Details of the Long Island encounters appeared in UFO Roundup vol. 1 no. 39, dated November 24. The following text from UFO Roundup is reproduced with permission:
Two jetliners outbound from New York's Kennedy International Airport encountered a UFO at 16,000 feet, not far from where TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed last July.
The encounter took place on Saturday night, November 16, 1996 at approximately 10:10 p.m. Pakistan International Airlines Flight 712 was flown by Captain Whaid Shah and First Officer Nasir Aziz. As the [747] jumbo jet approached the crash site 10 miles south of East Moriches, Long Island, New York, "my co-pilot saw a streak of light coming from the left-hand side (north) going toward our right-hand side (south) and ahead of the aircraft about three miles," Captain Shah said.
Aziz reportedly described the UFO as a "dark shape with four green lights" that "crossed our flight path three or four miles ahead of us."
A TWA flight immediately behind the Pakistani jet made the same sighting and asked to turn around, aviation sources said. The TWA plane was rerouted and the air corridor used by the Pakistani jet was closed after the plane left the area. TWA would not comment on Saturday's incident." [New York Post, November 18, 1996]
Radar contact with the UFO was confirmed by the FAA Center in New York, Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts and the FAA air traffic center in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Capt. Shah asked if there were "any military exercises going on. They (the Boston tower) said no, so I pressed on."
"We don't have an explanation for it," said FBI spokesman Joseph Valiquette. "The flight crew allegedly saw something in the sky that was unusual -- something with lights." [Boston Herald, November 18, 1996.]
One theory was that the object was one of the Leonid meteors. The Leonid meteor shower began after midnight and reached its peak at 2 a.m. Saturday. Yet the USAir pilot who took off after the PIA and TWA flights reported no meteors.
CNI News contacted Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Hotline, for further information. Davenport said that many other airline pilots had also reported UFO activity since November 14.
"On the 14th of November there was one over northern Pennsylvania, and the following night, Friday the 15th, there was another one in the same area," Davenport said.
Then on the evening of the 16th, at nearly the same time as the sightings near Long Island, other pilots in Georgia and Florida were reporting UFOs as well.
"On Saturday, the 16th of November, there were two airliners over Florida and Georgia that were reporting anomalous objects at 41,000 feet. They were both U.S. carriers. One aircraft was over Alma, Georgia -- this was conveyed to us by the FAA, by the way -- and the other was over Orlando, Florida," Davenport said.
"I estimate that well over two dozen aircraft have seen and either discussed over radio network, or reported to the FAA and/or reported to us what sounds to be UFO activity since the 14th of November," Davenport told CNI News.
[Interested readers can get further information from the National UFO Reporting Center web site: http://nwlink.com/~ufocntr/. Also, readers can receive UFO Roundup directly by contacting the editor at Masinaigan@aol.com.]
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