The pilot who saw it drink
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Alongside his own sighting, John Kiriakou has described a second-hand account he heard as a teenager, in a setting he says brought him into contact with a cross-section of official Washington.

Where he heard it

As a child his family came down to Washington for summer holidays and stayed with relatives. His father's cousin, who was his godfather, owned what he calls a very prominent steakhouse in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, a place that drew senators, congressmen, bankers and politicians from the city, and which he describes as "a crossroads for movers and shakers in Washington."

The godfather's son managed the restaurant. A friend of his was there one day when Kiriakou was, and happened to be an F-14 pilot. He places the conversation in 1977 or 1978.

The story

The pilot volunteered the story unprompted. He was based at Langley, and said that all of the pilots there had seen these phenomena, whatever they were. He had seen one himself: he followed it for a while, "and it went down into the water, it stayed down there for a while and then it came back up."

Asked about the shape, Kiriakou said the pilot described a cylinder, "like a cigar is what he said."

The reaction he described

What Kiriakou emphasises is the response the pilot got. He was rattled enough to report it on landing, both to his superiors and to other pilots. The other pilots' answer was "Oh, I've seen that. I've seen where they go down into the water and come back up."

He filed his flight report, and "nobody ever bothered to ask him follow-up questions, to question, you know, was that really what you saw or could it have been something else? They just accepted it like, 'Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody sees those.'"

The detail Kiriakou says stayed with him was the pilot's own interpretation: "it was almost like the thing was drinking. It went down into the water on purpose and stayed down there and then came back up."

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou's UFO sighting
- CIA and the UFO question
- The Lake Michigan sightings
