Can UFOs Cause Air Accidents?

Pilots have been seeing unexplained things outside their cockpit windows since the dawn of aviation.

One of the most legendary examples happened near the end of World War II when both Allied and German pilots reported seeing fiery glowing objects that followed their planes and then disappeared in wild maneuvers.

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To the best of my knowledge there has never been a documented commercial air crash attributed to a cockpit distraction due to a UFO buzzing outside. Historically, pilot distractions inside the cockpit have triggered crashes, including: pilot chitchat, misreading of instruments, preoccupation with certain flight controls, and other loss of situational awareness. There isn't one flight recorder transcript I know of where, in the doomed flight's final minutes, the pilot says: "Is that an alien spaceship out there?"

There is a legendary case of a military aircraft crashing during a UFO pursuit. In January 1948, four P-51 Mustang fighters were rerouted to check out an object described as one fourth the angular size of the full moon (the diameter was estimated to be 300 feet, but this can't be calculated without knowing the object's distance). The P-51s broke off the pursuit except for one pilot Thomas Mantell who climbed to 25,000 feet without oxygen, blacked out, and spiraled to a crash landing.

As is symptomatic of UFO hyperbole, this story has been embellished with claims the UFO was gigantic and metallic, and it perhaps used a space weapon on Mantell to keep him away. The incident was a game-changer for belief in UFOs at the time. UFOs could shoot back! The simplest explanation is that Mantell was chasing a silver 30-foot diameter secret Navy high altitude balloon. (Another secret balloon probably crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947, but that’s another story.)

Yes, there are decades of pilots reporting oddball lights in the sky spooking them, and even a New York Times best-seller entitled: "UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record." But there has never been a corroborated report of a truly exotic vehicle of obvious extraterrestrial construction (something more than a blob, a Frisbee-looking thing, or other primitive geometric shape) ever being seen in broad daylight and up close.

UFOs are almost exclusively seen as just weird lights. And, often the misinterpretation is made that the lights are attached to a physical body, as in the case of the legendary Phoenix lights sighting in 1997 (which Morella references as an outstanding UFO mystery). The Phoenix lights have been debunked as a hoax where flares were attached to a series of helium balloons. Witnesses' imaginations filled in the nonexistent details to describe a monstrous flying delta-shaped vehicle.

Shortly after the Flight 800 crash an astrophysicist did come up with a plausible extraterrestrial explanation for the streak of light. Mike Shara calculated that given the rate of meteors impacting our atmosphere, there is a statistical chance that a large meteor fireball should explode close enough to a commercial aircraft once every 50 years to cause it to crash. However, the Flight 800 fuselage did not have the chemical signature of meteor debris. A detailed investigation traced the explosion to a short circuit that ignited fuel tank vapor.

What's more, Morella writes that "five percent (of UFO sightings) ... seem to defy rational explanation," This would throw the phenomenon into the fantasy land of metaphysics or the supernatural. Statistically, this really means that there is more noise than signal in the residual data. In other words -- in the absence of tangible evidence -- the residual sightings are strongly influenced by an individual's perception and over-interpretation.