Cue the weird music because on October 25 during daylight hours a UFO cruised northbound up the west spine of the Cascades over Oregon at commercial airliner flight levels and speeds with no transponder to show Air Traffic Control (ATC) its speed, direction and altitude and with only intermittent and broken primary radar coverage. The object was tracked by several commercial flights who had "eyes on" so Seattle ATC Center, which handles flights en route in the Pacific NW, had a general idea of where it was and the direction and speed. Center warned several commercial flights to keep a lookout giving reported positions. I listened to the 40 minute ATC Seattle Center audio tape and there was definitely something out there. Eventually two F-15s were scrambled from PDX to intercept but they never connected. So what was this UFO?
My best guess is that the military was having guidance problems with one of its drones (current or X-series) used on intercontinental missions. There are several bases in the California desert and Nevada (Edwards, Nellis, Area 51, China Lake) that routinely send these out on missions around the world. On a trans-Pacific routing they fly across Oregon on a Great Circle route to Asia. I saw what I believe was an inbound drone heading to one of the above bases on a crossing course high over an inbound trans-Pacific airliner for San Francisco. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that although NORAD (responsible for defending North America) confirmed the incident initially, later the commander of the PDX fighter base called the FAA's Seattle Center and dropped the cone of silence on the whole affair. The Air Force would certainly be more than a little red-faced to admit that one of its drones was "lost" and plowing through commercial airliner flight space.
Perhaps there is more to the story that will still come out. It is troubling that the F-15s could not lock up this target since both Russia and China now have similar drones. It looks like we will still have to wait, though, for a close encounter of the third kind.
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