Unknowns in Our Airspace - UAP and Aviation Safety Threats

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Report of unidentified flying out, unidentified verio phonomen, hoday dicot.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Weapons being tested by our own or foreign government.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
The Americans people are becoming most interested and for many instances,
very alarmed by the UFO stories.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
So why do you suppose that all of this has
been kept.

Speaker 4 (00:22):
From the world?

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Exploring our past, our future, and the mysteries of our universe?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Where do they come from?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Why can't you explain? Everybody in uthology is screaming, it's
our disclosure.

Speaker 5 (00:32):
The future is now.

Speaker 6 (00:34):
This is Micah.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hanks from the high Mountains of Appalachia and a bunker
below ground. Welcome one and all. It is the Micah
Hanks Program. Glad as always to be getting into gear
and going in pursuit of the anomalous in our existence,
as we do every week. Listen on demand via podcasting
apps everywhere. Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Autumn
has certainly made its way to the mountains, and so

(00:59):
my cohorts Brett Tingley, my brother Caleb, and of course
Cody Britton, longtime friend of mine and drummer extraordinaire, decided
to bring in the season with a bit of spooky
style with a performance out in Hendersonville, North Carolina on
Friday night. We had an incredible time. The weather was perfect,
and of course it allowed us an opportunity to slip
into the spooky season in style with a few friends

(01:21):
and fans who were in attendance. Always a great time,
and I hope you all had a wonderful weekend out there. However,
it is you are getting into the spirit of the season.
Evidently over in France over the weekend, somebody was getting
into the spirit of things, maybe mischief, mayhem and motorcycles
to be exact, because apparently, according to CNN, and this

(01:43):
is big news this morning, I'm sure you've heard about it,
precious artifacts were snatched from the Louver Museum in Paris.
Among the items that were stolen in this robbery apparently
where an emerald necklace set among more than one thousand
diamonds that were gifted to Napoleon by his second wife
at a range of other treasures that officials there at
the museum described as being of inestimable value. The thieves

(02:06):
apparently targeted the Louvers Apollo Gallery on the upper floor,
which houses the French Crown jewels. They said that in
the course of a brisk seven minute heist, they broke
into two high security display cases and stole nine items
that according to France's Culture ministry. And yes, the thieves
left on motorcycles, so the scene there in Paris over

(02:26):
the weekend might have looked like something from a Christopher
Nolan film. I think it's been appropriately described, however, by
French officials as a national disaster that these items were stolen.
In other news, those of you who are night owls
or maybe insomniacs like I am, if you happened to
be awake in the still hours of the early morning

(02:47):
like I was last night, you may have been among
the many who noticed that something was a little rotten
in Denmark as far as online services. In fact, a
lot of commuters on their way to work on Monday
morning probably also noticed the issue. Seeing in business reporting here. Apparently,
the Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing platform that powers
much of the Internet, went down for several hours on Monday,

(03:10):
making several major websites and apps inoperable. Now this is
no joke. I was actually awake in the middle of
the night, and often when I wake up and can't
go back to sleep, I'll grab a book and start reading.
And there are reasons I enjoy reading in the middle
of the night, especially if I'm unable to be catching
up on much needed rest, which in many cases I
might prefer to be doing. But when I have to

(03:31):
be awake in reading, it's a mostly distraction free environment.
I'm not getting phone calls and messages and requests all
the time. I can just tune out. In the perfect
midnight silence of the wee hours, I can just tune
out and really focus on whatever I'm reading. So that's
one thing I enjoy. What's the other thing, too, is
if I'm tired but just can't sleep a lot of

(03:54):
the time, when I start reading, it actually makes me
drowsy and it will help me go back to sleep.
So in any case, I'm often reading in the middle
of the night. And as much as I enjoy real
hard copies of books, and I have a lot of
them throughout my house, ask anybody who's been to my home,
they will tell you it's like a library. But often
when I'm laying there in the bed, it's a little
easier to enjoy an ebook. And so there I was

(04:17):
early this morning. I'm browsing online and I find an
ebook I want to buy, and I click the link
to buy it, and it takes me to an error
page instead, and it says, sorry, we can't find this page.
And so I'm thinking, okay, well, that book, I guess
is not for sale. Have to find another one. So
I go and I look for another book, and I
click to purchase, and sure enough, the same thing happens.
And it takes me just a moment to realize that

(04:38):
essentially every item on Amazon dot Com, not just ebooks,
was temporarily missing for a while this morning, and so
eventually I had to opt for a book I already
had on hand and say, well, I guess something's up.
Of course, this day and age, if something's up, you
never know what that means. You don't know if there's
been an attack on American infrastructure, or world infrastructure for

(04:59):
that matter. You don't know if there's been some kind
of a heist pulled, like what happened at the Louver
in Paris over the weekend, which I guess is all
the more reason it's a little disconcerting to see a
news headline like this one reporting that the federal agency
responsible for overseeing and modernizing the US Nuclear Stockpile will
be furloughing the vast majority of its staff as of today,

(05:21):
October the twentieth, twenty twenty five, and this amid the
ongoing government shutdown. Yes, according to the Department of Energy,
about fourteen hundred employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration
will receive furlough notices, while fewer than four hundred employees
will actually remain on the job to safeguard the stockpile.
Think about this for a second. Because the US government,

(05:44):
or at least certain actors within the government, can't get
it together, and therefore the entire government has to shut
down and remain shut down, and thereby federal employees aren't
being paid. We only have a skeleton crew right here
in time for Halloween guarding the nuclear stockpile of the
United States. Now, I didn't see the Energy Secretary's statement

(06:06):
about this today, but apparently Chris Wright, the Energy Secretary,
was going to be speaking about how the US government
shutdown will impact US nuclear deterrent efforts. Well, I guess
that's not concerning at all, is it talk about a
Halloween nightmare? But I mean, I know there are many
people out there government employees and their families who are
being impacted. I've got a lot of friends who are

(06:28):
government employees and who are currently not being paid and
they are out of work. So this is very difficult
for a lot of people. Again, I hope sincerely that
the government can eventually get back to work and that
we can get things back on track. But again, current
estimates that I've been reading about could mean that this
may be ongoing for quite a while. Nobody really is

