Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth – AN ATLANTIC ENCOUNTER
It was 23.40 on 22 December 1977. Captain Walt Hammel and co-pilot ‘Slim’ Dickson (pseudonyms) were flying in a Trans World Airlines (TWA) plane about 600 miles out over the Atlantic at 21,000 feet, bound for Boston’s Logan International Airport. ‘The weather was clear except for some widely scattered clouds beneath us,’ Hammel related to investigator Donald Todd, the day after this incident. ‘We had just been having a cup of coffee and Slim had set his cup on the panel next to his right elbow. As he put the cup down, he glanced out to what would be between one and two o’clock, and suddenly he grabs me by the arm.’
Reflexively I swiveled my head to look at him and caught this dazzle of twinkling lights coming at us from the starboard side, just ahead, and appearing maybe about 50 feet below. Instantly Slim and I realized that whatever the thing was, it was moving in a hurry, that it was entirely too close, and appeared to be about to cross in front of, or about to collide with us. And it was huge!
I slammed on some power, hauled the nose up and prayed we’d go over the top of that thing. Just as we started to climb, this thing swept straight up, did an impossible right-angle turn and begins to pace us. I don’t see how anything could have executed a maneuver like that — I mean almost a simultaneous two-directional turn — up and to the right, not to mention coming to damned near a dead stop.
We couldn’t detect any sound, any prop or jet wash, nor see any exhaust. It just kept flashing a lot of lights around the middle. Once we leveled off again, the thing stayed just ahead of us off to our right and we had a chance to observe it. We couldn’t see any hard outline or shape to it, but you could tell it was almost circular because of the lights [which] were mostly white . . . There was a red blinking light on top of the thing with all those twinkling, silvery- white lights on around the middle . . . A little later the thing rose up and there was another red blinking light on the bottom of it . . . It looked as if about every dozen or so lights around the middle, there was a reddish-purple one, and in between them, there was a blue one. But they were all blinking off and on intermittently
I don’t mind telling you I was nervous as hell, and Slim, he was chalk white and scared stiff. It suddenly occurred to me, what if the passengers are watching that thing? What am I going to tell them? I didn’t want panic back there, so I buzzed the stewardess . . . evidently none of the passengers had spotted it. The object may just have been far enough forward to be out of their sight line.