Kiriakou's UFO sighting
=======================

In 1981, at the age of seventeen, John Kiriakou saw an object he has never been able to explain. His parents had bought a restaurant in Sharon, Pennsylvania, about fifteen or twenty miles from the family home in New Castle, and he and his father worked the eleven-to-seven shift there on Friday nights. The drive ran through Amish country, which, the Amish using no electricity, is very dark.

The sighting

Driving north around half past ten, they saw a brilliant flash of white light, then a second, then a third. As his father asked what it was, an orange trapezoid lit up, saucer-shaped, Kiriakou says, but with hard edges, with a round light in each of the four corners strong enough to illuminate the body of the craft. It hung silently, not very high: he estimates fifteen hundred to two thousand feet.

They pulled off the road and got out. A third man pulled up behind them, got out of his own car and asked the same question; Kiriakou's father said he did not know. Then the object left at what Kiriakou describes as a fantastic speed, unlike anything he had seen before or since, and vanished. They stood a while longer wondering whether it would come back.

Not reporting it

Back in the car, Kiriakou asked his father whether they should call somebody. The answer has become the fixed punchline of the story: "And tell them what? We saw a flying saucer and it flew away? They'll think we're nuts." They told nobody until they came off shift the next morning and told his mother, who did not believe them; his father insisted.

Afterwards

Kiriakou treats the episode as unresolved rather than revelatory. He was seventeen then and says he still thinks about it all the time, while noting that other people's accounts are far more dramatic than his own, "mine's nothing like theirs", and that his was nonetheless enough to burn a place in his memory.

The sighting is also the reason he asked the question every new CIA officer asks. His boss told him it was the first question all of them have on arrival, and passed on the answer he had himself been given: that all of that material is at the Pentagon and the agency has nothing to do with it. He remains, on his own description, a rational man who saw something, "I thought it was all baloney myself."

The cousin who flew F-15s

Years later Kiriakou told the story to a cousin in the Washington area, a former F-15 fighter pilot, prefacing it as the craziest thing he had ever seen. The reply deflated it: "Oh. That's nothing. We used to see these things all the time."

His cousin's own example was an object off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia that came out of the water. The characteristics he described match Kiriakou's, fantastic speeds, turns and angles "that the laws of physics tell us are not possible", and, on his account, all of the pilots had seen them.

The reporting procedure he described is what Kiriakou takes as the point of the story: "you have to file a classified report. It goes to the Pentagon, and then it just gets lost in the black hole there."

The first question on the first day

Kiriakou dates his own enquiry precisely: "On my very first day at the CIA, literally my very first question of my new boss was, where are the UFOs?" The boss laughed and said "that's the first question for all of us on our first day", then gave the answer he had received from his own boss: "All that information is at the Pentagon. None of it's here. We don't have any idea what those things are."

The 1981 sighting, retold

Retelling the sighting in May 2026, Kiriakou put the height slightly lower, "1,200 to 1,500 feet off the ground", and kept every other element: three blinding white flashes, then an orange trapezoid "in the shape of a saucer" with glowing orange lights at its four angles, hovering; his father pulling the car onto the side of the highway; the stranger who pulled up behind and asked the same question; the departure "at this fantastic speed that just defied the laws of physics," without any sound at all.

See also

- CIA and the UFO question
- John Kiriakou
