(OPINION) A Boeing 747 captain with some 9,500 hours of flight time at controls has told of his bizarre encounters with UFOs while taking to the skies. Christiaan van Heijst explained he has witnessed objects which appear to exceed all known technology as they appeared to hit hypersonic speeds of up to 23,000mph.
The 39-year-old, from The Netherlands, is a respected airman and an award-winning aerial photographer – and yet he has seen things he cannot explain. UFOs are traditionally a highly stigmatized topic – often being dismissed off-hand as nothing beyond conspiracy theories or something for the world of cranks.
But in recent years the conversation has moved, with even the US government confessing there are things in the sky that they as of yet cannot or will not publicly identify. The topic even has a new name – UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon).
And with former US military pilots coming forward to tell about their own unexplained experiences, that piqued the interest of Christiaan. “I realized that what they described sounded very much like some of the strange things I have seen years before,” the pilot told The Sun Online.
“I always thought it was some ‘military stuff’ I had seen, but now it was possibly something else entirely that even stunned some of the best US military pilots on record.” Christiaan has been flying for 20 years – starting out as a champion aerobatics pilot before moving over to commercial planes.
He has close to 9,500 total flight hours, 6,000 of them on the Boeing 747 – one of the world’s largest and most popular aircraft. And while he says some 99 percent of the weird stuff he sees in the sky can be dismissed, there are still a “handful” of sightings which for him defy explanation.
Christiaan emphasized that as a pilot, he is trained to spot things in the sky – with his main objective when he’s at the control being to keep his plane safe. “If I see something that catches my eye, I immediately want to know if it is another airplane, something weather-related, military or anything else that might jeopardize my flight. Anything else is secondary,” he told The Sun Online.
“That is also why airline pilots are credible ‘trained observers’: we don’t search for UAP, we evaluate everything we see based on our thorough knowledge of aerial observations, and meteorological experience and wonder if anything has a direct influence on our flightpath or airplane.”
And for Christiaan, one of his most compelling and strange sightings was over Greece as he was flying near USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and her strike group. (SOURCE)
