What happened
During the late-afternoon rush on 7 November 2006, a United Airlines ramp worker pushing back Flight 446 to Charlotte spotted a dark, metallic-looking disc hovering low over Gate C-17, just under the cloud deck. He alerted the crew, and word spread over company radios. Pilots, managers and mechanics came out to look. Witnesses described a silent, dark grey object somewhere between 6 and 24 feet across that stayed in place for several minutes. Some then saw it shoot straight up at tremendous speed, leaving a crisp, clear hole in the overcast through which blue sky was briefly visible. A United supervisor phoned the FAA tower. Both the airline and the FAA at first said they knew nothing, until a Freedom of Information Act request by Chicago Tribune reporter Jon Hilkevitch turned up a recording of that call. His January 2007 story made national news, and Hilkevitch said the witnesses' credibility was beyond question.
The official explanation
The FAA said the sighting was probably a weather phenomenon and declined to investigate, noting that no controller saw anything and radar showed nothing. Astronomer Mark Hammergren said conditions that day suited a hole-punch cloud, a rare effect in which part of a cloud layer freezes and falls out, leaving a round gap. Other suggestions include a stray balloon or lights reflecting off clouds. Accounts of the shape, height and motion differ among witnesses.
The anomalous case
The witnesses were aviation professionals at one of the world's busiest airports, people who watch aircraft for a living, and many said what they saw was definitely not a plane. The object reportedly hovered in plain view for several minutes before climbing straight up and leaving a clean hole in the clouds. United and the FAA initially denied any knowledge until the Tribune's FOIA request uncovered a recorded call from a United supervisor to the tower. Former NASA aviation safety manager Brian E. Smith argued that any unknown vehicle at low altitude over a major airport is a serious safety issue. Critics of the FAA say its refusal to investigate an object reported by its own airline partners over an active gate was a failure of its security mandate. Whatever it was, it was never identified.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- 2006 O'Hare International Airport UFO sighting Wikipedia
- Just what was that Object Hovering Overhead at O'Hare? (from The Providence Journal) Aviation Pros
Witness reports elsewhere
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