far away to see. But moments later, three lights came back in and moved from left to right, sort of at the same pace in a line, and then faded out again.

I guess left to right would have been south to north from where we were standing. And this sort of thing continued for at least half an hour, maybe 40 minutes. We stood there and watched these lights fade out, then fade back in, and then move, usually left to right or south and north. But occasionally there would be, for example, two moving left to right and one would move right to left or towards the south. Occasionally they would move up and then fade out or down and then fade out. occasionally they would all, there would be three or four that would fade in and then move in different directions for five to ten seconds and then fade out. And there was always at a consistent pace, which made us think, you know, satellite, right? But the way they were moving was not a

satellite because they were not moving across the sky. They were staying in one area of the sky and then fading in and out, and occasionally they would pause and stop, right, and then fade out, or pause for a while and then move in a different direction. They never went very fast, and they never came toward us that I could see. Now, it's really hard to estimate distance

because these were just points of light. There was no sound, and, you know, it was really hard to tell how far away they were. it seemed like they were pretty far away. If they were far away, that was the direction of Lake Michigan. So, you know, our thought was potentially this is something that's happening out over the middle of Lake Michigan, if these are, you know, larger things that are far away. We also thought of planes, but clearly these weren't planes. We saw some planes that went across the sky at the same time.

and, you know, in the planes, you can see the blinking lights, you can see the red and green. And also, they just go in a straight line across the sky, which is not what these were doing. So the other thought we had was some kind of, you know, helicopter search deep over Lake Michigan. And we looked into that. I checked with the Coast Guard.

I didn't, they didn't say, you know, the guy said he didn't know him anything. He'd get back to me and never got back to me. I didn't see anything in the papers, which I looked. I suppose there could be something like that, but they would have been really far away because there were such small lights and there was no sound. So we watched these lights do this for, like I said, 30 or 40 minutes and eventually we got cold because it was getting on towards midnight at that point and we wanted to go home. And so my brother packed up his camera. Now he does have photos of these and a video.

It's not the greatest video, but he does have a really good camera and he got something. But, you know, it's far away in a really dark night. But I'd be happy to send that if anyone would be interested in that. And the crazy thing is we packed up to go home while these were still going on. And then we had to walk across this bridge across a creek. And we paused on the bridge because he wanted to take one more picture of the stars. And we looked back and there was nothing going on. It was almost like it was doing it, you know, whatever these were, we're performing for us.

And once we decided we were done watching this phenomenon, decided it was done performing. So, you know, could have been just a coincidence also. But it was a little bit weird that, you know, they appeared when we said, we wish we could see a UFO and then they, you know, faded out and didn't come back when we decided to go home. I'm not one of the, you know, I don't want to be one of these UFO guys that thinks, oh, immediately it's aliens, right?

I am looking for a conventional explanation. Talk to my dad, who's kind of a science guy about it. He didn't have any explanation. But, you know, I'm open. open to some sort of conventional explanation. That's actually what I'm looking for. But yeah, other than that, I'd be happy to answer any questions people have

or anything like that. But that's what happened. We came home. We didn't see anything else the rest of the night, and that was it. All right, thank you. Hey, everyone. Ryan Sprague here, host of Somewhere in the Skies.

If you've ever thought about supporting us, we have great two easy options for you right now. If you listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, you can click the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Or you can join our Patreon at patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Both of these options give you the same benefits, early access to the main show, bonus episodes and content, and priority to ask our guests your listener questions. So to help support Somewhere in the Skies, click that's a lot of. subscribe button on Apple or visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you so much for your support. And keep looking up. I'm going to tell you a really incredible story that I have first-end

information on. The story begins at lowering Air Force Base and northern Maine near limestone back in 1975. The 42nd bomb wing consisted of two airy fueling squadrons and a bomber squadron. The bomber's mission was to support emergency war orders armed with nuclear weapons. I'd like to give you some background about the UFOs over lowering before we get into the details of the formation flight. a couple of weeks or maybe even as few as a couple of days before this particular formation flight, a meeting was called by the 42nd bomb wing for all the flight crews, for all three of the flying squadrons, to be held at the alert facility. So this was unusual.

It was first time that it happened for me and all the time that I had been there, so I was kind of curious as to what this is going to be about. So at the beginning of the meeting, a uniformed major says, listen, if you don't have a security clearance of at least secret, you need to leave. There was only a couple of people that got up out of a couple hundred people that were there. The major started off by saying, if you haven't heard, there has been a UFO reported over the base, over the nuclear-armed B-52s that are on alert,

over the nuclear weapons storage facilities that had nuclear weapons stored at them at this time. So it was very, very serious situation, and that's what this meeting was all about. It's hovering without making any sound. It does have a few lights. It moves erratically. It can move very quickly,

unconventionally, rapid straight line movements, or straight vertical movements. can turn without any apparent radius in the turn, so it's a pretty incredible technology. The wing staff was pretty concerned about it, so they had notified SAC headquarters. And we were told, don't talk to anybody about it if you have one of these incidents.

You can talk to us, and we'll be debriefing it, but outside of this room, don't talk about it. And we're also concerned that the local press is going to get, wind of all the extra ground forces and the fighters that we're bringing in to help us deal with this issue. So we're going to tell them that there's a Canadian helicopter crossing the border and harassing us. So I think that's pretty incredible. But that's the background for the story that I'm going to tell you.

