Shortly after 4:15 pm CST on November 7, 2006, it might have seemed like any ordinary overcast winter afternoon for United Airlines employees outside Gate C17 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (ORD). Ordinary, except for what looked like a hole in the sky above one of the country’s busiest hubs for international air travel.
Visible in the 1,900 ft cloud base was an almost perfect hole, the apparent footprint left by a round unidentified object that had been seen hovering there just moments earlier before it rapidly ascended, punching through the clouds on its departure.
What unfolded over Chicago that afternoon would become one of the most talked about UAP incidents of the new millennium. Today, what is remembered as the 2006 O’Hare International Airport UAP incident also remains a stark reminder of the potential hazards that aviators face amidst reports involving unrecognized objects that seemingly invade America’s most sensitive airspace with utter disregard for federal aviation ordinances.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said nothing had been detected on radar that afternoon. Still, several employees—and possibly even a few of the pilots and crew aboard outgoing flights—all observed something in the skies above O’Hare.
One of the earliest witnesses was a United Airlines employee assisting the pushback of a Boeing 737-500 from gate C17. As the witness would later tell investigators, he was “compelled to look straight up for some reason and was startled to see the craft hovering silently.” Upon seeing the object, the employee radioed to notify the United Airlines Zone 5 control coordinator, then alerted the cockpit crew in the plane next to him about the object, who reportedly opened their windows to observe the object.
Meanwhile, another employee that would soon become a witness learned of the hovering object after hearing his coworkers discussing it over company radios.
“I’m a management employee for a major airline and was sitting in my office at around 1630 on Nov. 7th when an employee made a radio call to our station operations center concerning an object hovering over gate C17,” read a report the witness later anonymously filed with the Seattle, Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).
“I ran out of my office and saw a relatively small object hovering in place over C17,” the employee’s account read. “The METAR was reporting OVC 1900 and I initially estimated the object hovering at about 1000 feet.”
“After about a minute, I saw the aircraft zip to the east and disappeared.”
Hellbound and Down 