When pilots meet UAP
Testimony of Christiaan Van Heijst, airline pilot, regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
On March 20, 2024, Francisco Guerreiro MEP organized a round table on unidentified aerial phenomena in European airspace, with the participation of :
André Jol, UAP coalition Netherlands
Edoardo Russo UAP Check & euroufo.net
Dr Beatriz Villarroel, from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stockholm University, and the Sol FoundationÂ
Ryan Graves, former US Navy pilot and Director of Americans for Safe Aerospace
Christiaan Van Heijst, civil aviation pilot, as well as several representatives of civil associations working on the UFO subject.
José Penedo, Head of Political Affairs, European Union Aviation Safety Agency, attended the conference.
The latter is a Dutch airline pilot with over 20 years' professional experience and almost 10,000 flight hours. He began his career flying turboprops on military operations in Africa and Afghanistan. After a few years, he was a Boeing 737 pilot in Europe for fourteen years. For the last three years, he has been a Boeing 747 captain, flying all across the world. He is also a professional photographer.
Early in his career, he claims to have seen some strange things, but he and his colleagues always assumed that their origin was military. He's seen rockets, missiles, satellites, and all kinds of fireworks, but not everything can be explained.
He says he was never really interested in the subject of UFOs or UAPs until he heard the testimony of Lieutenant Ryan Graves and Commander David Fravor. He began to realize that the things he had seen in the first two years of his flying career were out of the ordinary. He recalled his own experiences as a pilot and began to worry more about the safety of his flights. Indeed, if things were flying near his plane or on his flight path and not identifiable by air traffic control, there was a real safety problem.
Therefore, he decided to come forward as a commercial pilot, aiming at breaking the stigma by talking about his observations. He hopes that the aspect of flight safety can be discussed openly and that professionals like him have a way of reporting what they see.
His first sighting was over Germany at night:Â
It was a bright light that basically fell vertically down with an incredible speed. It disappeared into the clouds, below our airplane, indicating that it was something really outside of the cockpit, it wasn’t just a reflection that I’d seen, and even my instructor who was flying next to me (it was one of my first flights as a commercial pilot) was really shocked by what we saw, and I never found an explanation for it was.
His second sighting, quite similar to the first, occurred almost four years later, over the Greek coast, on a clear, bright day with no clouds or thunderstorms:Â
We were flying at about 36,000 feet, and suddenly there was, about 10 km ahead of us and a little to the east of us, a bright light falling vertically down. At the moment we saw it, I think it must have been coming at an altitude of about 60,000 feet, which is just the moment we could actually see it coming into the window frame and it fell down within, let’s say roughly one and a half seconds into the sea, just disappearing into the Adriatic Sea. We quickly made a short calculation on the back of our hands and we calculated that it was moving, not even falling, but vertically moving at a speed of around 30,000 km per hour, which is hypersonic, which is just incredible. I immediately asked air traffic control if there was any military activity, if there were any rocket launches or maybe something else going on military. The air traffic controller dismissed it immediately and left us without asking any questions, without any answers to our question.
A third sighting occurred over Greece:Â
The same night that the carrier group with the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the nuclear American-powered aircraft carrier was passing by just south of our location, and all of a sudden, it was a bright night just a full sky full of stars, no clouds, we saw a very bright light appearing in the sky just ahead of us. It was impossible to judge how high it was but it was, let’s say among the stars, it was very high. It disappeared and reappeared four times in succession, it was moving not like any satellite or airplane I’ve seen. And the fourth time it reappeared, it shut out with instantaneous speed, and it just disappeared among the stars. No other way to explain it, but the speed was just instantaneous and absolutely incredible, and we’ve never seen anything like this before, neither my colleague who was sitting next to me who saw it as well. As I said that same night the USS Theodore Roosevelt was passing by, so our default answer was, well it must be something military, probably, connected, but still it was always in the back of my mind because I could, I simply cannot even imagine what type of technology or propulsion could generate such an instantaneous speed.
And the fourth sighting I had took a little more than a few seconds, it actually took almost a whole hour. It was a flight over Spain from Amsterdam to Malaga with a Boeing 737, we had just passed into Spain over the Pyrenees (...) The sun had already set below the horizon, and all of a sudden my colleague is asking me if I could identify the strange type of plane or flying object that was in front of us. As you can see in the picture here (he shows a photo taken of his plane), it had a really strange shape, and the reason why we were really curious about what we were seeing, was that we were already flying at an altitude of 41,000 feet, which is significantly higher than most commercial traffic. We were flying at this altitude because we were nearly empty and we also got a direct course to the airport of Malaga, because the airspace was pretty much empty, we were the only ones flying there, so we didn't have to follow any airways (...). For about fifteen minutes, this object, whatever it was, was hanging ahead of us, was significantly higher, and didn’t show any signs of a contrail, no tail, no engines which you normally see when we spot other airplanes in the sky. And after about fifteen minutes it didn’t move relative to our position, it didn’t change altitude, it didn’t grow bigger or larger or smaller, indicating that it would move to or from us.Â
So after fifteen minutes, as I said, I contacted air traffic control, the civilian air traffic controller, asking what type of airplane it was, because we were just wondering what kind of machine this would be.
The air traffic controller was really surprised, he said ‘no, as far as I know, you guys are the only ones over the entire Iberian peninsula’. So he asked us to describe what we saw, and he was absolutely clueless and after a couple of minutes he came back to me, he said “well, military, a traffic controller wants to know what you guys are seeing because they’re very interested as well’. This was by the way in 2010, I’m not sure that the date is important but anyway, it was already a while ago, so the military traffic controller was interested, I told them all the details and he basically confessed to us that there was no known traffic all the way up to Morocco for far as he knew, no military activities, no weather balloons, absolutely nothing going on
We saw the object all the way to our descent into Malaga, which was almost fifty-five or sixty minutes later, for a full hour we just saw this object straight ahead of us. It didn’t really pose a threat for far as I know at least, it was pretty far away, but for the longest time (it’s now already 14 years ago) I’ve just been wondering what I’ve been seeing and I’m really disappointed that I was never able to report this sighting anywhere.Â
Christiaan Van Heijst later discovered that there were websites and organizations dedicated to the UFO subject, but as a professional, he was unaware of their existence.
