The misfortune of an actual UFO sighting

Stan, I'm not sure whether this has been asked or talked about before. That is, during your time flying, were there oddities or unexplained sightings which you saw or heard at first hand, either yourself or from close colleagues?

No, in my own (true to form) personal experience I never saw anything that I was excited by, although I flew for around thirty years. If I knew then what I know now, when I was a co-pilot, I might have been asking the ex Air Force guys I flew with about what they might have seen, but I wasn’t as interested as I am now. I remember one guy that was in a Victor tanker saying that he and others watched an unknown object fly in formation with them for a while. But he was not a regular guy that I flew with, so I don’t know how much I ‘trust’ his word. 

I do sometimes see videos of things purporting to be ‘UFOs’, when I recognise the images as being things  like heavy contrails in unusual light or simply distant aircraft etc. I am not particularly observant about most things, but I love looking at aeroplanes and would say that I’ve done a LOT of it, for over fifty years. To give you some idea, one wee dog that we had, got so conditioned to me running outside when we lived near the flight path to Durban airport, that he eventually ran outside and barked at the sky whenever he heard a plane flying overhead. Even now, one of my greatest pleasures is simply looking at the outside views while flying planes in DCS world. I find the detail that goes into much of the modelling, wondrous.

I have know a pilot colleague for nearly three decades but only in the past few years I discovered that he is a firm believer in UFOs, having had more than one sighting when he was younger. He wasn’t a pilot then I don’t think, but still in the RAF, probably an officer. Based in Scotland (Lossiemouth/Kinloss) he (and his girlfriend) watched as a large, triangular shaped, dark coloured object glide silently overhead at slow speed. If I recall correctly he estimated its height at about 500ft. I can’t remember the other sighting he had. 

I flew with him first in Brunei in the early nineties when we flew for Royal Brunei Airlines, but only got to know him better when he was a pilot manager and my boss at EasyJet around 15years later. He is a serious guy, not a joker at all. So I was surprised when he wrote to me after he read my book and told me of his thoughts and experiences. He clearly saw something that changed his worldview! 

I had a moment of insight while considering the possible reason(s) as to why I haven’t really had any strong ‘ personal experiences’ of my own. My current thinking is that, had I done, I don’t think I would have been a member here or previously at Skeptiko. I am pretty convinced as it is, if I thought I had definitely seen a UFO or ghost or had multiple psychic experiences like others have/do, there would be nothing to investigate. As I’ve said before, for me, it’s enough to ‘know’ such things exist. That opens the door for future enlightenments, I don’t have to know everything immediately. There’s years of learning in only one simulation game! I feel I’ve reached an ‘equivalent’ place now, to those that have experiences, through investigation and intuition as well as thought. It will never be as convincing, but teasers such as the one I had while meditating were enough to push my own indicators towards one end of the spectrum.