Crossing over the "fence" in our unmarked 0-2A that full-moon night of 17 February 1969, we relaxed as we were now out of Laos and over friendly territory. We were at the proper altitude, we had positive radar contact with the site at our home base, and there were no clouds in the sky. A full moon was staring us in the face at an elevation of about sixty degrees above the horizontal. Not a care in the world now — all we had to do was to get back, land, debrief, and then we could hit the club for a couple of cool ones with our meal.
Suddenly radar came up on the air and asked if we were "holding hands." Holding hands means that you have another bird in formation with you and maybe he has his IFF (Identification Friend-Foe) turned off. Of course, the answer was "no." We were a single ship! Radar responded that he was painting something behind and above us. Since we had several instances of the "bad guys" trying various tricks including having either a fixed wing bird or helicopter fly out of Laos and hang on our tail, we were concerned. So, we slapped a clip in one of the M-16 rifles, armed the remaining "Willie Pete" (White Phosphorous) rockets that we had left, and, on the count of three switched off all the lights and did a fast climbing one hundred and eighty degree turn to the right. Nothing unusual to our "Mark I" eyeballs. Radar was informed that we had made the turn and had negative contact. Radar then responded to the effect that he had caught our turn and, as we turned, the blip on his scope disappeared. "Roger, turning back to base" was the next radio call.
We then did another one hundred and eighty degree turn to head back to the base. When we rolled out we looked up, shook our heads, and uttered a few obscenities. The sight was unbelievable. There, in front of us and up at a sixty degree angle were two moons! More blinking, head shaking, and muttering. Suddenly the right hand moon seemed to rotate ninety degrees and when it did it became disc shaped. Then it accelerated away from us and in a matter of seconds it was lost to sight. More blinking, head shaking, and muttering. Then we looked at each other and made remarks to the effect that “I didn't see anything. Did you?” We both agreed that we didn't see a thing. Not that we really hadn't seen anything, just that we both knew about all the paperwork involved and the grilling we would have to undergo if we reported such a sighting. Discretion is the better part of valor, or so the saying goes. Thus we never reported this sighting of a UFO and merely retained the knowledge to ourselves.