(06:49):
sure how much longer this government shutdown could last. But
speaking of governmental matters, and of course those of the
more secretive variety, there was a recent story that kept
my attention about some very intriguing signals that were being
detected coming from space. But these aren't the kind from
way out there. No, these are actually coming from fairly
close by. They involve a constellation of classified defense satellites

(07:15):
that were built by SpaceX and that I believe are
being operated by the National Reconnaissance Office. But they are
emitting a mysterious signal that now, according to some researchers,
it has been revealed these may violate international standards. Now,
satellites associated with the Starshield Satellite Network or what we're
reporting on here NPR did a report about this. This

(07:37):
is a fascinating story because these signals were initially discovered
by a gentleman named Scott Tilley. He's an amateur satellite
tracker in Canada, and he wrote a paper about this,
and he published this online. And apparently what mister Tilly
discovered is that the Starshield satellite network is transmitting to
Earth's surface on frequencies that normally are used for sending

(07:59):
command from Earth to satellites in space. Now, why is
that significant Because the use of those frequencies to downlink data,
in other words, to send it in the other direction
back to Earth runs counter to standards set by the
International Telecommunication Union, which is an agency within the UN
that seeks to coordinate the use of radio spectrum globally.
And so, if indeed satellites being operated by Starlink and

(08:24):
which are performing a classified mission for the US government
are actually in violation of international standards, what would that mean?
According to Tilly speaking with NPR, nearby satellites could receive
radio frequency interference and could perhaps not respond properly to commands,
or they might ignore commands altogether from Earth. Now, think

(08:46):
about the potential here because obviously, if these are satellites
being operated by the US military, and therefore they have
a classified mission, that probably has something to do with,
you know, protecting the national interest. Right maybe who knows
nuclear deterrence. But as we have also recently learned, we
know that most of the employees at the agency that

(09:06):
are tasked with nuclear deterrence here in the United States
are being furloughed today. So what happens if there are
let's just hypothesize here for a moment, satellites in orbit
that are a part of those deterrence efforts and they
aren't able to communicate properly because they are in violation
of international transmission standards. This is really starting to look

(09:27):
pretty scary if you ask me. Outside experts told MPR, however,
that the potential for radio interference is real. According to
Kevin Gifford, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado,
Boulder who specializes in radio interference from spacecraft, he says,
I think it is definitely happening. And yet, amid all
those concerns, neither SpaceX nor the US National Reconnaissance Office,

(09:51):
which operates those satellites for the government, did respond to
MPR's request for comment. Let's hope that if they didn't
know that this was potentially inviolated and therefore also potentially
impacting the efficacy of satellite communications, that MPR's report has
politely brought this to their attention sounds like something maybe
they should know. Something else I guess a lot of

(10:13):
people would like to know is whether indeed there was
secretly a group of individuals that were operating car sized
drones over New Jersey late last year. Yes, I'm talking
about those dang mystery drones again, because as we know,
and as I will concede, by the way, based on
my own investigation into this, there were quite a lot

(10:33):
of sightings of conventional aircraft that were mistaken as being drones.
But my contention has always been based on those investigations
that my team at the debrief and I did at
that time officials I communicated directly with who provided me information,
and I'm talking about folks at Picatinny Arsenal, by the way,
who said they had confirmed sightings of some of these drones.

(10:55):
My contention has always been that there probably were there
had to have been, in fact, at least some actual
drone sightings, But is as often the case when people
start seeing things in the sky that they can't explain.
This starts making headlines, and then everybody starts going outside,
they start looking up, and then they start seeing things too,
And inevitably many of those things that people are seeing

(11:16):
are prosaic objects. And so as a result, a lot
of the beloved skeptics go online and they can prove, hey,
this person saw a plane. Hey, so did this person, Hey,
so did this person. In fact, now the emerging hypothesis
for those skeptics is that there were no drone sightings
at all, and that drones are effectively as elusive as

(11:36):
real UFOs. People didn't really see any of them. There
were no mystery drones. But now, to introduce a bit
of a thought experiment here, wouldn't it be intriguing if
indeed there were some development in the story that complicated
factors a little. For those skeptics who double down and
say there are no drone sightings, people who think they've

(11:58):
seen mysterious drones have just been looking at aircraft and
planets and stars. They don't know what they're looking at.
They don't know the difference between planes and actual car
sized drones. Yes, wouldn't it be interesting if there were
a new factor introduced that complicated that logic. Well, what
I am about to tell you remains somewhat speculative right

(12:20):
now because it relies on sources who have not come
forward publicly yet. But there was a very interesting report
by Shane Galvin published by the New York Post, And
what this article alleges is that there was a private
contractor who has not been named, but who recently, speaking
at a defense conference, said that he is part of
a private company that has taken credit for a lot

(12:43):
of East sidings. They say that they did indeed actually
have a car sized aircraft and that they were doing
tests over New Jersey late last year. But because they're
a private company, they didn't have to disclose anything to
the public about this. So, according to the New York Post,
this private company revealed all this at a high powered
army conference where they demonstrated a unique aircraft. At that event,

(13:06):
they weren't just saying they had one. They actually had
this aircraft there. They were doing demonstrations and videos of
the test flights were provided to the New York Post
and they're featured in an article right here which we
will have linked in the show notes you can take
a look for yourself. According to the Post's reporting here,
at the Army's UAS and Launched Effects summit at Fort
Rucker in August, a private contractor conducted a live demonstration

(13:29):
of a manned aerial craft that wiled the crowd with
its unconventional appearance in unorthodox flight movements. Then that contractor said,
I'm quoting here from the article at the New York Post.
You remember that big UFO scare in New Jersey last year, Well,
that was us, he said. Apparently, this individual and employee

(13:50):
of the unnamed contractor claimed to a small group after
the demonstration that indeed they were responsible for these sightings
last year, or at least some of them. The company,
they said, was in the air over the Garden State
of November twenty twenty four to test out their capabilities.
The contractor's employee also added they were not required to
disclose their activity to the public because of a private

(14:11):
government contract that they say that they have now. Again,
no details about this alleged company or the employee who
was saying all this at this event back in August,
have been made public, although the video has been posted
there with the New York Post article, and so for
the time being, until any of these details are confirmed,

(14:32):
I have to put this in the interesting, if true camp.
But indeed, if there really was a private contractor working
with the US military testing car sized aircraft over New
Jersey last year, essentially exactly what many residents in that
state were saying that they were seeing. Hey we've got
large drones, car sized aircraft flying over our homes at night,

(14:55):
and the government, of course said, well, it's not ours.
As it turns out, this very well might have been
a private company with a government contract doing tests if
this story ends at being confirmed. So indeed, wouldn't this
be a bit of a complicating factor if it turns
out that some of those car sized objects people were
seeing over New Jersey late last year and that the

(15:17):
skeptics say don't exist were real. After all? I'll be
following this story, and of course when we come back,
you'll be hearing about a mysterious object that collided with
an aircraft last week. Right here on the Micah Hanks.

