Chilling images of disc-shaped ’22-88ft UFO’ seen by a dozen shocked airline employees as experts baf…

EXPERTS were left baffled after chilling images emerged of a disc-shaped spotted over a major city.

On November 7, 2006, an employee at the O’Hare International Airport in Chicago saw a metallic, saucer-shaped object flying in the sky.

The reported sighting lasted only five minutes but was witnessed by at least 12 staffers for United Airlines.

At the time, it made international headlines due to a tape released by the Federal Aviation Administration. 

The FAA said the incident was a “hole-punched cloud,” a statement agreed by astronomer Mark Hammergren who was associated with the Alder Planetarium at the time.

However, the case still remains unresolved and has been the subject of much discussion by UFO researchers.

Nearly two decades later, 30 Ph.D. physicists working with Applied Physics, a privately-funded research group, believe that the O’Hare UFO is a telltale sign of a theoretical interstellar system known as an “Alcubierre warp drive.”

Described as a Star Trek-like “warp drive,” the idea was first conceived by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.

It can reportedly travel between stars by bending the fabric of time and space around itself.

Alexey Bobrick, a theoretical physicist and Applied Physics’ chief science officer, first published his calculations describing the perfect shape of an Alcubierre drive in Classical and Quantum Gravity in 2021.

Bobrick believes the most energy-efficient shape is a flat one.

“Some models of warp drive spacetimes suggest that the shape of the spacecraft, and the resulting geometry of spacetime bending, could significantly reduce energy requirements,” Bobrick told The Debrief.

“Depending on the specific design of the warp drive,’ according to Bobrick, ‘the passenger-holding craft may benefit from a saucer or spherical shape per the laws of general relativity.”

The AP team said the 2006 O’Hare UFO was similar to several cases of classic UFOs as it was a traditional, flat-flying saucer.

Witnesses said the object was somewhere between 22 to 88 feet in diameter. 

Chicago Tribune columnist Jon Hilkevitch said the O’Hare UFO “was reported to be an airline by as many as a dozen of its own workers,” and that some of the employees even reached out to to air traffic control.

The audio from that call was eventually released by the FAA via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Brandon Melcher is a physicist who studied “dark matter” at Syracuse University and also worked with AP’s team analysis of the O’Hare UFO.

He noted that the UFO movements matched that of an Alcubierre drive.

“From the [witness testimony], it seems reasonable to claim that a metallic object around 50 feet in diameter was hovering ~1,500 feet above a passenger gate at an international airport within regulated airspace,” said Melcher.

“After some time, the object accelerated from 0 to about ~1,000-2,000 feet per second almost instantaneously.”

The AP team also said there is no aircraft that exists now or back in 2007 that would have been capable of resting in midair and then accelerating directly upward at thousands of feet per second.

Still, the evidence of the O’Hare UFO remains completely anecdotal, and because of this, the physicists admitted that their study cannot move beyond the category of informed speculation.

“The only way to fully investigate sightings like this is to gather more data,” said Melcher, adding that “the level of reluctance expressed by several witnesses should be a cause for concern, which is why we must remove this dangerous stigma.”

“Pursuing the truth should be the norm,’ he said, ‘not suppressing facts and scientific discourse.”

The AP team looked at the O’Hare case as a thought experiment and as a way to share their work for the group’s Advanced Propulsion Laboratory and its Physical Warp Drives project.

The lack of evidence in the O’Hare case still supports the possibility of a warp drive-powered craft, said the AP team.

In the end, the FAA said the object was just a strange “weather phenomenon.”

But the AP team refuses to believe this.

“One fascinating effect of warp bubbles is how they also explain the lack of radar signal,” Melcher told The Debrief.

“The Alcubierre warp drive also causes light rays approaching from behind to bounce off the bubble, but away from their initial trajectory.

“This would explain why there was no radar ping to the object allegedly hovering over the passenger gate at ORD. If the light gets deflected away from the object, there will be no radar pings.”