The Flight 842 Disc

When the sighting was rebuilt in the cockpit afterwards, the object's turn worked out at roughly twenty times the force of gravity. Its speed came to about a thousand miles an hour, and a darker fan-shaped patch of sky is said to have trailed behind it. Captain Phil Schultz was flying TWA flight 842 from San Francisco to New York on 4 July 1981. The airliner was on autopilot at thirty-seven thousand feet over Lake Michigan. A large round silver object with six dark portholes descended from above, passed close overhead, turned hard and was gone in five or six seconds. His first officer saw about the last two-thirds of it.

What is on the record

Three videos from one channel yield three claimants: Captain Schultz, a pilot called Phil and the first officer. Phil and Captain Schultz are the same man, so the real number of witnesses is two.

The tellings differ from the written record in several places. They put the event in 1979. The record gives 4 July 1981. They call the object the size of a football field and say a slight shock wave was felt. The written report says no shock wave or turbulence was felt. One telling adds radiating lines like stress cracks across the object and puts the turn at thirty times gravity, where the reconstruction gives about twenty. Another renders the investigator's name as Haynes. He is Richard F. Haines, the NASA scientist who interviewed the captain and rebuilt the sighting in the cockpit.

Nothing outside Haines's investigation has turned up. Schultz did not file an official report, and air traffic control at Milwaukee reportedly had no other traffic on its screens. No independent press account or catalogue entry has been found. No explanation has been offered.

Why it sits where it does

The grade is L3. A captain and a first officer on the same flight deck saw the same object: two trained observers, one vantage point. Everything the public knows comes through one investigator. What crossed above flight 842 is not resolved here.