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Check this out.

Speaker 5 (16:14):
Thing more than anything, like having people sing your songs
like at the shows, bro, Like for sure, like for me,
a cool, cool moment in my career, our career up
to a point was Peacock Theater. You know, like we
went to La not being from there, having a nice crab.
Everybody was singing the songs, like, bro, like what more
can you ask for?

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You know what I mean?

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I think that's manifested that it was weird because like
everybody's singing your songs. You're like, hey, you actually listen
to the music, Like okay, like you know, y'are not
just here for a free good night, but definitely definitely
that people singing your music and just knowing the songs.

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Speaker 1 (17:49):
Welcome back. So last week we had a very concerning
incident unfold in the skies out near Salt Lake City.
And yes, this involves a mysterious object that pilots say
struck their aircraft. And so this is developing story right now.
We still have only a few details, but I'm on

(18:12):
the case and we're trying to find out exactly what's
going on here. So in essence, for those who have
not seen it yet, we've got an article about this
over at the debrief dot org. And what we know
is that the United Airlines Boeing seven thirty seven Max
eight that was en route from Denver to Los Angeles
was flying south of Salt Lake City when all of

(18:32):
a sudden, something appears to have struck the front of
the aircraft. And whatever this object was that struck the
aircraft calls not only significant damage to the windshield, had
also some minor injuries to at least one of the
pilots in the cockpit. Based on images that have circulated online.
We have yet to confirm that those images show the

(18:53):
pilot with an injured arm, but that is what they
appear to show, and so naturally, while we are still
trying to confirm a lot out of this information, I
will advise that people exercise a little caution before they
start sharing these images online and saying, look what happened
to this guy. Again, we're still in the process of
confirming all this, but it is absolutely confirmed as of

(19:14):
now that the National Transportation and Safety Board is currently
investigating this incident. United Airlines has issued a statement about
the incident because it involved one of the aircraft and
after this object struck the plane, it was caused to
divert and make an emergency landing where it touched down
in Salt Lake City. And unfortunately, there were no injuries

(19:35):
reported among the passengers and they were all put on
a different aircraft and they were able to proceed on
to Los Angeles. But in terms of what unfolded and
what we know, this happened on Thursday October sixteenth, twenty
twenty five, at approximately six forty four a m. According
to the information I've seen, this was United Airlines Flights

(19:57):
ten ninety three. The aircraft was was a Boeing seven
thirty seven Max eight. As I mentioned, it was on
its way from Denver to Los Angeles, and as it
approached moab Utah, the one hundred and thirty four passengers
on board reportedly heard one of the pilots come across
the intercommon say ladies and gentlemen, I have some bad news,

(20:19):
or something to that effect, at which time the pilot
then said, an object has struck the windshield and we're
gonna have to make a landing now. The crew also
had reportedly heard a loud bang occur during the flight.
It was almost immediately evident that the right side of
the cockpit windshield had been not entirely shattered. And you

(20:39):
got to keep in mind that these multi layered windshields
are designed so that if indeed they are impacted by
an object, that happens pretty rarely at flight altitudes, considering
there aren't birds or generally very many other objects up
there that a plane can collide with. Right or whatever
it was, something let's just call it an unidentified aerial

(21:00):
object of some sort collided with the front of the aircraft.
It shattered a portion of the wind shield. It didn't
break entirely because it's a multi layer windshield, but it
was cracked significantly and very visibly based on the imagery
again online that purport to show the damage after this impact,
and so they are making their way to Salt Lake City.

Speaker 6 (21:21):
One of the.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Witnesses, a passenger named Heather Ramsey, who provided an account
about this to Fox eleven in Los Angeles, said that
she and all the other passengers were holding their breath
because they were so frightened. And again keep in mind,
they were seeing all of the crew members say something
has hit the plane. Get to the back of the aircraft.
Stop the in flight services they were serving drinks and

(21:43):
snacks and things. Then they push all the carts to
the back and they go and they buckle up and
say everybody, sit down, make sure you're buckled in. All
they have heard from the cockpit is the pilot saying
something has hit the plane. And so, understandably, based on
the few accounts that have been made available online, were
pretty scared. I certainly would have been too, but thank goodness,

(22:04):
within the hour, actually approximately fifty minutes later, they were
back on the ground again in Salt Lake City. And
that's where the passengers were transferred to a different aircraft
and then they were able to continue on to Los Angeles. Now,
as I mentioned earlier, shortly after the aircraft landed, the
National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that they were investigating and
that a cracked windscreen had been caused during cruise flight.

(22:27):
In other words, when they were at cruise altitude, which
is pretty strange. Now, this leaves us with a few
possibilities in terms of what this UFO might have been,
and those include a space debris falling from the sky
or possibly another space object making its way into Earth's atmosphere,
but of the natural variety, and yes, of course I

(22:48):
mean a meteor. So the first line of inquiry that
I decided to try and take in terms of understanding
whether or not we might be dealing with falling space
debris was I reached to an expert, and that expert
was astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
I reached out to Jonathan because Jonathan is one of

(23:10):
those guys who's always got his finger on the pulse
when it comes to where objects are going to be
falling to the ground. And so I'll often reach out
to doctor McDowell when incidents like this happened. In fact,
actually I think it was early last year, or maybe
the year before that, but there was a piece of
space debris that apparently fell on a remote property here
in North Carolina. We talked about this on the show,
and before other outlets actually linked it to SpaceX activities.

