A pilot flying for Turkish Airlines was left scratching his head after spotting and subsequently filming a UFO flying near his aircraft. The puzzling sighting reportedly occurred this past Friday as Atilla Senturk was en route to Istanbul after departing from Cologne. At some point during the journey, the pilot and his crew noticed something strange sharing the airspace with them and Senturk quickly pulled out his cell phone to record the odd aerial interloper.
Posting the video to his Facebook account over the weekend, Senturk marveled to his friends that he and his crew were amazed to see "an incredibly bright celestial body at high altitude" during their flight. "It was very close to us," he noted, "and it was very bright in spite of the sun." Senturk went on to declare, presumably based on his experience as a pilot, that the oddity was not a star or a satellite and marveled that the incident was the first time that he'd ever seen "something like this."
According to his account, the sighting came to an end when the object took off at "an incredible speed" that left the pilot stunned as it was at a velocity anything he'd observed in the past. In an attempt to add some weight to his story, Senturk asserted that he was not alone in witnessing the UFO and named two other members of the crew who also saw the strange companion in the sky. One hopes that they gave the pilot their blessing to mention them as fellow witnesses or else the next flight the crew works could be pretty awkward.
While skeptics will undoubtedly find a way to dismiss Senturk's experience, what's notable is that his story is the latest in what has become an intriguing series of UFO reports from pilots around the world over the last year or so. To that end, the sighting by the Turkish Airliner crew follows a curious case from February over England and another incident over Pakistan that took place in January. Coupled with the news that the United States Navy is updating its guidelines for personnel reporting UFOs, it certainly seems as if the stigma surrounding such sightings by professional pilots is becoming a thing of the past.