U F O

I'm an airline pilot. I've had a long and enjoyable career, during which time I've been all over the world. Like many pilots I started small; flying puddle jumpers for regional airlines before moving up to the big leagues. From small twin engine turbo-props, to narrow body jets, and finally the wide body super carriers, I've done it all. I'm now approaching the mandatory retirement age set by the FAA, so I'll soon be hanging up my wings. I won't stop flying, though I will now be doing it from the other side of the cockpit door. It's time I saw more of the world than just most of its airports, now I want to travel for my own enjoyment instead of a paycheck. Thankfully my health is still good, and I've invested well. My lovely wife and I can't wait.

People often ask me how how safe my occupation is. Well in my humble opinion, flying is the safest way to travel. I've lost track of how many thousands of hours I've spent in the cockpit, and how many hundreds of thousands of miles I've flown. And in all that time, I've had more white knuckle moments on the US Interstate system driving to the airport, then I ever did in the air. In fact, I can recall only two incidents where I came close to buying the farm. Both of those incidents happened toward the end of my career with the last airline that I was employed with, Trans-Pacific Airways.

I've flown for Trans-Pacific for about the last ten years. The airline is a major carrier between the west coast of the United States, Hawaii, and points along the western edge of the Pacific. If you've had your honeymoon in Hawaii or traveled on business to Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, or Taiwan; I may have had the pleasure of being the captain on your flight.

During the time that I've worked for Trans-Pacific, I've been in and out of HND, NGO, and ITM so often, that I came to think of Japan as a second home. Yet it was here that I had the very first incident in my flying career that almost ended it. Ten years later, I came even closer to disaster in the Sea of Japan. The first of these incidents had to do with a simple, and preventable mechanical failure. The latter was due to the hostile act of a country run by a lunatic dictator. In both cases I was very lucky. I've kept some of the details of those incidents secret, because … well pilots don't like to talk about UFOs. We don't want our supervisors to think we are going crazy. Now that I'm about to retire, I can safely tell you about the incidents as they really happened.

I had just started flying for TPA when they had bought some recently re-engined 767 aircraft. The airplanes had been purchased from another airline that had gone out of business, and TPA had gotten a sweetheart deal on the planes, along with a contract to refurbish them to better than new condition.

The airline needed the new planes, our older aircraft were becoming hangar queens, and our schedule was filled with flights canceled due to down equipment. But the 767's had some teething pains to work through, in hind sight maybe we should have looked elsewhere to have the A&P work done.

In the first few months, I had to turn back to the airport several times, when an engine started to run rough, or even flame out in flight. Now these planes were designed to be able to stay in the air with an engine out. Of course, on a long haul flight, you wouldn't want to do that, the safety factor was reduced, and your flight time would increase by a good thirty percent or more. So unless we were beyond the half way point, an engine failure meant returning back to the point of origin.

Then there was the day that the worst possible kind of failure happened to me. It was back in late 2003 as I remember. Right after takeoff, both engines quit during my climb out. Now I've landed dead stick before a few times. But usually this happened during a well set up final approach, where I had lots of warning that I was about to land without power. Losing an engine on takeoff is bad enough, losing both is usually fatal. I was a bit lucky in that I didn't lose both engines at exactly the same time. First the port engine flamed out, leaving me the starboard to keep the ship in the air. I was able to gain some altitude and flying speed before gradually loosing that engine as it started to run rough before gasping for breath and dieing.

I declared an emergency and started a turn back to the airport. There wasn't anywhere to land in front of me, I would have had to ditch in the Pacific. Behind me was the city of Tokyo and the airport. I set up for the best possible rate of decent and hoped I'd remain on the glide path, but it was obvious to me that I was going to fall short of the runway. I had noticed a flock of large vultures flying over an industrial area taking advantage of the rising heated air over the factories. The area was within my glide path, and I made a slight alteration in my course to pass over it, hoping that I might catch a thermal and gain some needed altitude to stretch my glide. It almost worked, but the VASI lights and the ILS showed me that I was still below glide path.

It was then that my collision avoidance radar started painting what I thought was a small aircraft coming right at me. It was too small to see and the radar signature looked more like a large bird, or maybe one of those military drone things. But the closing speed indicated by the radar couldn't have been right, for the object registered at traveling at over Mach 1! I ignored the radar as it wouldn't make a difference anyway, as I had no airspeed or altitude to give up to get out of the way. My co-pilot and and I looked out the wind screen, and we thought we saw something pass under us in a blur. Then the radar showed the object had turned, and was now flying behind us, matching our speed.

A voice then broke in over our radio.

"Trans-Pacific N22457TA, please lower your landing gear so I can help."

The voice was in English, but with a slight Japanese accent. It sounded like a teenager's voice, not that of an adult. Lowing my gear didn't make any sense, that would increase my drag and I'd lose even more altitude and speed.

But the voice sounded reassuring, and repeated.

"Trans-Pacific N22457TA, please trust me and lower your landing gear, and I'll get you down onto the runway, OK."

My copilot and I looked at each other. There wasn't much else we could do. The way things stood at that moment, we were about to make sushi out of ourselves and the property just in front of the airport.

I grabbed for the gear lever and said a silent prayer to myself. What happened next was a mystery to me for many years.

We thought we felt a jolt, as if something had bumped into the bottom of the airframe. Suddenly our rate of decent slowed and we noticed our airspeed INCREASING as if we were being PUSHED! The runway no longer appeared unreachable, in fact the ILS indicators were now showing us ON glide path. Had we encountered a divine tail wind? The two of us just tried to maintain our heading and watched the indicators. Our approach speed and path were now perfect as the main gear touched down on the numbers and we started applying brakes. The runway was long enough so there wasn't any worry about not being able to stop in time without the use of the reverse engine thrusters.

