The O'Hare Airport UFO (2006): The Disc Over Gate C17

At about 4:15 p.m. on November 7, 2006, a United Airlines ramp employee pushing back a flight from Gate C17 at Chicago O'Hare International Airport looked up and saw a dark grey, metallic, disc-shaped object hovering silently below the overcast, about 1,500 feet up. He called it in, and over the next several minutes at least a dozen United employees, including pilots, mechanics, and supervisors, watched it. Then it shot straight up through the cloud deck, punching a clear hole that lingered in the overcast for minutes.

United Airlines initially said it had no record of any sighting. The Federal Aviation Administration said nothing had shown on radar and that the object was probably a "weather phenomenon," the hole in the clouds included. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act later showed both the airline and the FAA had received reports that afternoon, and the FAA had discussed them internally.

Jon Hilkevitch's article in the Chicago Tribune on January 1, 2007, became the newspaper's most-read online story at the time and put the case around the world. Witnesses, speaking anonymously for fear of their jobs, gave consistent descriptions. No photograph or video has ever surfaced from a sighting at one of the world's busiest airports in the era of camera phones, a point both sides make.

O'Hare is a modern daylight sighting by aviation professionals, in numbers, at a controlled airport, with an official explanation, weather, that few of the witnesses accept. It is frequently paired with the later Navy encounters as evidence that trained observers keep seeing things the system has no category for, and the hole-punch cloud remains the case's most distinctive detail: a hole-punch cloud is a real meteorological phenomenon, usually caused by aircraft, which is exactly the argument.