Christiaan Van Heijst, an experienced 747 cargo pilot with a keen eye for photography, recently shared his experiences with podcaster Chris Lehto, revealing four puzzling UFO sightings. Of these, a ‘hypersonal’ UAP stands out.
Van Heijst, who has spent countless hours navigating the world’s airways, initially rationalized these observations as secret tests of advanced USAF technology. Still, the unfolding of recent, undisclosed events has made him reconsider.
What are these mysterious objects and where do they come from?
Christiaan said: “I saw four things that I still can’t explain. For a long time I just dismissed it saying it must be something military because especially for commercial pilots, if we see something we can’t identify, the best response is; “It’s a military thing.”
“It wasn’t until I watched the interviews with Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Ryan Graves, where they discussed their observations and explained the things that many Navy pilots have seen, that I realized they were describing things that I have also seen.
“If these Navy pilots concluded it wasn’t theirs, I was forced to reevaluate my own observations.”
Christiaan witnessed his first UAP while still training to become an airline pilot – but what he saw also stunned his experienced instructor.
“Suddenly I saw a bright light just to the left and in front of the plane that was actually moving vertically downwards, and it disappeared into the cloud layer below,” Christiaan explains.
“It lit up the cloud layer as much as it fell through, and I remember my instructor captain saying, ‘Wow, what was that?’ and I was like, ‘You’re the instructor, you’re supposed to know what’s going on out there!’”
He believed that the glowing ball may have been an example of ball lightning – a rare and still unexplained weather phenomenon – but that the conditions at the time were wrong for any form of lightning.
“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a meteor,” he added. “I’ve seen literally thousands of meteors – they always enter the Earth’s atmosphere at a certain angle, and they burn up in the atmosphere, leaving a trail of smoke. In this case it was a bright light moving vertically downwards at a constant, incredible speed, leaving no trace or changing in intensity. What often happens with meteors is that they change intensity as they burn up.”
He saw a second, similar object a few years later when he was co-pilot of a Boeing 737 on a flight between Greece and the Netherlands. Christiaan and the plane’s captain thought the object, which was flying about 50,000 kilometers per hour, might have been a missile, but Greek air traffic control assured him that no such activity had taken place in the area.
Perhaps Christiaan’s most remarkable sighting was also in the skies over Greece, in September 2005. “We had just landed on one of the small islands with a small runway and it was the middle of the night, there was no moon, it was just a beautiful starry night. You could see all the stars, thousands of them.
“My captain and I simultaneously saw a very bright light appear in the sky in front of us, very, very far, very high, and it almost looked like the planet Venus.”
Venus, which shines brightly in the night sky, has been suggested as the explanation for many UFO sightings, but there was something unusual about this particular sighting. Christiaan continued: “This light suddenly appeared, it disappeared, it appeared again. It made a stuttering motion and the fourth time it reappeared, it immediately shot away. There was no acceleration, it was instantaneous speed… hypersonic… and it just disappeared among the stars.”
Whatever Christiaan saw, he is sure it was not a natural phenomenon. He added: “For us commercial pilots, our best answer is: it must be something military, because that same night a large part of the airspace south of Greece was closed because the USS Theodore Roosevelt along with a few cruisers or so therefore were passing through just south of Greece on their way to the Persian Gulf.
“We knew about this because the airspace was closed and we are informed about those types of closures before the flight, so the moment we saw that slight stuttering and strange movements we thought it was probably related to the passing aircraft carrier. Through.”
To this day, Christiaan has “no idea” what the object could have been. The only thing he could say for sure is that it was not a satellite. “As pilots we see satellites all the time, we see the ISS, we see so many things in the night sky, but this was just weird,” he explained.
“I’ve never seen anything like the instantaneous speed when it shot off. I thought, ‘Wow, what the hell is that?'”
Christiaan, an enthusiastic photographer, managed to capture one of his observations on camera. It was during a flight to Malaga, at the southernmost tip of Spain, when Christiaan’s captain pointed out an unusual ‘Tic Tac’-shaped object just ahead of them.
Whatever it was, it was not displayed on any aircraft systems, and Spanish air traffic controllers were also baffled, eventually handing Christiaan over to military air traffic controllers to investigate the sighting.
“There was no military traffic, no commercial traffic that was known to be ahead of us, no weather balloons, nothing – just absolutely nothing that he could identify.”
The mysterious object seemed to shadow Christiaan’s plane for about an hour: “It seemed to be something that wasn’t really chasing us, but at least following us – or it could have been an absolutely massive object standing still and floating somewhere. over Africa.”
