From: titan@sys6626.bison.mb.ca (Titanium Knight)
Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors
Subject: * When Pilots See UFO's 1/2
Date: 1 Jun 93 09:07:43 GMT
Organization: System 6626 BBS, Winnipeg Manitoba Canada
File: airspace.txt
Mantell wasn't the last pilot to die while pursuing, or being pursued by, an alleged UFO. At 6:19 p.m. on Saturday, October 21, 1978, Frederick Valentich of Melbourne, Australia, took off from Moorabbin Airport aboard a rented Cessena 182 bound for nearby King Island. He planned to pick up a load of crayfish for his fellow officers at the Air Training Corps, where he was a flight instructor. An experienced daytime pilot with an unrestricted license and instrument rating, Valentich, 20, was relatively inexperienced at night flying. He was also a UFO enthusiast who, his father said later, had claimed a UFO sighting 10 months before his disappearance.
Out of Melbourne, Valentich paralleled Cape Otway before heading over open water for King Island, where he was scheduled to land at 7:28. At 7:06 he radioed Melbourne Flight Service, asking, "Is there any known traffic in my area below 5,000 feet? Seems to be a large aircraft." Ground control asked what kind. "I cannot confirm," Valentich replied. "It has four bright lights that appear to be landing lights...[and] has just passed over me about 1,000 feet above... at the speed it's traveling are there any RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] aircraft in the vicinity?"
"Negative," answered Melbourne. "Confirm you cannot identify aircraft?" Valentich replied in the affirmative, adding three minutes later, "It's not an aircraft, it's ..." At that point there was a brief break in the recorded transmission that was later released to the Australian press.
"It is flying past," Valentich continued. "It has a long shape. Cannot identify more than that... coming for me now. It seems to be stationary. I'm orbiting and the thing is orbiting on top of me. It has a green light and sort of metallic light on the outside." The pilot then informed air traffic controllers that the object had vanished. At 7:12 he was back on the air, reporting his "engine is rough-idling and coughing." Ground control asked what his intentions were; Valentich said, "Proceeding King Island. Unknown aircraft now hovering on top of me." His radio transmission ended in a jarring 17-second metallic noise. Neither pilot nor airplane has been seen or heard from since. Some have attempted to explain away the incident as a hoax or a suicide, while others have suggested that the inexperienced night pilot, overcome by vertigo, may have turned upside down and seen the reflections of his own lights before the engine of his Cessna failed.
Haines has published a book about the Valentich incident, "Melbourne Episode: Case Study of a Missing Pilot," and he is in the midst of another compiling all of AIRCAT's cases. Most are variations on ufology's two major themes: daylight disks and noturnal lights. The first involves what appears to be objects in the shape of disks, spheres, or elliptical forms. Nocturnal lights normally appear as single, continuously visible white light sources. Sometimes the lights are also detected by ground or airborne radar and less frequently, accompanied by radio static and brief engine interruption, such as that experienced by Valentich. Most sightings involve two or more witnesses and last slightly more than five minutes, long enough in most cases, says Haines, to eliminate a number of explanations, such as meteors and ballons.