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from the ground to 5,000 feet in a few seconds? The response was silence. They started asking for my location, my work zone, and two fellow Air Force officers, Carlos Garces and Antonio Gomes, told me they would join me. While waiting and watching it, I wanted to know more about this object. Even though I got close, I didn't know what it was. I was alone with it for fifteen minutes— which felt like forever—never knowing what would happen next or if it would come back each time it set out on its course. I stayed there and focused on this thing repeating its elliptical course around my aircraft. When Garces and Gomes arrived in their Chipmunk after about fifteen minutes, they radioed "Where is it?" I gave them the position, and after they saw it I felt better, because now two more Air Force pilots had seen the same thing I did. They stayed with me for about ten minutes while the object kept up its circular pattern, each loop almost the same as the previous one, and we conversed on the radio. I was in the interior of the orbit and they were outside of it, so the object passed between the two planes. Because of that, we could estimate the size relative to the length of the Chipmunk's fuselage (7.75 meters): about eight to ten feet. After about ten minutes, I still was curious and really wanted to know more about this object, so I decided to make an interception, meaning I would head directly toward it but slightly to the side, so it might be forced to alter its course. I told my two Air Force colleagues there that I was planning an intercept. Since the object's speed was much faster than my own, I flew directly to a point along the trajectory of its elliptical course. It came toward me and flew right over me, on top of my aircraft, and stopped there, like a helicopter landing but much, much faster, breaking all the rules of aerodynamics. It was very close to my plane, only about fifteen feet. I was astonished. I closed my eyes and I froze at this a moment, without reacting. There was no impact... It then flew off in a flash toward the direction of Sintra mountain, to the sea. All this happened so fast that I couldn't do anything with my aircraft to try to avoid the object. One of the other pilots saw the whole thing. At various times the object had been very close to me and I was able to verify that it was round with two halves shaped like two tight-fitting skullcaps. I carefully looked at the lower one, which seemed to be somewhere between red and brown with a hole or dark spot in the center. The center band looked like it had some kind of a grid, and possibly a few lights, but it was hard to tell since the sun was so bright and was reflected. Right after landing, all three of us filed detailed, independent written standard reports about the incident, and our planes were checked for damage, but we didn't hear anything more about it from anyone in the Air Force, and we were not interviewed by the military. A little later, General didn't believe me. I told them that if it was a balloon, how could it ascend