Hampton Roads' Long, Strange History With UFOs
5 crescent shaped objects were traveling in formation, moving like saucers bouncing off the top of water. Up and down. Up and down.Jimmi Bonavita, then a Virginia Beach police officer, saw the semi translucent globes coming over the horizon, several miles out at treetop level.
He revved up his patrol car.
Then 4 Navy fighter jets came buzzing by, seemingly chasing the flying objects. Bonavita followed suit, zooming down the city's roads to keep up.
He wanted to keep them in sight.
The UFOs eventually went toward the ocean and disappeared over the sea, out maneuvering the pilots, said Bonavita, who's now retired.
The scene, which could be straight out of a sci fi movie, stuck with him the rest of his life, including the image of a jet flying right over his car.
These planes were armed, Bonavita, now a game warden with the Department of Defense and well known local expert on snakes and other reptiles, recalled in an interview. They had Sidewinder missiles. You don't fly armed jets over a populated area unless it's national security.
It was his 3rd and last UFO sighting.
I've long since given up what people think of me, I know what I saw. I know that what I saw was real. It wasn't an illusion. Can I explain it? No. But I'm not going to worry about it, Bonavita said.
There have long been reports of unidentified flying objects buzzing around Hampton Roads skies.
It makes sense, with the region home to several military installations and NASA facilities.
Such reports can be traced as far back as 1813, when a Portsmouth tavern owner claimed to have watched a ball of fire weave over Norfolk County. He even wrote about the incident to Thomas Jefferson.
But often the sightings have been easily dismissed, written off and not taken seriously. That changed this spring.
The Navy updated its protocol for reporting what it calls unexplained aerial phenomena, and several pilots came forward saying they'd seen UFOs as close as Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. The move by military brass brought the topic out of the shadows, providing a sense of legitimacy to obsessed amateur sky watchers.
And to what they've seen.
Police and news reports, interviews and emails are full of flashing lights and objects that move like no other. Astronomers and others offer logical explanations for some sightings, but not all.
Read their accounts, and see. You just might find yourself wondering what's out there when you look up.
On July 14, 1952, flight officers William Nash & William Fortenberry were alone in the cockpit of their Pan American Airways Douglas DC-4, en route from New York to Miami. Nash was pointing out landmarks to Fortenberry as they cruised over the Chesapeake Bay, and he'd just spotted Newport News.
Then they saw them, 6 disks, 100' wide.
Nash said they were glowing like red hot coals.
2 more joined before they all blinked their lights to the West of the plane, over the Peninsula, before entering a steep climb and disappearing.
There is no doubt in our minds that we saw missiles of some kind operating under intelligent control, Nash told the Associated Press.
No one else on the plane noticed anything, but people on the ground did.
3 Norfolk residents confirmed the accounts to the Daily Press days later. Langley Air Force officials told the newspaper the pilots saw rockets or tracers being fired at the bombing and target range on Plum Tree Island.
More local sightings soon followed, and soon the buzz about UFO sightings went national.
A Hampton couple told the Daily Press they saw 8 yellow/orange lights between Buckroe and Fox Hill.
A commercial airline pilot said he saw 2 pulsating white lights.
Later that month, radar at the National Airport in Washington picked up unidentified objects, causing the Air Force to scramble fighter jets. Officials told the AP afterward that it was the largest rash of sightings since 1947.
There was another sighting in Newport News in 1957 by an experienced Ground Observer Corps member who was on duty at the time, according to a Pilot article.
He was watching a formation of 6 B-57 jets take off at Langley Field when he looked up and saw a flattened oval object hovering in the sky.
After watching the object for about 10 seconds, the observer turned to pick up his binoculars, but when he returned to his original position the object was gone, the article said.
A year later, a pilot reporter saw an object at the Virginia Beach ocean front that was acting as no known plane or missile.
The thing seemed to be silvery or white, a long cylindrical object, and it also seemed to emit a stream of white smoke as it hung in the darkening, pink sky, he wrote.
After hovering, moving neither up nor down, forward nor back, for several minutes, the object began moving slowly southward, losing altitude.
Motorists craned their necks as they drove along Atlantic, watching the phenomenon.
For the next decades, people reported UFO sightings in waves around Hampton Roads.
They ranged from the reckless, such as when a 15 year old boy fired 2 shotgun blasts at a UFO he saw in Poquoson, to the utterly bizarre when, in 1983, an Alexandria man sued the Air Force, claiming the Langley base in Hampton was hiding long dead creatures from outer space packed in ice.
Alien rights even made it to political debate in the commonwealth in 1965, after a sheriff in western Virginia became alarmed by the number of citizens carrying arms following several UFO reports.
The sheriff said:
That even if creatures from outer space should land, Who's got a right to mow them down? according to a Pilot article.
