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On
the morning of November 2, 1982, Captain Júlio Miguel
Guerra, a flight instructor member of the 101 Portugal’s
Air Force squadron, was flying a DHC-1 Chipmunk for an aerobatic
training. At about 10:50 a.m. at an altitude approximately
of 5,000, he noticed below to his left, near the ground,
another “aircraft.” This airplane seemed to have
only a fuselage, it didn’t have wings and it didn’t
have a tail, only a cockpit and it was oval in shape. In
order to investigate, Guerra turned his airplane 180 degrees
to the left in order to follow and identify this “object,”
which was flying to the south. Suddenly, the object climbed
straight up to his altitude of 5,000 feet in under ten seconds.
At first with some instability, oscillations, wavering motion,
and then it stabilized, remaining still.
This
object seemed to be a metallic disc composed of two halves,
one on the top and another on the bottom, with some kind
of band around the center, brilliant, with the top reflecting
the sun. The bottom half was a darker tone that seemed to
be red or brown. At first, it moved with his aircraft, then
it flew at a fantastic speed in a large elliptical orbit
to the left, between 5,000 feet to the south and approximately
10,000 feet to the north, always from left to right, repeating
this route over and over. Right away, he realized it was
an unknown object, and called the tower and told the controller
that there was a strange object flying around him. He, and
others from three or four other airplanes, said it must
be some kind of balloon. Some of the pilots flying in other
zones made fun of it, and he responded by asking them to
come and see it with their own eyes. Two fellow Air Force
officers, Carlos Garces and Antonio Gomes, communicated
over the radio that they would join him to tag this “object”.
When
they arrived to Guerra’s location, they stayed with
him for about ten minutes while the object kept up its circular
pattern, each loop almost the same as the previous one,
and they conversed on the radio. Guerra was in the interior
of the orbit and they were outside of it, so the object
passed between the two planes. Because of that, they could
estimate the size relative to the length of the Chipmunk’s
fuselage. At various times, the object had been very close
to him and he was able to verify that it was round, with
two halves shaped like two tight-fitting skullcaps. Carefully,
he looked at the lower half of this object and he noticed
that it had a hole or dark spot in the center. The middle
band looked like it had some kind of grid, and possibly
a few lights, but it was hard to tell since the sun was
so bright.
After
about ten minutes, Guerra decide to make an interception.
He communicated to the two Air Force colleagues of his intentions.
Since the object’s speed was much faster than Guerra’s
airplane, he flew directly to a point along the trajectory
of its elliptical course. The object came toward him and
flew right over his Chipmunk, positioning stationery right
on top of his aircraft, like a helicopter landing but much,
much faster, breaking all the rules of aerodynamics. This
craft now was hovering, only about fifteen feet of him.
Then without notice, flew off in a flash toward the direction
of Sintra mountain to the sea. This was witnessed all the
time by the two other pilots no far from Guerra’s airplane.
Right
after landing, all three pilots filed detailed, independent
written standard reports about the incident, and their planes
were checked for damage, but they didn’t hear anything
more about it from anyone in the Air Force, and they were
not interviewed by the military. A little later, General
José Lemos Ferreira, the Portuguese Air Force Chief
of Staff at the time, authorized the release of all the
records to a team of scientists and experts.
The
scientific team studied all the data and the three pilot
reports, after a meeting of all thirty investigators in
Porto, in 1984, the group provided a written analysis of
more than 170 pages. Among their findings, they determined
that this craft was clocking more than 300 mph when flying
vertically. They could determine its velocity to be about
1,550 mph when flying around Guerra’s plane. This speed
is incredible, especially given the maneuvers it was making
around the aircraft. The investigators did everything they
could to understand this case, but they could not find an
explanation for it. They concluded that the object remained
unidentified.
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