A New Age of UFO Mania
Escalating from grainy videos of so-called aliens to fighter jets blowing things out of the sky will only fuel America’s obsession.
In May 1957, an American fighter pilot stationed in the quiet English countryside was suddenly ordered to get into the air and shoot down an unidentified flying object. The pilot, Milton Torres, pursued the target, which appeared motionless at times before zooming at thousands of miles per hour. He locked on to the object and prepared to fire, but it vanished from radar screens. In secret documents that were declassified and released by the British government many decades later, Torres said of the experience, “To be quite candid, I almost shit my pants!”
The strange encounter was one of a handful that took place during the Cold War, when American military unidentified flying objects over North America in less than a week.
