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Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 It was a warm Thursday night when w and UR news staff began to paint. The rock music was playing. We were dancing with our brushes in the air, and then suddenly everything went quiet.
Speaker 1 00:00:12 I wonder if it's a plane flying with like a banner,
Speaker 0 00:00:16 Why would the banner be lit up?
Speaker 2 00:00:18 It's like definitely a device with like landing strips on
Speaker 1 00:00:21 That's so weird.
Speaker 0 00:00:23 The
Speaker 3 00:00:23 First
Speaker 4 00:00:23 Thing I thought was like, that looks like a ship. It looks like a ship in dark water with like perfectly aligned white dots, but it looks like when you look out at a really dark body of water and you can't see anything, but a ship lights, it's an, I was like, it's, it's fucking aliens. They're aliens, they're in the sky. And they're coming to say, hi. And I had like, I have anxiety. And I was like, this is it. This is the end. And everybody else thankfully was seeing what I was seeing. So I wasn't going crazy.
Speaker 3 00:00:59 And it was just a bunch of lights in the, in an order. So around, like, I would say six or seven lights, just following it. And we were all very confused and we just all just kind of looked at each other blank. Like we had no explanation for what it could be. And also coincidentally, our speaker gave out and we no longer could listen to music. So it was very eerie.
Speaker 0 00:01:24 But this story isn't entirely about what w and your reporters, Sarah and Maria saw it's about what they thought they might have seen Where the first, nor will we probably be the last to wonder if what we had seen was a UFO and an identified flying object. Luckily for us, the flying object was very much identified and we'll get into that later, but there have been other sightings in the Chicago area over the years that still haven't been identified.
Speaker 6 00:01:55 What's interesting. Is it involved the police in Palatine, um, as, along with a couple civilians, and I think that's probably how we heard about it. So
Speaker 0 00:02:04 That's mark Rodger, the scientific director at the center for UFO studies founded by a previous Northwestern astronomy department head Dr. Jay Allen Henick, one siding from 1982 still stands out to him,
Speaker 6 00:02:17 Oh, by four in the morning or so on a, uh, like a, a cooler day. People reported kind of a fuzzy oval object moving from Northwest to Southeast at a low altitude. And it stopped for a while too. And because people reported it and the police were out and a couple of 'em were out patrolling. Uh, it got called in and the dispatcher said, well, you know, take a look, see what you can see. Well, both police cars saw this and at the same time, and that was the great thing, cuz it allowed us to triangulate where the object was. So they saw it, they talked out on the radio. We went to the police station where they were very cooperative and they gave us the tapes, which of course in those days were cassette. And so we played those and we were able to get time signals and, and really get things pinned down.
Speaker 6 00:03:08 And it was hovering over the south of town and it kept and it's move, never moved too quickly, a little bit faster than the car. And it went short to where airport, but it didn't go down. Like it was landing. It just went that direction. We also contacted the, uh, uh, tower and those days we had good cooperation with them and, and they said, no, nothing was, was, you know, nothing was coming in. And so we calculated the, uh, altitude is just over a thousand feet. And we, we looked like its size, even though it was fuzzy, it was about 2 25 feet across, you know, and of course it had no wings, no sound. They rolled their windows down. They, they got almost right under it at one point. And uh, you know, they saw it for, you know, 10 minutes or so, and then it went away. Well, that's a great UFO sighting, not a dramatic, no aliens involved, but not a weather. Phenomenal, not anything obvious.
Speaker 0 00:04:01 Illinois has had over 4,000 UFO sightings called into the national UFO reporting center. Since the 1980s, these contain a lot of grainy, iPhone pictures and Illinois residents like Sarah and Maria, trying to understand what they've seen while the us government released a report last year, detailing over a hundred reports, identified aerial phenomena that could not be explained, or even in some cases, reports of unknown, advanced technology, many UFO sightings across the world likely have explanations, which scientists like Rodger can easily identify through their research.
Speaker 6 00:04:34 Well, weather phenomena can be, you know, there, there are things like, uh, sun dogs, which are things that appear on a, a lighted area in clouds that appears on both sides of the sun because of refraction from ice crystals and people can understandably mistake. Those is something odd. Now PHTA Morga, which are, um, basically near the horizon. You can get inverted layers or rather that they, what we are looking at like ship at sea, uh, that is over the horizon can appear because of refraction in the atmosphere, a Mirage effect. And not only will it appear when you can't see it visually it'll be upside down while we're identifying. I, I think the one, what I'm focused on would be drone sighted. The there they're really becoming a, uh, a pain, which
Speaker 0 00:05:20 Brings us back to what we saw out. What was up there in the sky.
Speaker 6 00:05:24 Something that most people haven't seen is Elon Musk, Starlink satellites, uh, his company has also developed, um, a set of satellites to bring internet around the world. Those satellites cause UFO S because they do something that satellite never did before they move across the sky in a group. So imagine looking outside at night and all of a sudden saying coming over the horizon, a point of light followed by 59, other points of light, all moving together. If you haven't heard about Starlink, you're going to wonder and say, I don't know what that is.
Speaker 0 00:06:03 That sounds familiar,
Speaker 4 00:06:05 Perfectly aligned white dots,
Speaker 0 00:06:08 But there's still one more unsettling thing we've yet to solve. What about the speaker cutting out? Right? As the satellites passed over, that was like straight out of a sci-fi alien apocalypse movie.
Speaker 4 00:06:22 And so when we saw the lights immediately after we were like, did that thing, just turn off our music. And I like walked over and I looked and it, it had, it had died. The speaker died. It had been playing all day and it just, it just died
Speaker 0 00:06:36 For w N U R news. I'm Helen Bradshaw.
