Hi there. My name is Patrick, calling from Texas. I'm a retired Air Force officer, and I need to tell you about something that happened to me back in October of 1968. I was a B-52 navigator stationed at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. What I experienced that night, what showed up on my radar, it defied everything I knew about aircraft. And I knew aircraft. So this was the early morning hours of October 24th, 1968. We'd been up doing training maneuvers, practicing procedures. I'd been flying for about ten hours at that point, and we were getting ready to land. Standard stuff, you know what I mean? Just another training flight. We were coming back from Grand Forks, flying east of Minot, doing some high altitude work. Steep turns, vertical S's, that kind of thing. Nothing unusual.
We're starting our approach to land when the tower comes on the radio. And this is where it gets strange. They say, 'Could you guys keep your eyes open for anything unusual?' Now, I remember thinking that was odd. We ask what we're looking for, and they just say, 'You'll know it if you see it.' One of the pilots, I think it was Brad, he says something like, 'Are the missile crews seeing things again?' Kind of joking, but not really. My first move was to focus the plane's radar into a narrow, high intensity beam. I was the navigator, that was my job. I'm scanning, and I see this return off to our right. First sweep, it's faint. Second sweep, it's very strong. I mean really strong. I tell the pilots about the contact. They can't see anything because of cloud cover, but they ask me to keep them updated on what it's doing.
And here's where my mind gets blown. From one sweep of the radar to the next, this thing closed on us from three miles to one mile. Three miles to one mile. In maybe three seconds. We computed the closure speed later and it was three thousand miles an hour. Let me say that again. Three thousand miles an hour. directional changes are consistently reported - Max' I knew whatever it was, there was something out there I'd never seen on radar. I don't know of anything that could move laterally like that in three seconds, cover two miles, and just stop. Dead stop. And then it's maintaining our descent rate perfectly. Staying right with us. Perfect formation, one mile off our wing. And that's the thing, it wasn't drifting or anything. It was locked on to us.
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