Can UFOs Cause Air Accidents

Pilots have been seeing unexplained things outside their cockpit windows since the dawn of aviation.
One of the most legendary examples happened near the end of World War II when both Allied and German pilots reported seeing fiery glowing objects that followed their planes and then disappeared in wild maneuvers.

The sky phantoms were nicknamed foo-fighters (long before the 1990s alternative rock band), and thought to be secret military weapons.

There is a legendary case of a military aircraft crashing during a UFO pursuit. In January 1948, four P-51 Mustang fighters were rerouted to check out an object described as one fourth the angular size of the full moon (the diameter was estimated to be 300 feet, but this can't be calculated without knowing the object's distance). The P-51s broke off the pursuit except for one pilot Thomas Mantell who climbed to 25,000 feet without oxygen, blacked out, and spiraled to a crash landing.


As is symptomatic of UFO hyperbole, this story has been embellished with claims the UFO was gigantic and metallic, and it perhaps used a space weapon on Mantell to keep him away. The incident was a game-changer for belief in UFOs at the time. UFOs could shoot back! The simplest explanation is that Mantell was chasing a silver 30-foot diameter secret Navy high altitude balloon. (Another secret balloon probably crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947, but that’s another story.)

Yes, there are decades of pilots reporting oddball lights in the sky spooking them, and even a New York Times best-seller entitled: "UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record." But there has never been a corroborated report of a truly exotic vehicle of obvious extraterrestrial construction (something more than a blob, a Frisbee-looking thing, or other primitive geometric shape) ever being seen in broad daylight and up close.

http://news.discovery.com/space/fatal-distraction-can-ufos-cause-airline-accidents-121031.html