(23:34):
I was able to look at it and compare it
to a similar device that had fallen in a farmer's
field in Canada, and I was pretty sure that what
we were looking at belonged to a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
So when the folks out here in North Carolina, not
very far from where I am, In fact, my colleague
Brett Tingley, excellent bass player but also managing editor at
space dot Com. Ratt got out there and actually saw

(23:56):
this piece of debris and took photographs of it and
provided some of those to me that we used in
our own reporting there at the debrief. But this was
unequivocally a piece of SpaceX spacecraft debris that made its
way through re entry and made its way to Earth.
And so when I saw this, I brought it to
the attention of Jonathan McDowell, and I said, Hey, John,
were you tracking any SpaceX debris on this date or

(24:18):
in this date range, because if so, I think I
know where it might have made its way back down
to Earth. And sure enough he confirmed, yes, that's consistent
with a piece of space debris we were tracking. And
then right after I brought it to his attention, he
went on social media and posted that it seems this
piece of debris, the re entry of which we were tracking,
seems to have made its way back to Earth in

(24:38):
North Carolina. Well along similar lines regarding the incident out
over Utah last Thursday, I asked doctor McDowell, is it
possible that there was any spacecraft that should have been
coming to Earth in that general area? And he not
only sent me a link to an update on his
website about this where he said there were no known
spacecraft re entries occurring in that vicinity at that time.

(24:59):
He said, there were three that were occurring around Earth.
We tracked all of them. One of them was a
Starlink satellite I believe, and then two were Chinese spacecraft reentries.
But he said, while we cannot rule out the possibility
of some kind of space junk falling back to Earth,
and colliding with a plane. First of all, it would
had to have been able to survive reentry. More on
that in a moment, And second of all, there were

(25:20):
no known spacecraft reentries in that area at that time,
so it's pretty clear that this probably wasn't spacecraft junk
that made its way back down into our atmosphere. So
then the next possibility we have to look at is
a meteor, But of course those are a little trickier
to track, given the fact that, of course we are
tracking a lot of near Earth objects that are large

(25:41):
enough that they could be potentially dangerous to Earth, but
there are so many more small ones that are generally
golf ball to maybe dust grain size, and they impact
the Earth's atmosphere every day, I mean maybe countless times
throughout the day, and most again burn up so quickly
that they're not going to cause any problem. But now
those objects that actually do make their way through our

(26:03):
atmosphere and that could potentially make their way not only
to the ground, but potentially also into a collision with
an aircraft, there's one key factor that has to be
taken into consideration, and that of course involves the size
of those objects. So another expert that I reached out
to is doctor siamak Hessar. He's an expert on space
debris re entries, and he said that essentially the main

(26:26):
factors are a material composition, because objects that are made
from heat resistant materials have a much greater chance of
partially surviving re entry. He also added, though, that smaller
fragments or components made of lighter materials typically disintegrate, so
size is another issue. So it really comes down to
the material used to make these objects if it is
space junk, and of course the size, because it has

(26:47):
to be big enough that it can actually burn on
its way through the atmosphere and for long enough that
some of it is left by the time it either
makes its way to Earth or as the proposed scenarios
some have been speculating about here, actually collides with an aircraft,
but based on the data that I have on hand
from experts I've spoken with, that seems pretty unlikely. Now

(27:07):
we also have to look at the possibility of a
meteor striking in aircraft, but this angle is a bit
problematic too, because based on the data available on this possibility,
the odds of a meteor striking in aircraft are exceedingly low.
To be more specific, the probability is estimated to be
about one in every fifty nine thousand to seventy seven

(27:28):
thousand years that this would happen. Ever for a single aircraft,
one aircraft every fifty nine thousand to seventy seven thousand years.
So I have to say the probability is not really
ruling strongly in favor of meteor impact either, not a
zero chance. It's certainly possible, but highly unlikely. So if

(27:52):
there wasn't any space debris being tracked at the time
or in the vicinity where this incident occurred, and it
is exceedingly a low probability that we can attribute this
to a meteor striking that aircraft, That of course brings
us back to the question of what else could possibly
have been in the airspace at that time. Well, as
it turns out, there is a development in this story,

(28:14):
and it may be that we now are closing in
on an answer. In fact, posting about this on social
media website X, doctor McDowell now says that the UA
ten ninety three incident appears indeed to have been a
balloon strike, pending, He says final confirmation and that SpaceX
are effectively therefore off the hook. Now, many would say,

(28:37):
but how in the world could a balloon have caused
that much damage to an aircraft? But in fact, in
this case, it wasn't so much the balloon as potentially
the payload that the balloon in question had been carrying
at the time. Doctor McDowell retweets a post by John Dean.
He's apparently the CEO and co founder of Winborne Systems.

(29:00):
He says, yes, I think this was a windborn balloon.
We learned about the UA ten ninety three and the
potential that it was related to one of our balloons
at eleven pm Pacific time on Sunday and immediately looked
into it, he said, at six am Pacific time. We
sent our preliminary investigation to both National Transportation Safety Board
and the FAA and are working with both of them
to investigate further. So again pending additional information, it seems

(29:25):
that there's a possible resolution. Some of the imagery revealing
what these windborn balloons look like indeed show that they
are balloons, not unlike what you'd expect from a weather balloon,
but they also feature a small payload, and it seems
that that object, whatever it was, if it struck the
windshield of an aircraft moving at high speeds, could indeed
have potentially caused this damage. So on a future episode

(29:48):
we will provide updates if that is indeed confirmed in
terms of what John Dean is now working with the
National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA to try and determine.
But all this goes to show that, yes, indeed they're
there are a range of different things in our skies
that can cause problems. So when we come back here
in a moment, we're going to look at the broader
issue of our cluttered air space, the nons and also

(30:12):
the unknowns that may impact aviation safety right here on
the Micah Hanks Program.

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Speaker 1 (32:27):
When mystery objects in the skies get a little too
close for comfort, welcome back. It is the Micah Hanks Program.
So as the investigation remains underway as to what caused
damage to an aircraft and to a pilot over Utah
last week, United Airlines has confirmed there are no major
injuries among crew or passengers. The National Transportation Safety Board

(32:50):
is continuing its analysis and it's sent the recovered windscreen
off to a lab for investigations, so we will have
updates if any are made available. Of course, in the meantime,
I'll want to remind you if you want already an
ex subscriber, additional commentary on stories like these, and of
course further context provided on all of the discussions we

(33:11):
have here on the program are made available to X
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and you would like to support the ongoing work of
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(33:34):
X podcast and then the monthly Enigma's special all on
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signing up. You can find that information at micah Hanks
dot com Forward slash X. Getting back into this discussion here,
something about stories like this really make me feel uneasy.

