UK Pilot Tells of Near-Miss with UFO

While it might be easy to scoff at people who report UFOs, it's much harder to dismiss reports from trained, experienced pilots. These are people who spend their days flying aircraft, so they're unlikely to see Venus in the night sky, or a weather balloon, and mistake it for something anomalous. From The Independent:

A pilot has told how his passenger jet came with feet of being hit by a UFO while flying at 34,000 feet over the Berkshire countryside.

The captain was so convinced that the “rugby ball” shaped object would smash into the Airbus that he ducked as it headed towards the cockpit.

The pilot reported the incident to air traffic control and checked the aircraft’s instruments immediately after it shot past, but there was no sign of the mystery object.

It appeared so suddenly out of a left hand side cockpit window, that the aircrew had no time to take evasive action, before it passed within a few feet of the jet, The Telegraph reports.

An investigation by the aviation authority has been unable to establish an earthly explanation for the UFO, which was described by the captain as bright silver with a metallic construction and “cigar/rugby ball like” in shape.

When a pilot is terrified that an unknown, but metallic, structured object is about to collide with his aircraft (in this case an A320 Airbus), it's worth taking note. Skeptics will reflexively claim he was mistaken and fabricate an explanation, but that's what skeptics do. Me? I've heard way too many of these stories, including one firsthand from one of the first female U.S. military pilots (she was a member of a UFO study group I belonged to in the early 1990s) to dismiss them as misidentifications. But it will be a blip in the news, then just another footnote. And we are no closer to understanding what these unusual objects are.