We had departed lowering earlier in the day. It was a nighttime refueling mission. There were three KC-135s in this formation. I was the aircraft commander on the number two aircraft in this three airplane formation. Tankers' formations were referred to as cell flights. There was a lot of vertical separation, a lot of horizontal separation, and there was none of this. We're right flying like the fighters do this kind of stuff.

Now, we were way, way vertically clear, I think, a thousand feet. I don't know, half mile maybe, you know, so it was very much fun. It was just kind of boring, actually, to be in a formation flight and a tanker. However, the mission was pretty routine. I don't remember it was unremarkable in almost every way until we started back. And that's where the fun begins. That's where the action happens. So we are coming back from a refueling mission somewhere.

south of New York, offshore a little ways, and I believe it was with the F4 Phantoms. Just a routine training mission for both the phantoms and for us. So as we are somewhere close,

I think somewhere between Bangor and Portland, northbound coming back to Loring Air Force Base. The command post at Loring contacted us which was not routine

but not completely out of the ordinary but when they asked the aircraft commander of the cell leader, the aircraft commander of the number one tanker to change radio frequencies to stand by

they had an important radio call that they wanted to talk to him about that was pretty unusual so it didn't take me along to say hey I'm going to take one of my spare radios and go with them see what this guy is going to get briefed on.

So I tuned in. Number three, tanker probably had the same curiosity. He did the same thing, I'm sure. And we're listening to the command post telling the cell formation leader, listen, the UFO is over the base again right now. And we want you to pass off the leadership of the formation. of the self-flight to the number two aircraft. And then we want you, number one aircraft,

to turn your lights out, turn your radios off, and head straight to the base at your own discretion. Altitude, airspeed, path, whatever, at your own discretion. Which is unusual. Very unusual to hear that. Incredible, as a matter of fact. So I was quite shocked. the cell leader

acknowledges and says will do so the next thing you know I'm getting a call from him he's contacted me and said listen I just got special orders I have to depart the formation you're going to take over leadership of the cell let the navigators coordinate our positions when you're ready you got it so the navv the navs did that

I was convinced that we were where they said we were I could see some of the city so I knew we were close so I trusted the NAF, and off we went to the initial approach fix, and the aircraft commander of the number one tanker turns his lights off, I don't hear any more communication, so he's now radio silent, and in the moonlight I can see his silhouette, and down he descended into the darkness, heading straight for Loring Air Force Base.

I would love to have traded places with him. So number two, now the old number three, and number two and I started to head to the initial approach fix, which is quite always south of the south end of runway 36. runway 36 lands to the north. So going straight to the base is a lot faster, and everything unfolds with that aircraft as he approaches the base well before I make it to the end.

initial approach fix. I start hearing a tower channel frequency communications that are really exciting. I've heard some combat radio discussions during some bomb strikes with the F4. So, you know, I can recognize a little stress in the voices, and that was definitely stress in these voices. I wouldn't call it panicked, but it was, and it was bordering on frantic as they're talking about. Did you say it?

Where is it now? Which way did it go? Oh my God, there it goes. And it's down on this end of the runway. It's over the, over east loring. No, it's back over the alert bombers. And that kind of communication back and forth, quite a few different people talking on the tower frequency.

I don't believe I could hear the tankers crew members chime. in. I'm not sure I would have recognized them. Maybe I would have. I do know that when the tankers at elevation with Casey-135 is that elevation, their radar, forward-looking radar has like 240-mile range. I'm not sure what it is. It's substantially reduced at ground level, and they were flying in really, really low, I believe. So the fact that they lost radar contact with the UFO in almost an instant is remarkable in itself. And then they said, I did hear the communications say something to the effect of we've lost it. And then as quickly as communications had started until our frequency, they ended.

So that was kind of the end of the excitement. And my wingman and I continued our normal approach. runway 3-6. We broke up the formation just after we hit the initial approach fix. So I landed a couple minutes later. The second airplane landed and taxied in. It is in the middle of the night. There's not a lot of action going on at the base that we can see. And we proceeded to our squadron, normal debriefing room. Had a couple of beers, filled out some paperwork, and And we're dying to talk to somebody that knew anything about what had just happened out on the base. Couldn't find anybody that either knew it or dared talk about it.

So that was kind of the end of that night. The tanker that had departed the formation and gone off the chase at UFO was absent from the briefing room when we got there. and then all of a sudden I remembered that, well, he must be debriefing the major, the same major that gave that a meeting that I talked about earlier in this clip. However, at the end of the story gets even a little bit more bizarre. I see the aircraft commander of the first tanker. I'm not going to say his name. I've almost slipped a couple of times to say his name,

but I don't have permission to get him involved in my UFO story, so I'm not going to say his name. I see him walking along in front of the base exchange, the BX over at Loring. Just a couple of days after the flight, I believe. So I pulled my truck over and got out and went running over to him and said, What in the hell happened to the night with that UFO? And he looks at me and he goes, I can't talk about it. I can't talk about it.

You wouldn't believe me if I could talk about it. So that's the end of the... the story. And as incredible as it is, that's as true as I can remember. It's been a long time ago, but I had a lot of experience at the time of that incident, and I've had a lot of experience in the cockpits after that experience, but I've never had anything as incredible as that happened. Hope you enjoyed that story. I enjoyed telling it. The Somewhere in the Sky's podcast is part of the Lionsgate SoundNet. Thank you. Please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever possible. Thank you for listening.