That's when we saw it. My copilot and I watched as whatever it was that we had encountered in the air, flew up from under our aircraft where it must have latched onto the main gear, and then flew past the cockpit and WAVED at us. It was a blur of red, black, green and tan. My copilot swore it had a face. Since the control tower was a good half mile from our touchdown point where we and the UFO parted company, no one except the two of us had more than a very brief glance at it. I was certain that this 'drone' aircraft, or what ever it was, had somehow attached itself to the undercarriage of our jet and gave us just enough extra forward velocity to make it to the runway.

About a month later I was in bar near the Tokyo airport with a small group of pilots, who like myself, had just finished a shift and had a few days of down time. One of them recognized me.

"Hey, you're the guy who made the dead stick landing last month. That must have been a real pants filler!"

I smiled back at him and said, "Actually I don't know how we made it down. We were below glide path and there wasn't a prayer. Something came out of nowhere and …." I stopped in mid sentence. I realized that I was telling a UFO story, and I must have sounded like an idiot. Pilots do NOT admit they have seen a UFO.

But one of the other pilots seemed to know something.

"You've encountered the Angel!"

I suddenly realized that I wasn't the first pilot to have had an encounter of the weird kind over the skies of Japan.

"Angel?" I asked.

"Don't tell anyone we said this," he said, "But in the past half year there have been three other mid air rescues of doomed flights that were attributed to this Angel. You are now the fourth. No one knows what it is, and so far no one has managed to photograph it. One pilot claims to have gotten a good look at it, and said it's a flying elf like creature, or maybe a friendly Gremlin."

"Right." I said. I finished my beer, threw a bunch of coins on the bar table, and walked away.

For almost the next ten years I flew in and out of Japan, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Taiwan without any incidents. I would hear about this Angel of the Japanese skies from time to time, but I put it out of my mind. I agree with Carl Sagan, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Then last month I was making a flight from Seoul to Tokyo, ferrying business class passengers on a milk run. North Korea had been rattling their sabers for the past few months, and some of the population in Japan had started to get a bit nervous about the possibility of a missile attack. I was a bit apprehensive myself, especially flying close to the boarder of the damned country.

I pride myself on my navigation skills. I can tell you within a half a mile where my aircraft is at any moment. So on that fateful day, when on a routine flight between Seoul and Tokyo I suddenly found myself surrounded by four MiGs armed to the teeth, it was a hell of a surprise. There was no way I had screwed up and violated North Korean air space.

The North Korean fighters seemed to indicate by their body language that they wanted me to follow them back to Pyongyang. I wasn't in the mood to be hijacked, and quickly set my transponder to squawk 7500. I knew I was over international waters, and I radioed such to the Koreans, as if they were listening, or gave a god damn if they were. I kept to my flight path and prayed that the Koreans were just being bullies and weren't looking to start a war. That's when the one off my port side fired several dozen tracer rounds ahead of me to get my attention. Shit! My copilot was already on the radio calling for help, but it appeared that the MiG's were jamming our transmissions.

I figured we had just seconds to live when suddenly my forward looking radar painted an incoming object, hell-bent for election. I thought at first it was a missile fired from Japanese fighters that had come to our rescue, but that was not the case. What ever it was, it appeared out of nowhere, and ripped though the starboard wing of the MiG that had fired the tracer rounds. The enemy fighter disintegrated and its pilot hit the ejection seat. The mystery object wasn't a missile, as it turned back after blasting though the MiG like a hot knife through butter, and slowed down to fly between my aircraft and the bandits. It was the Angel again!

There were still three bandits left, hopping mad. One of them fired off an air to air missile at me, but it was intercepted by the Angel, which seemed to catch it and then threw it back at the MiG that launched it. The Russian built fighter exploded into a ball of flames, its pilot must have been killed instantly.

The two remaining MiG's were now far ahead of me and closing in. One of them started shooting its guns, I could see the flames and gas reports and could only imagine the armor piecing shells heading my way. I pushed my nose down to get out of the line of fire which left the MiG's to play chicken with the Angel. The friendly UFO had either laser cannons or particle beam weapons, which it fired at one of the approaching fighters, blasting both of its wings right off. The MiG then spiraled down toward the ground. The pilot ejected and hit the silk.

Our savior then took off after the remaining pirate, it flew right through the MiG, cutting its fuselage in half, and the last North Korean pilot opened his chute. The UFO then flew along side us and waved.

This time we got a good look at it, but we didn't dare tell anybody what we saw, because we did not want to end up in the loony bin. This UFO was a flying humanoid looking android, much smaller than some of the drone aircraft that I know are being developed out in Area-51. I couldn't imagine how much power the thing had, but from what I saw, it could probably take on a squadron of MiGs, single handed. It escorted us all the way back to Japan.

The last thing I remember was the same voice I had heard years earlier come out of our radio as it spoke to us in a laugh, "See ya later!" just before it sped up flew away.

I've searched the Internet, I've asked questions in airport bars, but I've found few concrete details. One of these days I'm going to find the truth. I suspect that I'm going to end up spending a lot of my travel time criss-crossing Japan looking for the answers. One thing I'm certain of though, Kim Jong-un better leave the island nation alone if he knows what's good for him. Japan won't need any nuclear weapons to lay waste to Pyongyang if it comes to that. They have an Angel on their side.