Obviously when he started canvassing retired military radar personnel for feedback on UFO encounters, Army veteran Bill Schroeder wanted names. Long removed from active duty, he reasoned they’d be less inhibited about going on record decades after the fact, like he recently did, about a 1967 incident involving a UFO shutdown of a surface-to-air Hawk missile battery in Key West. But he was wrong, for the most part.

“We live in an age where anonymity is growing in magnitude like a bomb going off” — Jock Sturges/CREDIT: clatl.com

“Even today, a lot of these guys, they get real hinky about this stuff,” says Schroeder from his home in Safety Harbor, Fla. “They ask why do you want to know, what are you using this stuff for, things like that. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even bother to ask their names anymore. I’m more interested in their experiences.”

Which brings us to Schroeder’s feedback portal, militaryufo.com. It’s a threadbare site, a one-way flow of information where military eyewitnesses have the option of using their names, with guaranteed anonymity either way. Schroeder puts the number of entries at “less than 200,” with “maybe 150 to 175 of them I’d call valid.” He decided to share a handful with De Void, and here’s a sampling of those who actually identified themselves:

A radio operator stationed at California’s Mill Valley Air Force Station in the late 1950s is alerted to five UFOs heading east from the Pacific toward Golden Gate at “a speed that was higher than anything we had.” He writes that three interceptors were scrambled out of Hamilton AFB, only to watch the bogeys “turn on a dime” and retreat to open ocean. “When we asked how to log it we were told not to log it in turn we had to tell the picket ships and air force radar planes to do the same.”

A former weapons tech reports on a 1967 incident off Hofn, Iceland, involving a Navy P-3 anti-submarine plane encountering a head-on UFO that proceeded to follow it. Several F-102 jet fighters were dispatched to get a line on the bogey, apparently without success, but the Navy pilot “was really messed up.” In late 1981/early 1982, a master sergeant crew chief aboard an AWACS sentinel patrolling Saudi Arabian skies fields the pilot’s request about a bogey at 6 o’clock. They paint the UFO on the scope and the pilot changes his orbit to try to get a visual, but the object stays rigidly fixed on his tail for a solid hour. “A LT. Col. told me he was told to forget the incident ever happened and that I along with the rest of the crew was to do the same.”

Similarly, an air traffic controller working a Saudi Red Sea corridor at Khamis Mushayt is contacted by two commercial airline pilots approaching each other from opposite directions. Both pilots request ATC radar confirmation of a mutual sighting at somewhere between 32,000 and 34,000 feet. The object “darted between their aircraft ‘too close for comfort,’” states the controller. “One pilot said, ‘Khamis radar, I hate to say this but we have a UFO up here with us and the damn thing is level with us and keeping pace. It isn’t round, it’s sort of triangular shape with what looks like a rowe of windows along the side we can see.’

“I asked the pilot if he wanted an official UFO sighting report made and he replied, ‘Absolutely not. I’d lose my job and be laughed out of the profession.’ The second pilot chimed in, ‘Khamis, let’s just forget this whole event. It never happened, okay?’ I painted the three for another 20 minutes until they left my radar coverage. The same thing happened on another shift the next night to another controller.”

Says Schroeder, “I have no idea if the stories are true or not. One of my markers in that regard is motivation. Why would they lie? No book to sell, no fame to claim. I think the reports are good.”

And if so, that leads us in a troubling direction. Then, as now, whether through government policy or personal insecurities, many eyewitnesses remain fearful of attaching their names to experience. But as UFO incidents go, the details above are not all that extraordinary and are, in fact, relatively common. No little green men, no floating through bedroom windows. Yet, the loss of this data to science is incalculable. Perhaps just as puzzling as UFOs is the mystery of American culture’s aversion to confronting reality. But no reason to adjust so long as our luck holds up.