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CHAPTER 4 In 1982, Portuguese Air Force pilot Julio Guerra happened to look from his cockpit window down toward the ground below, and saw a low- flying metallic disc. Suddenly, it bolted up toward him at high speed. During a lengthy series of events, this object demonstrated a harrowing variety of maneuvers at close proximity to Guerra’s small plane, witnessed by two other Air Force pilots called to the scene. Since leaving the Air Force in 1990 after eighteen years of service, Guerra has been a captain with Portugalia Airlines, [1] Portugal's largest commercial airline. He's never seen another UFO, but remembers this life-changing event with On the morning of November 2,1982, I was flying a DHC-1 Chipmunk northward in the region of Montejunto mountain and Torres Vedras near Ota air base. It was a beautiful, clear day with no clouds, and I was headed in the direction of my work area, E (echo) zone, planning to climb to 6,000 feet for an aerobatic training. As a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant with ten years in the Air Force, I was a flight instructor as part of 101 Air Force squadron, flying solo in my plane. At about 10:50 a.m., when I was overflying Maxial zone at an altitude of 5,000 to 5,500 feet, I noticed below me and to the left, near the ground, another "aircraft." But after a few seconds I saw that this airplane seemed 1 1 e 1 rewound at, oat ana to have only a fuselage. It didn't have wings and it didn't have a tail, only a cockpit! It was an oval shape. What kind of airplane could that be? I immediately turned my plane 180 degrees to the left in order to follow and identify this "object," which was flying to the south. Suddenly the object climbed straight up to my altitude of 5,000 feet in under ten seconds. It stopped right in front of me, at first with some instability, oscillations, and a wavering motion, and then it stabilized and was still—a metallic disc composed of two halves, one on the top and another on the bottom, with some kind of band around the center, brilliant, with the top reflecting the sun. The bottom half was a darker tone. At first it moved with my aircraft, then it flew at a fantastic speed in a large elliptical orbit to the left, between 5,000 feet to the south and approximately 10,000 feet to the north, always from left to right, repeating this route over and over. I tried to keep it in sight. Right away, when I realized it was an unknown object, I called the tower and told the controller that there was a strange object flying around me. He, and others from three or four other airplanes, said it must be some kind of balloon. Some of the pilots flying in other zones made fun of it, and I responded by asking them to come and see it with their own eyes if they off course from a distance, what might happen if it were closer? CIRCLED BY A UFO by Captain Julio Miguel Guerra tremendous clarity.