(33:55):
And I think that's because even though I am always
trying to provide and logical perspectives on these things and
to explore all the options, because a lot of people
were leaping to the conclusion that this was probably space debris,
whereas in fact, right now most of the data seems
to point to it having been a balloon that was
operated by this company called Windborne Systems. And once we

(34:18):
actually began to dig into this and we start realizing
how exceedingly rare the likelihood is of a meteor impact
with an aircraft, the fact that there was no known
space junk falling in that region at that time, and
that there are plenty of people who are really good
at tracking it and know where it is and when
it's going to come down, and generally where that's going

(34:40):
to happen. In fact, actually in the capacity of my
profession as an aerospace and defense rider for the debrief
and all the other science topics I covered too, Yes,
I also track orbital re entries, and so if there
had been anything coming down in that general area, you
can rest assured thanks to the diligence of contacts like
doctor Jonathan McDowell and others that I correspond with, I

(35:01):
would have been able to confirm that. But I think
that there are also some fundamental realities that come to
light with a case like this in terms of knowns
and unknowns. Because while we can resolve a lot of
these cases, and really increasingly with time, with the data
available to us and the experts who are on the case,
it's becoming easier to solve cases like this one, there

(35:22):
are still some outliers, and there are still some instances
where there are some things observed in our skies which
are not so easily reconciled, and so that brings us,
in my opinion, to another issue. Of course, there are
also those who are so averse to the idea that
there could be objects of unknown origin in our skies,
and they hate any kind of discussion of that. But

(35:43):
by contrasts, I'm one of those people that, while not
leading with the anomalous interpretation, nonetheless acknowledged that there are
some strange things seen in our skies. I will refer
to an article I did there at the debrief back
in August of twenty twenty three, where we looked at
some of the latest reports that have been filed with
the Aviation's Safety Reporting System, which is run by NASA. Well,

(36:04):
at least as of the time this article was published,
it was, you know, the last I saw about the
Aviation Safety Reporting system amid all of the cutbacks and
the shutdowns and the scaling back that we've seen in
government since the beginning of the year, the last I
saw was that NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting system might actually
be going the way of the dinosaurs too. I hope
that doesn't end up being the case, because it has,

(36:24):
over the years, provided I think, a wealth of information
that has helped to promote aviation safety. But yes, it
is also collected on occasions some pretty good UAP sidings reports.
I'm quoting from my article here from August twenty twenty three.
One of those incidents which occurred in April of that year,
describes an encounter quote with a dark colored object potentially
as large as a small business type jet aircraft. It

(36:47):
was also detected on the radar of the nearest air
route traffic control center and deemed a threat due to
the risk of a possible mid air collision. According to
the pilot's report, during climb out on departure, we encountered
an unidentified flying object or phenomena of some sort. The
object was brought to our attention by air traffic controllers
when they advised us of a primary radar target that

(37:08):
was at our nine o'clock position within a half mile distance.
The close proximity of the traffic advisory raised our attention
to the threat, the pilot wrote in their report. As
I noted in the article there at the debrief, the
pilot states that the object was observed close to the
eight o'clock position on the captain's side of the aircraft,
flying at the same altitude of twenty five thousand feet
above mean sea level at the time the first visual

(37:30):
contact was made. The object or aircraft seemed to maintain
its track, moving to the seven o'clock position relative to
the reporter's aircraft, at which time it was no longer
deemed to be a potential threat. But apparently whatever this
object was they could still see now, although it couldn't
be identified by the pilot. The object was described as
potentially being some kind of large unmanned aerial vehicle, possibly

(37:52):
a single ship military fighter or training aircraft, which the
pilot judged to have been traveling at least two hundred knots.
They note in their report air traffic control was interested
in the visual reports since they were not talking with
the aircraft nor aware of its presence apart from the
small primary radar return, and it was not transmitting an
ADSB out signaled despite Class A airspace requirements. Now, on

(38:16):
that point, I noted in the article that this has
to do with Federal Regulations fourteen CFR ninety one point
two two five and fourteen CFR ninety one point two
two seven. These were published back in May of twenty
ten by the FAA, and it requires any aircraft operating
in Class A B and C airspace to be equipped

(38:36):
with automatic dependent Surveillance broadcast or ADSB capability. That's what
the pilot in this report was talking about. As far
as the pilot's conclusion about whatever this object that they
saw might have been. They said, this phenomenon represents a
significant threat to our operation given the potential for mid
air collision without the ability to react to a TCAs

(38:57):
two resolution advisory as trained for the given scenario. They
further advised that other pilots quote coordinate reports with controlling
authorities to reduce potential for mid air collision. Now, again,
there were some of those skeptic types I was talking
about earlier, and I'm not trying to just always rag
on them. I try to be very skeptical myself, and
I have a lot of respect for the skeptics who

(39:17):
actually do their homework, not the ones, however, that sit
there and make fun of issues like this on social
media all day. Now, certainly a balloon probably wouldn't be
operating with an ADSB transponder in circumstances like this, even
if it did happen to drift into Class A airspace. However,
if it were simply a balloon, would the pilots in

(39:39):
question have a mistaken it for resembling a military aircraft?
And furthermore, on the outside chance that this was legitimately
some kind of an aircraft that was not following FAA
regulations while operating in Class A airspace, as the pilot
interpreted this as having been, would that not have represented
a potential threat in term of a potential for a

(40:01):
mid air collision? And finally, I would ask, was there
not obviously some kind of object, whatever it might have been.
Was there not obviously an object that collided with an
aircraft last week over Utah? And could that not have
potentially been a disaster, in fact a tragedy. Thank goodness,
the entire crew and the passengers made it safely down

(40:23):
to Salt Lake City without further incident. But again, as
this investigation is underway, for those hecklers who like to
sit out there and make fun of these stories, and
the hecklers that like to make fun of the fact
that the United States government is still investigating UAP sidings,
that pilots still report them. And even though the pilots
describe these things or characterize them as UAP as described

(40:45):
in this article I'd written back in August of twenty
twenty three, they sometimes also describe things that sound a
whole lot more like military aircraft or conventional objects. But
whatever they want to call them. My point that I'm
trying to emphasize here is that when there are objects
in our airspace that pilots are unaware of, and these
objects are not being operated in accordance with the Federal

(41:06):
standards for Safe management of aircraft in our airspace, this
presents a danger to pilots. And when there are dangerous
objects that aren't following the rules that end up in
our airspace and at flight altitudes, we have incidents happened
like what happened last week over Utah. We were lucky
this time, but will we be lucky next time? It's not.

