Over the past decades, there have been countless UFO sightings and encounters that have come in all shapes and sizes. There seems to be no agreed-upon norm for what a UFO should look like, and while saucer or spherical are the most common, they do control the range of sight. And the sizes range from tiny to very large.
How big do you think a UFO has to be before it is considered truly impressive? Bus-sized? Airliner? What about even bigger ones? What do you think of a UFO the size of a football field or even larger? Although rare, there have been some reports of UFOs of this size, and here we look at some of the largest ever seen.
The earliest case we'll look at here is from 1956. It was originally told by Major Donald E. Keyhoe, who at the time first heard the story in 1959, during which he served as director of the National Air Phenomena Investigation Committee.
Kiho was approached by the captain of the Navy, James Taylor, who told a wonderful story, which he tried to keep out of the public eye for a long time. According to Taylor, in 1956 he was aboard the R7v-2 naval transport, piloted by Commander George Benton and Lt. Peter W. Mooney, on a flight across the Atlantic to Patuxent Naval Air Station, Maryland, in the United States, together with several other sailors returning from abroad, a few dozen crew members and 30 pilots, navigators and flight engineers. They were approaching a stop in Gander, Newfoundland that evening, reportedly in clear and calm conditions with excellent visibility as a series of strange events played out.
As Benton looked out over the calm sea, he noticed that instead of a dark expanse that stretched to the horizon unnoticed before, there was now a "cluster of lights like a village." It turned out that the co-pilot could see him clearly too, and they both agreed that he looked like a small city just sitting there in the middle of the ocean.
The problem was that there shouldn't have been anything but open water. At first they thought they were off course and approaching Earth, but a check on the instruments showed that they were walking exactly on the intended course. It was then suggested that they had seen the ships, but attempts to contact them by radio were met with silence, and a check with his radio operator found no records of any ship groups planned there.
It didn't help that these ships weren't like any of those they had seen before. It was strange enough that they woke up some of the other crew members, most of whom were asleep, and a few other people crowded into the cockpit to see the strange sight. They were now almost directly above the mysterious lights and began circling around them to try to figure out what was going on. It was then that the group of lights suddenly dimmed and Kiho would write about it:
As our plane began to circle, the strange lights suddenly dimmed. Then several colored rings appeared and began to creep apart. One of them, Benton noted, seemed to grow in size. A shout came from behind him. Benton shot him another look. This luminous ring was not on the surface - it was something rushing towards the vehicle.
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“What the hell is this?” Mooney said. “I don’t know,” Benton muttered. He began to climb. But then he realized that it was useless. The glowing ring could catch them in a matter of seconds. The radiance, he now saw, came from the edge of some large round object. He reached their height and quickly took the form of a giant disc-shaped machine.
Whatever it was, it was huge. The plane they were on is called the Super-Constellation, a huge four-engined plane that looks more like a flying fortress than an airplane, 116 feet long and with a wingspan of 117 feet, and this mysterious object reportedly completely eclipsed it, according to estimates. Benton, about 400 feet in diameter. It climbed quickly and the plane banked in an evasive maneuver, but just when a collision seemed imminent, the object turned towards their plane and began to walk on the port side. It was then that they were able to see the true enormity of it, and Kiho says:
Its mass was amazing; its diameter was three to four times the wingspan of our aircraft. At least thirty feet thick in the center, it looked like a giant saucer flipped over another. The glow visible from this distance along the edge was blurry and uneven. Whether it was an electrical effect, a series of jet exhaust, or light from a hole in the rim, Benton couldn't tell. But the glow was bright enough to show the curved surface of the disc, giving a hint of dull reflective metal. Although Benton saw no sign of life, he had the feeling that they were being watched. Fighting the urge to dive, he kept a straight course. Gradually, the strange car rushed forward. Tilting its massive body upward, it quickly picked up speed and was lost among the stars.
After this harrowing experience, Benton immediately called the tower on the ground and asked if they had noticed anything strange, and they confirmed that the object had been detected by their radar, but things got very strange when they landed at Granger. According to Taylor, they were greeted by Air Force intelligence officers who gave them lengthy interrogations of what they saw and seemed to believe it was all fact, never asking what people saw, but rather wanting details.
After that, the mysterious officers refused to answer any questions about what they thought was happening and told the crew, who witnessed the phenomenon, to keep silent about it. A few days later, Benton will claim that he was approached by an unnamed scientist who showed him photographs of the object they saw, but refused to divulge further information about it.
A fairly recent 1996 report was published in the Pelotas region of Brazil. On November 5 of the same year, Brazilian pilot Haroldo Westendorf went on a private flight in his Embraer EMB-712 single-engine aircraft. Haroldo was an avid private pilot and flight acrobat, and it was purely a recreational flight, but it would become a rather excruciating experience in just 12 minutes in the air.
At about 10:30 am, the pilot was crossing a nearby lake when he noticed a giant object hovering in the air in front of him. After verifying that they had seen him, too, by ground control, Haroldo made the possibly foolish decision to move closer. It will be much weirder than he expected.
As he approached, he saw that it was some kind of huge 8-sided pyramidal object, estimated to be about 70 meters (225 feet) high and about 100 meters (325 feet) in diameter, and Haroldo reported that he had a good view of it., bypassing it several times at a distance of only 40 meters. He argued that each side of the pyramid bore a series of opaque triangular windows, and that the object was apparently metallic and brown in color. The massive structure also seemed to be spinning very slowly and inexorably approaching the nearest coast at a speed of about 60 nautical miles per hour. As the pilot gazed at this massive object in awe, a small disc-shaped craft jumped out of a hole in the top of it, ignored the plane completely and sped away at incredible speed.
Haroldo then climbed up to look at the top of the monolithic object, but as soon as he did, he began to spin even faster and emanated from him ominous beams of red light. After a few moments, this huge pyramid then shot straight into the sky at a very fast pace, which was quite alarming as the pilot fully anticipated a possibly catastrophic turbulence shockwave.
He even started evasive maneuvers for the expected approaching wall of turbulence, but he claims that this never happened, as if the ship defied the laws of physics. The story received quite a lot of media attention in Brazil at the time, but while Haroldo will claim that it was witnessed by at least two air traffic control installations, they denied seeing anything. Regardless, several witnesses will come forward to say that they saw him too.
Even more recent to this day is the April 2007 report, and this is arguably the largest UFO of them all. Experienced pilot Captain Ray Bower was flying over the coast of Alderney, Channel Islands, when he noticed a bright yellow light about west of the island. It was hard to say what it was, but it was clear that it was absolutely gigantic. Bauer would say about a strange subject:
It was a very sharp, thin yellow object with a green area. He was at 2,000 feet and motionless. I thought it was about 10 miles away, although I later realized it was about 40 miles away. At first I thought it was about the size of a 737. But it must have been much larger due to how far away it was. It could have been a mile wide.
I cannot explain it. At first I thought it might be a reflection from a vineyard in Guernsey, but it would quickly disappear. This was clearly visible for about nine minutes. As I approached him, it became clear to me that he was tangible. I had two thoughts about flying up to him for a closer look, but decided not to do so because of its size. First I had to think about the safety of the passengers.
Later, it will detect an identical object in a different area, and it will also become clear that at least one of the objects was seen by another pilot, although the ground control radar did not detect them. Interestingly, a few years earlier, on January 28, 1994, a similar object was seen in roughly the same area and was estimated to be over 1000 feet in diameter.
What are these ships and why are they so incredibly huge? Aside from the obvious technological miracles that must be there to allow them to fly like this, what is their purpose? Could it be that these are mother ships holding the smaller ships most often seen?