O'Hare International Airport UFO Sighting

Tuesday, November 7, 2006. Late afternoon at O'Hare International Airport. A solid overcast sat over Chicago, its base at about 1,900 feet.

At Gate C17, in Concourse C of United's Terminal 1, a ramp employee was pushing back United Flight 446 to Charlotte, North Carolina. They looked up. Something was hanging above the plane. They told the crew, and the crew put it out on the company radio. A disc-shaped object, hovering over the gate.

Two United mechanics heard the call as they prepared to taxi an empty jet to the hangar on the north side of the airport. Pilots, supervisors and ramp staff raced outside to look. Close to a dozen United employees saw it. It was dark grey and metallic. Clearly disc-shaped. It made no sound and had no glowing lights. It sat motionless just under the clouds, and some thought it was spinning. One mechanic wrote that its top was sharply outlined, but the bottom and edges were hazy, "like when you see the mirage-like surface of the road on a hot day." A supervisor stood at the gate, trying to figure out what it was. "I knew no one would make a false call like that."

Then it went. It "shot straight up at an incredible speed and was gone, leaving a crisp hole through the clouds with blue sky visible at the top." One employee said, "It was like somebody punched a hole in the sky." A mechanic compared it to a cookie cutter hole stamped out of dough. It stayed for a little while. Then it dissipated. Outside the airport, another witness saw something "obviously not clouds" shoot through the overcast, leaving a clear blue hole.

Around 4:30 p.m., a United employee called the FAA tower. The controller had seen nothing and joked about it. A second call came around 4:50, after the object was gone. "There was a disc out there flying around." No controller saw it, and radar showed nothing. The witnesses stayed anonymous, fearing ridicule. United and the FAA both said they had no information. On January 1, 2007, Chicago Tribune reporter Jon Hilkevitch broke the story. The paper's Freedom of Information Act request pushed the FAA to review its tapes. The article drew over a million page views and spread to CNN, NPR and the BBC.

The FAA declined to investigate. "Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," said spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory. The theory most often cited is a hole-punch cloud. Adler Planetarium astronomer Mark Hammergren later described how an aircraft crossing uniform cloud near freezing can leave "a perfect hole punched in the cloud." Doubters pointed to a reported 48 °F in the cloudbank. Skeptic James Oberg called such reports "of zero evidential value." NUFORC director Peter Davenport called it "one of the most dramatic cases of the year 2006 that this center has handled."

In 2007, NARCAP published a technical report of about 155 pages, led by Richard F. Haines. It made no claim of alien origin. The object remained unidentified, it said, and anything able to hover over a busy airport unseen by radar or the tower is a flight-safety risk. Haines put it plainly. "We must be proactive before an aircraft goes down."

No authentic photo or video has ever surfaced. Two cellphone images appeared in January 2007 but were never authenticated. The case lived on anyway, in UFO Hunters, Hangar 1, Showtime's UFO and WTTW's Chicago Mysteries. That last one reached a verdict. Unsolved.