Attorney General Robert Y. Button ruled that:
Virginia apparently has no law which makes it a crime to shoot little green men from outer space.
As one 1988 Pilot article put it:
The area around us has been known as one of the most interesting locales in UFO literature.
Exclusive analysis brought to you by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science. Gimbal is the first of 3 U.S. military videos of unidentified aerial phenomenon, UAP.
After the 1980s, newspaper stories about sightings dropped off.
Then in May 2019, pilots from the VFA-11 Red Rippers fighter squadron out of Naval Air Station Oceana said they'd seen UFOs from Virginia to Florida for several years starting around 2014.
The objects flew up to 30,000' in the air at sometimes hypersonic speeds, had no exhaust plumes and moved in ways impossible for humans, such as sudden stops and turns, they told the New York Times. One was described as a sphere encasing a cube.
Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, told the newspaper that the new UFO reporting process was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015 after those incidents when the squadron was training off the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
For quite some time, and especially within the past few years, there's been an increase of observed incursions into our training areas, especially off of the Virginia capes, down to Florida, these sightings have occurred on a quite frequent basis, Gradisher said.
The reports have been frequent but anecdotal, because for many years aviators were scared of reporting, Gradisher continued.
There have always been guidelines in place, but over the years due to the stigma attached with some of the reports, our aviators have been less than forthcoming in reporting these incidents, Gradisher said. It was:
I'm not gonna report it because I'm gonna get teased by my squadron mates.
What the Navy wants, he said, is to gather enough data about the unexplained henomena, from videos and instrumental readings, for example, to analyze and study them.
Navy officials have gone down to the Oceana station to encourage pilots to report new sightings as soon as they happen.
We don't know what's out there. It could be drones from Walmart. It could be any number of things, Gradisher said. But we don't know what it is because we don't have enough data.
Pentagon leaders want to drive home the point that from the Navy perspective, there is no stigma.
Cameron Pack didn't stay silent. The Salem High School graduate experienced his own sighting in 2003. While driving with a friend in Salem Village near the amphitheater, they saw what looked like lights in a triangle shape with no structure, no shape, no outline, flying low above the treetops. We slowed down first, like what is that? Pack said.
The lights flew in a straight line over the pair's car, then turned and moved away.
And it was making a God awful noise, Cameron said. Not like a jet noise but something organic, like alive, almost. But still in a machine way. We kind of knew it was something not normal and not from here. We didn't say it was a UFO, didn't say it was some kind of alien ship.
It was just understood it wasn't anything that was normal. Ever since then I've always kind of been looking up. I kind of became obsessed.
Cameron sent a request to the city's police department under the Freedom of Information Act, not expecting much.
Then he got them, UFO sighting reports, dozens of them.
In 1976, Pack learned that the Virginia Beach department had started taking reports of sightings using a specific form that had been requested by a national UFO organization.
The officer would write the details down and pass along the information to a central UFO hotline, according to a police memo from May of that year.
If you feel it is necessary to dispatch an officer to the scene, do so, a communications supervisor wrote.
After you have all the required data, call UFO Central.
Remember, Lights in the sky are of little scientific value, and should not be called in, unless in your judgement the circumstances warrant.
Pack compiled all the police reports spanning more than three decades into a book.
The reports end in 2008.
The caller states her daughter witnessed a circular object with lights on the bottom, reads one from November 1995.
The object was flying very low to the house, possible about 6 stories high. Object then disappeared behind the trees.
She also advised there was a humming noise.
Caller stated a group of lights appeared in the sky, stopped dead still, then went back the way they came and shot straight up in the sky, reads another from May 1988.
Many reports describe objects with lights of various colors: red/green/yellow/white & blue. They describe dogs barking at the things.
One woman told police an object with lights had followed her car from Salisbury, MD., to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.
Cameron, 35, said after his initial request to Virginia Beach police in 2004, he followed up every few years until about a decade ago, when no more reports appeared to be coming in and he was told the old reports had been destroyed. Cameron looked elsewhere to no avail.
I did the whole eastern half of Virginia. Nobody else had this form, Cameron Pack said in a recent interview.
Virginia Beach police spokeswoman Linda Kuehn said in an email this month that she could not find any past protocol regarding UFOs, and she did not respond to a follow up request for clarity.
Chesapeake police likewise had a UFO sighting policy starting in 1977, instructing officers to forward information about reports to UFO Central in Illinois.
But spokesman Leo Kosinski said because of system changes, the Chesapeake department could not give a reporter any UFO sighting reports for this story.
Police spokespeople in Norfolk, Suffolk, Hampton, Portsmouth and Newport News said they were not aware their departments had ever kept track of UFO sightings.
