Anybody that's done much hangar flying knows that pilots can be divided into three groups. Group 1 thinks that UFO's are solely the product of too much time spent at the airport bar. Group 2 has probably broken a dozen FAR's chasing or trying to get away from UFO's. The third group are the pilots that were in Group 1 and then had an experience that made them switch to Group 2. This group is a lot like ex-smokers or sober alcoholics and clean druggies. They want to tell anybody and everybody about the thing that made them believe.
I'm pretty solid Group 1 but several years back I almost became a convert to Group 2. I still like to recount my "almost" conversion experience so I am a little like the third group. This happened before deregulation and if you had the route; you flew the route. Didn't make any difference whether or not any passengers had bought tickets. You probably had mail and small freight and the airplane had to get to the next place anyway to keep the schedule working. I had bummed a ride from Roanoke to Lexington on an EAL 727. Another non-revenue pax had beat me to the jump seat so I went back and stretched out in the seat across from the galley. There is a whole row missing in front of these seats on the right side of the aircraft. I am a pretty tall guy so I like the extra room to stretch my legs. When the door was closed for pushback, there were only 5 passengers on the airplane besides me. Two suits up in first class had their own flask and made it obvious they didn't want any stewardess attention. Back in Y class with me was a lady with two children that she must have drugged for the flight. NO kids their age are that well behaved. All three of them were sound asleep about 30 seconds after gear up. I was just getting ready to snooze off myself when the three stewardae came back with some cards and asked me to be a fourth for bridge. I'm not used to bridge playing stewardae; and certainly not three on one flight. I was delighted and thankful for my good fortune and soon we had a good game going - even though the one that was my partner still didn't play 5 card majors.
So what about UFO's? Be patient, good stories can't be hurried. We climbed out to FL290 and they made a PA to that effect. We were flying between two well defined layers which is a bit unusual for that altitude; but you see all kinds of weather over the Appalachian's. One of the stewardesses seemed to be spending a lot of time looking out the window. When she made an illegal call, her partner asked her what she was watching and to please pay attention to the game. She fessed up that she was seeing a funny light that seemed to be following us. We all abandoned the game for a moment and began staring out the windows. Sure enough, at about our 4 o'clock position, there was a white circular object that seemed to be following us. It had a quivering, slightly erratic movement but maintained a constant distance from us. I estimated it to be about a mile from us.
Now I had flown quite a few hours and I had witnessed many aircraft being places where they weren't supposed to be. Of course this is usually at much lower lower altitudes where you have airline, corporate, military and private aircraft all sharing the same airspace. You don't expect to see grandpa in his J3 cub at FL290 in the middle of the night between cloud layers. But I must admit that this thing was making me doubt my commitment to be a Group 1 pilot. We watched it for at least 10 minutes and I became more and more convinced that something else was between layers with us and it wasn't any type of aircraft that I had ever seen before. I was thinking that maybe it was some secret military spy plane or something like that.
While I was trying to convince myself that I was just seeing an optical illusion, my bridge partner went over to the gallery and called up front on the interphone. The cockpit crew must have been Group 2 because they had already spotted it and and notified ATC that they were going to make some minor deviations from the jetway they were tracking to "double check" some autopilot functions. This was serious business because they could be in trouble for the extra fuel burn if it got back to management and they couldn't lie ..er I mean explain their way out of it. Soon I felt the aircraft in a shallow bank to the left. The UFO stayed right with us in the same relative position to our aircraft. A minute later they made a steeper bank turn back to the right and the UFO stayed right with us. I realized that I was already thinking subconsciously of it as a UFO. For the next several minutes, they put the aircraft through some pretty drastic maneuvers for a revenue flight. The UFO stuck to us like a shadow.
Maybe it was the shadow metaphor that made me think of it. Maybe it was the thinning of the upper cloud layer and the fact that the object's motion was becoming more erratic. It suddenly hit me like a bolt of lightning. I almost shouted to my bridge partner that was still standing next to the interphone. Ask them to kill the nav lights. As soon as they turned off the nav lights, the UFO disappeared. When they turned them back on, the UFO reappeared!
Now I still don't understand all the physics involved. There was some perfect set of conditions with the two cloud layers and the white tail navigation lights that was creating an optical illusion that fooled several reasonable people. When we landed, I wanted to talk to the cockpit crew and see if they had a negative conversion from Group 2 back to Group 1. I didn't get to do that because my bridge partner stewardess made me a better offer.
And that's the truth
Bowinkle T. Propwash
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