Free UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record by Leslie Kean

instability, oscillations, and a wavering motion, and then it stabilized and was still—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.

     
    I made this drawing the day after the encounter and submitted it to the Portuguese Air Force. On top I wrote “metallic aluminum” and underneath “metallic red.” J. Guerra, CNIFO Case Report
     
    At first it moved with my 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. I tried to keep it in sight.
    Right away, when I realized it was an unknown object, I called the tower and told the controller that there was a strange object flying around me. 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 I responded by asking them to come and see it with their own eyes if they didn’t believe me. I told them that if it was a balloon, how could it ascend from the ground to 5,000 feet in a few seconds? The response was silence. They started asking for my location, my work zone, and two fellow Air Force officers, Carlos Garcês and António Gomes, told me they would join me.
    While waiting and watching it, I wanted to know more about this object. Even though I got close, I didn’t know what it was. I was alone with it for fifteen minutes—which felt like forever—never knowing what would happen next or if it would come back each time it set out on its course. I stayed there and focused on this thing repeating its elliptical course around my aircraft.
    When Garcês and Gomes arrived in their Chipmunk after about fifteen minutes, they radioed “Where is it?” I gave them the position, and after they saw it I felt better, because now two more Air Force pilots had seen the same thing I did. They stayed with me for about ten minutes while the object kept up its circular pattern, each loop almost the same as the previous one, and we conversed on the radio. I was in the interior of the orbit and they were outside of it, so the object passed between the two planes. Because of that, we could estimate the size relative to the length of the Chipmunk’s fuselage (7.75 meters): about eight to ten feet.
    After about ten minutes, I still was curious and really wanted to know more about this object, so I decided to make an interception, meaning I would head directly toward it but slightly to the side, so it might be forced to alter its course. I told my two Air Force colleagues there that I was planning an intercept. Since the object’s speed was much faster than my own, I flew directly to a point along the trajectory of its elliptical course. It came toward me and flew right over me, on top of my aircraft, and stopped there, like a helicopter landing but much, much faster, breaking all the rules of aerodynamics. It was very close to my plane, only about fifteen feet. I was astonished. I closed my eyes and I froze at this moment, without reacting.
    There was no impact …
    It then flew off in a flash toward the direction of Sintra mountain, to the sea. All this happened so fast that I couldn’t do anything with my aircraft to try to avoid the object. One of the other pilots saw the whole thing.
    At various times the object had been very close to me and I was able to verify that it was round with two halves shaped like two tight-fitting skullcaps. I carefully looked at the lower one, which seemed to be somewhere between red and brown with a hole or dark spot in the center. The center band looked like it had some kind of a grid, and possibly a few lights, but it was hard to tell since the sun was so bright and was reflected.
    Right after landing, all three of us filed detailed,