Cameron started a Virginia Beach UFO club more than a decade ago but has since stepped down as its leader. He now interns with the Navy in transportation engineering. He doesn't bring up UFOs around the Navy, though, nor would he try to convince any person on the street, he said.
You're convincing people on the fence that are curious. You're not going to convince anybody who's a direct skeptic until they see it right in their face.
One such skeptic is Kelly Herbst. As an astronomy curator at the Virginia Living Museum, she often gets calls from people wondering what they just saw in the sky. 9 times out of 10, it's Venus. Planets, particularly Venus, can be very bright.
Herbst said that while people might recognize satellite photos of Venus, they may not be able to pick it out among all the lights in the night sky. When the planet is low to the horizon, atmospheric effects can make it twinkle, flash colors or appear to move. If you stare long enough, eye fatigue can make it seem like it's moving as the muscles in your eye struggle to keep your vision straight.
Your brain wants to explain these things, Herbst said. By nature, we do pattern recognition, so it's trying to fit what it sees into its known experience. And when it can't, that's usually when I might get a phone call from somebody.
Fireballs & bright meteors are another common culprit.
In June, the American Meteor Society reported over a dozen fireballs visible in Virginia, according to its online log. They can move in unusual paths, burn different colors depending on their chemical composition or explode and disappear in a flash of light.
A bolide meteor is an extremely bright meteor that often explodes in the process of breaking up.
Herbst suggested that could be what Bonavita, the Virginia Beach officer, saw back in 1975.
When they're far away, they can appear low to the horizon, almost as if they're following the curvature of Earth. If they're coming in low through the atmosphere, you'll get that kind of a swoosh feeling as if it's flying by you, Herbst said.
Birds are another explanation.
In the background of photographs, a fast moving bird might show up blurry and be mistaken for a flying saucer. And seabirds riding wind currents near the shore can hang in the sky nearly stationary, like a hovering aircraft. Seagulls' feathers can take on a metallic tint or reflect light from sunrises or sunsets.
Then there's weather balloons, mylar party balloons, sky lanterns that use the heat from a candle to rise, faraway military aircraft, drones, unusual cloud formations and the aurora borealis.
Part of the issue, according to Herbst, is it's hard to judge distances in the sky where there are no size references.
That's why the Moon sometimes appears bigger when it's low on the horizon, your brain starts comparing the Moon to objects on the ground instead of stars or clouds.
Just about anything that appears in the sky can end up being misidentified, she said. It's very easy to do.
A dusty cardboard box has all Carter Bulger needs to investigate a UFO landing.
A small shovel and plastic containers to collect dirt samples. A magnifying glass with a light attached, a spool of pink string and a compass. A bottle of insect repellent for good measure.
Bulger, 49, lives close to Shore Drive in Virginia Beach, just over the Norfolk border. He works full time in information technology, pulling a midnight to 8:00 a.m. shift.
And for the last 3 years, he's done some side work as a volunteer field investigator with the Mutual UFO Network, known as MUFON. It has chapters in every state and boasts hundreds of investigators.
One science blogger who has researched the study of UFOs, Sharon Hill, called MUFON the last of its kind to investigate UFO sightings but also said it sometimes gets criticized for thin reporting.
Bulger hasn't had a chance to bring out the cardboard box just yet. It's used strictly to investigate UFO landings and so far, he hasn't received a report of one.
But he has had plenty of other chances to dig into reports of UFO sightings.
He's been assigned about 30 cases after people around the region submitted their bizarre encounters, such as:
Saw a small disk shaped object glide in front of my truck about 60' in the air at a 45malmstrom angle. Looked tranparent but sunlight reflected off of rippled edges, one person wrote from Newport News last June.
I saw a camera flash outside my front window, I looked out and saw what appeared to be a stationary firefly then it moved around in 2 circles, another wrote in Virginia Beach the next month.
Bulger takes these submissions through an online case management system. His living room desktop computer is filled with folder after folder of files, including photos and videos, and reports he's written.
To investigate, Bulger conducts recorded interviews with witnesses. He tries matching up their written and verbal statements, looking for any inconsistencies or people pulling his chain. He goes out to the scene and takes photos and videos.
He checks weather records from the time of the alleged UFO spotting to see if anything else could explain the phenomenon.
He submits public document requests to the Navy and Federal Aviation Administration seeking radar records.
Was it just a military plane in the area?
People have confused what they thought was a UFO for a grouping of balloons, for instance.
For the most part, Bulger has concluded his cases were UFOs.
Does he believe something is out there?
Some alien being roaming the galaxies and making contact with Earth, perhaps with a stop in Hampton Roads?
Sure, Bulger said. Like Jodie Foster said in Contact, as big as the universe is, if there's nobody else out there it would be an awful big waste of space.