America West Airlines Flight 564 (Cactus 564) sighting

Thursday, 25 May 1995. America West Airlines Flight 564 was flying from Tampa, Florida, to Las Vegas, Nevada. Callsign "Cactus 564". A Boeing 757 at 39,000 feet over the Texas Panhandle, near Bovina, just across the state line from Clovis, New Mexico. On the flight deck were Captain Eugene "Gene" Tollefson, First Officer John J. Waller and the lead flight attendant. Far off, a thunderstorm flickered.

The flight attendant noticed it first. A line of regularly flashing lights in the sky to the north, below the airliner. At 9:29 pm the crew called Albuquerque Center. "Cactus 564...off to our 3:00, got some strobes out there. Could you tell us what it is?" The lights were bright and white. They switched on and off in sequence, left to right. Some accounts count eight, white with a blue tinge. The crew put the object at "probably right around 30,000 or so". Well below them.

Then the storm lit up. "When the background clouds pulsed with lightning, they could see the silhouette of a dark, wingless, elongated cigar-like object around the strobing lights." It was "between the weather and us." The pilot and co-pilot estimated its length at 300-400 feet.

"Three of us up here saw it!!" the crew radioed. "First time in 15 years I've ever seen anything like this." The airliner flew on westward. The lights began dropping behind.

Nothing showed on FAA radar. "Nobody's painting it at all?" the crew asked. The controller asked Cannon AFB whether a tethered balloon was up. It was not. Other military sites reported no aerostats, balloons or military aircraft. The controller was blunt. "It's that Roswell crap again!" Another voice on the frequency offered, "Ah...it's that secret stuff!"

At 9:48 pm Albuquerque called NORAD, callsign "Bigfoot". Told the object was 300-400 feet long, the NORAD desk replied: "Holy smoke!!" NORAD's radar answers kept shifting. First nothing. Then an unidentified return. Finally, a small aircraft whose transponder was not initially operative.

Walter N. Webb, chief investigator for the UFO Research Coalition, took up the case. He interviewed the crew and the controllers. He obtained the FAA voice tapes and filed FOIA requests about military activity that night. His conclusion: "No known object or phenomenon could be found that correlated with the sighting." The Fund for UFO Research published his final report in July 1996, with sketches of the object.

One controller said NORAD told him the next morning of another, very unusual target in the same area. It stopped and accelerated again and again, with bursts computed at "between 1,000 and 1,400 m.p.h." Webb warned that this rested on one controller and could not be confirmed independently.

NORAD's small plane accounts only for its own radar return. It does not explain a 300-400 foot silhouette with strobes firing in sequence. In the Smithsonian Channel documentary UFOs Declassified: Pilot Eyewitness, SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak pointed to planets: "The kinds of things that fool trained pilots are bright planets." Critics answer that the lights sat below the airliner, to the north, in front of a storm. A balloon was ruled out that same night. A secret military aircraft was hinted at on the radio but never supported.

NICAP entered the case in its radar catalogue, and Richard Hall summarised it in The UFO Evidence, Vol. II. The FAA tape aired on Sightings. Waller's drawing shows the object against the thundercloud, just as the crew saw it. Nobody has matched it to a known object.