Since he went public about two years ago with podcasts and interviews, many of his colleagues have come forward privately, both on flights and over lunch. They shared their own experiences, which were sometimes far more significant than his own. Some of his colleagues reported “seeing luminous or silvery objects hovering next to the cockpit of their aircraft, sometimes flying at close to the speed of sound; others reported seeing groups of pulsating lights overtake them as they flew at great altitudes and speeds. Other colleagues have also seen different kinds of lights (...)."Â
It's very varied, it doesn’t really fit any certain type of description, the only common denominator is that we, as pilots, can never report it anywhere, so I think it’s very important that there should be a way to get rid of the stigma, so pilots, professionals and military personnel are allowed to talk openly about it without repercussions. And there should be a way for us to report it in a way that these sightings and maybe even pictures, because a lot of my colleagues even took pictures of the stuff they’ve seen, should be analyzed in an objective and neutral way. Because that’s the only way to find out what else is flying in our airspace.
At the end of everyone's speeches, questions were put to the speakers:
Q&A
Lee Dines, European advisor to SCU (Scientific Coalition of UAP Studies) asked the pilot: "Christiaan, what specific steps can be taken with the aviation community to encourage pilots to report UAP sightings without fear of ridicule or professional repercussions, thus promoting a safer environment for data collection and analysis?"
Christiaan Van Heijst: First of all, I think there should be a form or a means, perhaps an app, where pilots and professional observers can submit their sightings, including all the data they can provide: altitude, location, duration, etc. In addition, there should be a central point for collecting this data and analyzing it, whether with reference to other sightings, known sightings or even space and weather phenomena. I think the only way to do that is to create a centralized database to collect the data, and I think in the EU it makes sense to centralize that on a European scale, there are some local initiatives for different nations to collect the data, but I think it should be a European database eventually, which could perhaps be compared to American databases as well, or other large organizations, so that you don't have all this splintering of all the data collected. I think that's the best way to go.
He later added: "It's important to raise awareness among professionals who aren't really interested in the subject. (...) among pilots or military personnel, many of them don't even know about this topic of conversation, so I think it should be part of, let's say, training professionals and creating general awareness".
José Penedo, Head of Political Affairs at the European Aviation Safety Agency EASA, takes the floor to clarify that "there is already a system in place in the EU for reporting, there is a regulation that allows pilots and all professionals to report, it's open to all members of the professional association and it already exists, it must be said that the EU has been reactive on this point, (...). ) It can be improved, we can talk about funding and more tools, but it's already something you can freely build on (. . on behalf of the Commission and the EU".
Christiaan Van Heijst : Is this related to the regular flight safety and air procedure reports that pilots are supposed to submit or is this completely something else? Is it specific to UAPs or is it general?.
José Penedo: No, that's another story of course, it’s everything, you can report anything here, and of course maybe we can work on more specific issues, but there it's free for you as a professional civilian pilot to report anything you see.
Christiaan Van Heijst: Yes, the problem is that there are great safety reporting systems in place for every airline, which contributes to aviation safety as it currently exists, but if I file a report through my own company saying I saw a funny light in the sky, my company can't really do anything with that, so the biggest problem is that. If it's specifically UAP, first of all, pilots aren't aware of the existence of a reporting database, and it should be clearly communicated that there's a call out to all aviators to report these kinds of things. I'm not even aware of this, and I've been flying for European airlines for 20 years, so it's interesting to hear, and I think yes, I'd be interested to hear about it. It would be interesting for pilots and training to inform them about this or for airlines to inform them that pilots have the ability to report this kind of thing, so for me, it's the first time I've heard it.
Christiaan Van Heijst would later propose "that EASA consider adding a ‘UAP field to the form, i.e. a way of reporting a UAP on that form" "I think it would be a valid issue if EASA were prepared to spend money and budget on educating pilots about UAPs and also in an effort, a long-term effort, to get rid of the stigma. I think these three things are linked and that EASA can play a key role in this process."
Finally, in response to two questions on the Internet:
How can we put an end to the stigma attached to this subject?
And whether there should be a difference between professional reporting and public and citizen reporting, or whether it should be the same channel?
Christiaan Van Heijst : In regards to the topic of analyzing data from professionals like so-called credible observers, I think it’s important to make a distinction between people who see something in their backyard, let's say, or professionals who see something during their work. It's not because those sightings might be more credible or not.
The point is that credible observers like military aviators, etc., they see something during the line of work, and if I just reflected back of myself, when I’m flying and I’m looking out of my windows, I’m constantly looking out for other airplanes, I’m looking for in, let’s say in my professional point of view, for things that could conflict with my airplane.
If I see something that I can’t identify, I try to rationalize it. I know what kind of altitude we’re flying possibly, I can take a picture of it, I can report all the data that comes with it. And people who see something, let’s say in the backyard or during a walk with their dog, it’s very difficult to establish the circumstances in which they have seen something, and I think that kind of anecdotes might be very interesting to collect that data, but anecdotal evidence from pilots or military observers add some extra weight.
Because as I said, we see it from our professional point of view and we can collect the data under which we have seen those reports. And also, for example, it can be corroborative with the radar data from the ground. But I think all these things considered, there should be an emphasis on credible observers who see something in the line of duty. "
Translation by Kate Sellier
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0