How to Impersonate a UFO

(By Trevor Hopkins ) The story of how my dad pretended to be a UFO while flying a military jet one chilly winter's evening back in the Fifties.
And, more importantly, why...
So, here's how to do it - how to provide a convincing imitation of an Unidentified Flying Object. Don't try this at home, kids.

For this trick, you need a night with clear skies, with no cloud to form a visual reference, and with no moon to provide undesirable illumination.

Pick a time of year when the jet streams are blowing strongly - you know, those fast-moving stratospheric air currents that the pilots of commercial airlines like to blame for their late arrival. Wintertime is preferred. Oh, and you'll need a military jet. My Dad did this in a Canberra, but I dare say that any modern jet fighter would work just as well.

So, off you go. Fly up to 45,000 feet over some major conurbation, and head into the wind. Now, the jet streams are probably running at around 150 knots, so you throttle back until your airspeed is about one-fifty. From the ground, you are now more-or-less stationary. If you're equipped with a radar ground speed indicator, you can fine-tune your direction and airspeed until you are completely stopped, just hanging in the air.

Then, you turn on all the landing lights. These lights are typically distributed fore-and-aft, and on the wing-tips, and around the undercarriage. So, from the ground, you look like a disk with lit portholes, or engines, or whatever, all around the circumference.

You sit there in the jet stream for ten minutes or so, chuckling with your co-pilot about the stir you're probably causing on the ground. What a wizard wheeze. Then, you turn about and throttle right up, so that you are streaking through the skies. Then, just when you've reached your maximum speed, turn the lights off again. Your observers have just seen a hovering object suddenly accelerate from rest to a phenomenal speed - "no known aircraft can fly like that" - and then disappear.