(41:28):
And let me be very clear, it is not a
laughing matter. This isn't something to make fun of on
social media, and the people that do that seem to
miss the fundamental issue. When there are threats to our
aircraft and our aviators and the passengers who are flying
on board these commercial aircraft, we have a serious problem.
This issue should be treated seriously. We don't have to

(41:51):
say that these are technologies from outer space or non
human intelligence, or that they're coming through portals, or that
they're time travelers, or they're using cloaking technology or anything
like that. No, we just need to recognize that when
pilots are saying, hey, sometimes we see things up here,
and these could pose a threat because they don't often
broadcast their presence and if we happened to collide with them,

(42:12):
it could be really, really bad. That is an issue
that needs to be taken seriously. That is what I'm saying,
and that is why I take UAP reports seriously, without
ascribing agency to them, but looking seriously at the issue.
We are presented with a lot of aviation safety concerns,
and in fact, the aviation safety angle on this has

(42:33):
that not been repeatedly what government officials who have explored
this issue over the last several years have continued to emphasize.
Look at NASA's independent study team that looked at UAP.
What were they saying, Oh, they were saying, we hope
that we can collect more reports of UAP using NASA's
Aviation Safety Reporting system. Hello. The NASA team also warned

(42:55):
that UAP inherently represent a potential threat to aviation, both
in the commercial sector as well as military and of course,
the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office has also said, yes,
we're concerned about the number of reports we received from
the FAA where it seems that objects are observed by
pilots that are not following the FAA's rules. And no,

(43:17):
we don't have to leap to the conclusion that every
one of these is piloted by little green men in
order to recognize that there is inherently a safety concern.
So Aro has said that NASA has said that the
UAP Task Force before Arrow came along, had also come
to that conclusion. And yet people still think it's okay
to make fun of the idea of UAP investigation. People

(43:38):
think it's okay to make fun of this, to make
light of sightings by pilots. Now on the other side
of the coin, let's also recognize but sometimes pilots do
make mistakes. In fact, I've also received a lot of
these videos from pilots who have said, we have seen
objects that we can't identify, and when I've dug into
a few of these cases, I've been able to identify
those objects. In one instance, that was a SpaceX aircraft

(44:01):
that was being launched from Boca Chica, so it wasn't
any kind of a re entry. It was actually a
spacecraft leaving Earth's atmosphere in that instance, but nonetheless because
this rocket launch out of Texas looks so strange to
the pilot who was seeing it at that time, they
interpreted this as being an object operating in our atmosphere.
They couldn't detect it on radar, and they believed it

(44:22):
had a glowing halo of light around it. What they
were actually seeing was the nitrogen being released as the
second stage rocket was separating from the booster, and effectively
it was causing this cloud or ring like structure around
the primary spacecraft that they were observing off in the distance.
And so after a fashion, the pilot was actually spot
on with their observation. This wasn't just a star. It
wasn't starlink satellites in that case, although I have gotten

(44:45):
plenty of videos of those sent to me by pilots
also who have characterized these as the so called racetrack
UAP because starlink satellites flying in a single line with
the glint of the sun off over the horizon can
cause an illusion that makes it look like a single
object fly in circles. Yeah, I've gotten plenty of videos
of those too, But no, in this instance, the pilot
had indeed been correct. They were looking at a spacecraft,

(45:07):
but it was a spacecraft launched from Earth carrying Starlink
satellites into orbit. And in fact, in that instance, actually
there were many videos of this object that were filmed
from the ground. Some of them were actually sent to
Enigma Labs, and so there was an entry on their
website logging multiple UFO sidings in the Southern United States.
Best I could tell, they didn't try to evaluate what

(45:29):
those sidings might actually have been of again, taking a
few minutes to look online at whether there were rocket launches,
what direction that launch would have been visible, and what
time that occurred. I was able to reconcile those sidings
and the one by the pilot that was sent along
to me. But why is all that important in the
context of pilot sidings of UAP. The reason, of course,
is that whether it is a known object and it

(45:50):
is misidentified, as in cases like the one I'm describing,
or if it is a genuine unknown like the pilot
report reported to NASA back in twenty twenty three I
was describing Earth. These represent potential distractions to pilots when
they're flying along and they are observing something they can't
identify that in itself can be a potential safety concern

(46:11):
as well. And so yet again, to me, the understanding
of the importance of aviation safety with relation to UAP
sidings is twofold one. We've got to be able to
account for genuine unknowns and any safety threats they may
represent for aviators. But then in terms of the identified
flying objects that in the heat of the moment maybe

(46:33):
are misidentified, those two at times can potentially represent concerns
and even threats for aviators. So yes, we do need
to take this issue seriously, and we need to hope
that the next incident isn't indeed a lot more concerning
than what we saw last week over Utah. All right,
a little more, and we're going to wrap things up
here when we return right here on the Micah Hanks program.

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UAP sidings by Pilots. You know, there is quite a
long history of sightings of unusual things made in the
sky by pilots who, in their line of work, while flying,
observed things they couldn't explain. Of course, we've talked a

(49:00):
lot about these over the years here on the podcast.
A favorite of mine occurred on November seventeenth, nineteen eighty six,
shortly after six pm local time in Alaska. And yes,
of course, I'm referring to the famous Japanese Airlines flight
sixteen twenty eight. The pilot, Captain tara Uchi at the time,
initially observed a couple of smaller aircraft that were producing
these kinds of flares, and he said that apparently the

(49:22):
heat from these objects could be felt through the windshield.
He watched these for some time, and then they eventually
began to move off in the direction over toward the horizon.
But as tara Uchi and his copilot are continuing on
toward anchorage, and keep in mind, this was a cargo flight,
so there weren't passengers on board at the time, but
the pilots observed off in the distance of very large object.

