Series I – Vol. 9 BALL OF FIRE 10/25/1986

     My name is Daniel Dunn, and I am the owner of Aargus Air Charter, based
in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This article is part of an ongoing series drawn
from my 50 years of flying—stories I hope you will find interesting.

     In 1986, just prior to Frontier Airlines’ corporate demise, I was serving
as co-pilot on a Boeing 737-100, a twin-engine passenger jet with seating
for approximately 120 passengers. We had departed San Diego a couple of
hours earlier, and the late-evening flight had been smooth and uneventful
under clear skies.

     After crossing the Continental Divide—beautifully illuminated by bright
moonlight—we were cleared to descend from FL350 to 18,000 feet for
our initial approach into Denver’s Stapleton Airport. Shortly after leveling at
17,000 feet, the radio frequency was quiet. Air traffic control was handling
only one other aircraft behind us: a Sun Country charter flight.

     The silence was suddenly broken when the trailing aircraft called the controller
and asked if he had any traffic to the west—based on his heading, that would
have placed it behind us. The controller replied that he did not and asked why.
“There appears to be a bright red object in the sky at my four o’clock position,”
the pilot responded—off to his right and slightly behind him. Because of his
heading, the object was visible over his right shoulder. We were flying due east,
and whatever he was seeing was behind us and completely out of view.
Our 737, of course, wasn’t equipped with a rearview mirror.

     The captain glanced at me with one of those familiar What do you think?. he looks, I nodded. He gently banked the aircraft about 35 degrees to the right,
bringing the object into view. Sure enough, there it was—a bright red ball suspended in the night sky. It appeared to be only a few miles away. As any pilot knows, judging distance at night in the air can be extremely deceptive. After a few moments, we turned back on course and continued toward Denver. We landed in Denveand briefly discussed what we had seen.

     For a moment, we even entertained the possibility that we’d witnessed a UFO. It certainly didn’t resemble any conventional aircraft. The next morning, I turned on the news—and there was the answer. A reporter was covering a story about a Russian rocket booster that had re-entered over the mid-Pacific the previous evening, creating a spectacle up and down the West Coast. As it turned out, the object we saw wasn’t five to ten miles away as we had estimated. It was approximately 3,500 miles away.

Quite a difference.