Blenus Green, a retired B-1 pilot who now flies for American Airlines, has spoken out, on his hometown TV station, KTAB/KRBC-TV, describing what he saw.
Green detailed that he had been flying for 20 years and displayed a photo of him in an Air Force uniform. On that day, his American Airlines plane was flying over the Sonoran Desert between Picacho and Mammoth. What Green saw, was also seen by a Learjet pilot from another angle.
“It was very bright, but it wasn’t so bright you couldn’t look at it. You almost really wanted to look at it, to try to figure out what it was. It didn’t look anything like an airplane.”
He said it was flying several thousand feet above his Airbus and going “in the opposite direction.”
“What was weird about it, (is) normally if you have an object, you know, and if the sun’s shining this way, the reflection would be on this side… But this was bright all the way around. It was so bright, you couldn’t make it out, what shape it was.”
The other sighting was from a Phoenix Air Learjet. The pilot is a 15-year veteran with Phoenix Air and was a “seasoned captain” with more than 14,000 hours of flying time. At about the same time that afternoon, the pilot and his co-pilot noticed something flying outside and above them.
Bob Tracey, vice president of Phoenix Air Group, Inc., said on Thursday that after receiving a “full debriefing” from the pilot of the Learjet, he’s left wondering, “what the hell was it?”
Like Green, the pilots mostly noticed the intensely bright light of the object. The Learjet pilot described it as “like you woke up in the morning and stared at a bright light,”
Then it raced past them. The pilot, knowing that other aeroplanes would be coming near the area soon, put in his call to Albuquerque Center to alert air traffic controllers. The pilot was concerned that “someone’s going to whack into this thing.”
“He said that it passed him at maybe a similar speed that an airliner would,” Tracey said. That would be roughly 500 mph each, for a combined speed of “well over Mach 1,” or the speed of sound.
Balloons, of course, may travel at high speeds on a vertical line, but not very fast horizontally. Tracey summed up the incident as a “mystery.”
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