(49:43):
They said it was roughly shaped, kind of like a walnut.
In other words, it was spherical, but it sort of
had a ridge around the center and this object, whatever
it is, was moving in very close to them. They
got a little concerned, and so tara Uchi is in
communication with air traffic controllers and they say, would you
like military assistance, And he was a little wary of
having fighter pilots come up there and join them while

(50:05):
this great, big flying wallnut is approaching from off to
the left, and so he says, well, maybe actually we
could just try diverting, taking a different course. And so
this was agreed upon, and he was granted permission to
change his course, and he does that. Interestingly, thanks to
the work of John Callahan, who had been Division chief
of the Accidents, Evaluations and Investigations Division of the FAA

(50:27):
in Washington between nineteen eighty one and nineteen eighty eight.
Callahan had been collecting some data about this case. Apparently
there were radar tracks that showed that there had been
a large object out there in the area where tara
Uchi said that he could see this thing. The official
explanation that was offered at the time had been that
it was a ghost echo of his own aircraft, essentially

(50:48):
that his radar on board the aircraft had been bouncing
off of a cloud or something in the distance and
that he was actually picking up a ghost residual return
of his own aircraft, whereas in fact, there were multiple
tracks apparently that showed on radar that there was some
sort of a large object out there, where tara Ucci
said that they had seen it at the time. In
any case, there was a meeting and apparently some of
the science advisors to then President Reagan had come up

(51:11):
there and had met with him, and they said that
this was all really hush hush. The CIA said, don't
talk about it at all. And furthermore, apparently Callahan had
had this information sitting in a box on his desk
related to this case that he expected the CIA was
going to come back and they were going to collect
and take off with him and it would never be
seen again. And so this radar information and recordings of

(51:31):
interviews with the pilots and what have you, it was
kept sitting there in a box on his desk for
a few days. Any waits, any waights, an he waits,
and he says, oh, and behold, the CIA never came
and got this stuff. And so he put this box
away somewhere in case he needed it for a rainy day. Eventually,
when he left that position and he resigned. He was
cleaning at his desk and he found the box with

(51:52):
this information in it. And of course he came forward
in the early two thousands at the National Press Club,
not only talking about this incident there, but the incident
was also chronicled in an essay by Callahan that appeared
in Leslie Kyne's book UFO's General's Pilots and Government officials
go on the record. There was the case that's very
near and dear to my heart from Saturday October twenty first,

(52:14):
nineteen seventy eight, where Frederick Valentich was flying south of
Australia across the Bass Strait toward King Island. He ends
up getting in communication with air traffic controllers in Melbourne
and he tells them, look, there's some sort of an
object up here and it seems to be orbiting me.
It's got a green light on it, and this object
is doing really strange things. It doesn't appear to be
an aircraft. Valentich continues to communicate with air traffic control

(52:38):
there in Melbourne about this for several minutes, eventually explaining
to them, now the object is directly above my plane.
It's hovering over my aircraft. As I'm flying along, it's
hovering over me and it's not an aircraft. And then
there was a few seconds of metallic scraping noise as
Valentich disappeared off the face of the earth. As far
as we know, his aircraft was presumed to have crashed,

(52:59):
but we never found any the wreckage. Valentich was never
heard from again. I did speak many years ago with
his girlfriend who had been with him at the time,
Randa rushed and who is a dear friend. We've stayed
in touch over the years, and you can only imagine
how she felt as a teenage girl at the time
dating the pilot Frederick when he vanished inexplicably. And I'll

(53:19):
ever forget talking with Ronda, joined by her wonderful husband, Joe,
and we were sitting there, they were having coffee, and
I think I was having a scotch, considering it was
a video call and we were on different sides of
the world at the time. But indeed, Ronda was very
deeply impacted by that, and it's always stayed with me.
You know, shouldn't we have a better idea of the
kinds of things that can impact aviation safety when it

(53:41):
comes to the UAP discussion. Another thing about the Valentiche incident,
of course having occurred in Australia, is that it illustrates
this is a international issue. And just to further illustrate
that point, let's not forget July seventh, twenty ten, what
happened at the Hung Joe Salshan airport there in China,
where eighteen aircraft were apparently either grounded or re routed

(54:01):
after sightings of an unidentified object over the airport. And
there had been a source at the time that this
story broke back in twenty ten who had claimed from
a Chinese language source that this had had some kind
of connection to the Chinese military, that it might have
been either a military aircraft that was observed, or that
it was somehow related to a military operation. But again

(54:22):
to me, that's not unlike the case we were looking
at from August, or rather I guess it was April
twenty twenty three. But again I reported it in an
article from August of twenty twenty three, where this anonymous
pilot report logged with the Aviation Safety Reporting System maintained
by NASA said that something that resembled a military training
aircraft was observed out there in our airspace, but that

(54:43):
it wasn't broadcasting a transponder, It wasn't in communication with
air traffic control. They spotted it on radar and they said,
do you see anything out there? Sure enough, we did.
We were glad they brought it to our attention because
otherwise we would have had no idea that that aircraft,
military or otherwise was out there flying without a tran
sponder in Class A airspace in violation mind you of

(55:04):
FAA regulations. Oh yeah, but remember those are all just balloons,
and we can laugh at cases like these. Should we
laugh at the sighting made by these crew aboard a
porter Airlines Dash eight turboprop plane en route from Ottol
were coming into land in Toronto and had to take
evasive action to avoid striking a weird looking doughnut shaped object.

(55:25):
Both flight attendants were taken to a hospital with minor
injuries afterward. Yet again we might log this one as
a near miss. And again kudos to my pal Daniel Otis,
the Canadian reporter who's been tracking cases like that one
in filing foyer requests with the Canadian government. But again,
when we have an object that evasive action was required
in order to prevent colliding with it, and this of

(55:49):
course causing minor injuries to two of the crew, the
flight attendants on board that aircraft. Should we be laughing
about this, I don't think it's anything to laugh at,
And in fact, I'll also point out that one of
the sas about that object being donut shaped as it
was as this aircraft was coming in for a landing
there in Toronto, had actually been that this was a
balloon in that instance, were possibly a drone of some kind,

(56:09):
albeit one with a very strange shape. So no, we
won't rule out in every instance that sometimes balloons and
drone sightings actually do contribute to aviation safety incidents. That
might have very well been the case here, but again
we need to take them seriously, especially when members of
the crew on board that aircraft had to be hospitalized
for a short time thereafter. But then, of course there

