And yet no surveillance cameras captured it? No cameras at the gate? No cameras near or around? This was 2006, well after the days when the idea of 24/7 eyes everywhere was considered a conspiracy, it was the days of bush and the Patriot Act and consistent airport watch. And we get... no actual real evidence?

Pretty sure they don’t have security cameras pointed at the sky

I'm pretty sure that if there were really a giant unidentifiable craft hovering over an American airport terminal less than a decade after 9/11 someone would have found a way to point something at it.

I am inclined to agree with you, but on the other hand, according to that WikiPedia article the FAA concluded it was an unexplained weather phenomenon. That is easier to believe, but it makes it no easier to understand how no hard evidence was recorded.

Most do especially at flight control to record incoming planes along with steady snap cams that relay black and white feeds unless O’Hare is somehow less serious than Helsinki airport in 2005

This was over a gate (C-17 iirc) and thus may have been out of view for any flight control cams.

Too bad no one at an entire airport had a camera or took a picture.

Also, it wasn't seen by 'everyone at the airport'

>"The disc was visible for approximately five minutes and was seen by close to a dozen United Airlines employees, ranging from pilots to supervisors, who heard chatter on the radio and raced out to view it."

It also apparently was not visible on radar or visually from the control tower. Who cares if it was 'aliens' or not, it's a damned interesting phenomena that should be studied for it's own sake.

To be fair, it was 2006, and "everybody's phone has a great camera" was several years off. The article does mention someone may have snagged it on a plain digital camera.

Not taking a side, just pointing that out.

Phones had cameras back then. Disposable Cameras were available at every airport shop.

And Someone allegedly photographed it, but no one bothered to examine or release the photos?

Well, faced with all this suspicion and negativity, what incentive would anybody have to present their photos to the public? And so let's just scrap this whole incident at the airport. No pictures, no video, no UFO. There is still a substantial body of photographic, video, expert reliable witness accounts of unexplained phenomena happening in our skies going back decades. The government's chief skeptic guy that headed up Blue Book eventually changed his mind over the years in the face of this relatively small but very reliable subset of witness accounts [0].

The vast majority of people are looking at Venus or the moon or streetlights or drunken hallucinations. But we don't care about those people. We care about the 0.0003% (or whatever) of people that check all the boxes on a long list of reliability factors. And yet, that still isn't good enough for some people, because of the hugely negative pseudoscience context that this carries with it. "It's folklore!" In fact, I'll assert that a strange enough advanced aircraft could fly nuclear weapons over this country, and until our pilots shot it out of the sky and spread the wreckage across three states, it would hardly get any attention because of the context this subject carries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek#Change_of_opini...

What incentive? Huge incentives, obviously. This entire thread is a promotion to help a former government official kickstart a business to "research" this phenomenon, where his partner is contractually obligated to get paid $100,000 a year.

Some did. Most were cheap and even the most expensive ones took 2MP pixel shots. Good luck capturing a fast moving object from a long distance with a Motorola Razr.