(56:30):
are those who are involved in some of these aviation
incidents who aren't so lucky, such as pilot Thomas J. Prezios,
who plunged to his death on the evening of October
twenty third, two thousand and two. In an article from
two years after that incident. Published at CNN dot com,
they report on Moira Wade, who hitches her boat to
a plastic pole stuck in the puff mud of Big

(56:52):
Batau Bay, and then, in what has become a ritual,
she tends to make a makeshift memorial to her brother.
I have to come out here, she said, her New
U York accent, deeply out of place in this Alabama marsh.
I feel at peace when I'm here, and when I'm
not here, all I can think about is being here.
And it is that location where Wade's brother, fifty four

(57:12):
year old cargo plane pilot Thomas J. Presios, died in
October two thousand and two. The pole she hitches her
boat to is the spot where the cockpit was found,
the place where his remains had been recovered. But that
crash was a really strange one because at the time
they recovered the wreckage of his vehicle, they said that
there were red streaks that appeared to be transfer marks

(57:33):
on various pieces of the shredded cesna. They said the
red didn't match the red mail bags or other objects
known to be on the plane. Investigators also found a
small piece of black anodized aluminum embedded in the skin
of Preziosa's plane. That aluminum was not believed to have
come from the accident airplane, and those facts, they said,
led the National Transportation Safety Board accident investigator Butch Wilson

(57:57):
to conclude that Presios' Cesna had colloged in flight with
an unknown object. As the two thousand and four see
in that article continued, theories abound. Some believe Nightship to
eighty two collided with a drug runner's plane, the loss
of which might go unreported. Some wonder if night Ship
to eighty two was pelted by a meteor or space junk. Well,

(58:18):
considering what we found out earlier, it seems pretty unlikely
that a meteor or space junk were to blame. Others
think it collided with a military drone run amok heard
that one before, or perhaps was hit by a missile.
You know. Back in twenty twelve, I actually published a
book called The Ghost Rockets, and in one of the

(58:39):
chapters in that book, I actually chronicled numerous reports by
pilots of missile or rocket shaped objects that have been
observed over the years by pilots. Many of those reports,
by the way, I found with the help of a
colleague in NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System database. You guessed it. So,
in fact, maybe the idea of a missile or an

(58:59):
object shaped like one isn't such a far out idea
after all, when trying to understand what in the hell
causes some of these aircraft incidents that remain unexplained. At
the time of the two thousand and four incident, CNN
reported that the National Transportation Safety Board officials are not
embracing their investigator's statement that Nightship two hundred and eighty

(59:20):
two collided with an unknown object. They say the statement
is analytical in nature and does not belong in the
factual report. But the CNN article added, neither are they
running away from the possibility of a mid air collision. Instead,
prompted by the factual report and the interest it is generating,
they've taken the unusual step this month of reclaiming the
aircraft wreckage from the insurance company and shipped it to

(59:42):
the Washington area for a closer inspection. Now, on that note,
I will add that in the actual aviation investigation final
report published by the NTSBING you can read it online,
they found the following and I now quote the airplane
was destroyed by impact forces. There was no evidence of fire.

(01:00:02):
Wreckage examinations all recovered wreckage from the impact area revealed
no evidence of an inflight collision or breakup, or of
external contact by a foreign object. An examination of the
engine and the propeller indicated that the engine was producing
power at impact. The recovered component showed no evidence of
pre existing power plant system or structural failures. They went

(01:00:23):
on to also say that the crushing and bending on
the wreckage was consistent with a moderate angle of descent
and a moderate right wing down altitude at impact. The
amount of wreckage recovered indicated that all parts of the
plane were at the crash site. The wreckage was scattered
over an area of about six hundred feet. They went
on to say that indeed, the red markings that were

(01:00:43):
found on some portions of the aircraft did appear to
be consistent with other red paint found on certain other
parts of the aircraft wreckage. Further, that really strange bit
of anodized metal that they found embedded in some of
the wreckage. They said that in fact, this was believe
to have belonged to the primary aircraft the one piloted

(01:01:03):
by Presnios, so that this was not in fact some
sort of anomalous artifact that was left with the wreckage.
It probably belonged to his own plane. And yet, despite
these seemingly rational conclusions outlined in the NTSB report, there
are still some weird things about this case. I'll point out,
for instance, the pilot's last transmission, a transcript of which reads,

(01:01:25):
I need to deviate. I needed to deviate now. While
Presnios was flying his Cessna, there was a DC ten
that was flying somewhat below him at that time, and
the NTSB concluded in their report that, based on him
shouting I need to deviate in his final transmission, that
he'd probably seen that aircraft. They suspected it was moving
diagonally across the windscreen from his left to straight in

(01:01:45):
front of the Cessna while tripling in size based on
his vantage point, and so in response to seeing this
aircraft and fearing a collision, they believe that Presnios may
have actually tried to correct. They say the aircraft performance
simulation indicated that the airplane experienced high bank and pitch
jangles shortly after the pilot stated I needed to deviate,
and that apparently also that the airplane appeared to have

(01:02:06):
nearly recovered from these extreme attitudes prior to the impact occurring.
There was no evidence of any other aircraft near the
accident airplane or the DC ten at the time of
the accident. Soon after the accident, US Coast Guard arrived
at the accident scene, the meaning of the pilot's statement
that he needed to deviate could not be determined. A
review of air traffic control radar and transcripts revealed no

(01:02:27):
evidence of pilot impairment or incapacitation before the onset of
the descent and loss of control. So for my own part,
this one still seems a little strange, and again it
remains somewhat in question what exactly the pilot had been
referring to or seeing when he suddenly exclaims at the
end of his transmission, I need to deviate. I need
to deviate. Could it have been a DC ten flying

(01:02:49):
below him? Or might there have been something else in
the sky. Perhaps we'll never really know in this instance,
because sadly, those conditions led to the death of that pilot.
But in my opinion, that's all the more reason that
the issue of UAP with relation to aviation safety must
be taken so very seriously, and even in the cases
where there may be more prosaic explanations for some of

(01:03:11):
the strange objects observed by pilots, these represent potential dangers.
Look at what happened over Utah last week. That's a
very good example of what I'm talking about. For ex subscribers,
other examples involving aviation safety, strange sightings in our skies
and UAP will await, But for right now, that wraps
things up. Thanks as always for being here, and as always,

(01:03:33):
I'll catch you next time. You guys stay strange out there.