Unable to make radio contact with this second plane I felt my chances were fading fast. Dropping the radio mic, I sprinted up to the deck . . . and saw a huge ship bearing down on me!

I had the opportunity to fly with a Top Gun pilot and land on the USS Nimitz, 240 miles at sea. We landed the F-14 tomcat on the carrier and I was given a tour and was able to shake hands with all the sailors and marines. As we were flying back to Miramar, Maverick (his call name) said to me, “Let’s pretend there is a bogey on our tail.” He immediately went into evasive maneuvers, spinning one way and then the other, hitting up to seven Gs! After about ten minutes, I was about ready to hurl, but I thought, “If I do, he is going to tell all the other Top Gun pilots,” so I said to Maverick in my headset, “Maverick, we lost him!” Maverick laughed and said, “I know what you mean.”.

I tried to kill the plane, not people. We heard that the Japanese shot our parachuting pilots, but I never saw that. We never shot a pilot who had bailed out. Sometimes you would fly near them and they would salute you. As for the planes, it varied. For a fighter, you fired where the wing joined the fuselage. For the bombers, you went for the engines. You didn’t want to get too close because the wounded plane would spew engine oil all over your plane.

Seriously if I had a gun I would have shot the plane down.

A gun cracked, quite close to the tent. Soldier's instinct pulled Lee's head up. Then he smiled and laughed to himself. One of his staff officers, most likely, shooting at a possum or squirrel. He hoped the young man had scored a hit. But no sooner had the smile appeared than it vanished. The report of the gun sounded- odd. It had been an abrupt bark, not a pistol shot or the deeper boom of an Enfield rifle musket. Maybe it was a captured Federal weapon. The gun cracked again and again and again. Each report came closer to the one than two heartbeats were to each other. A Federal weapon indeed, Lee thought: one of those fancy repeaters their cavalry like so well. The fusillade went on and on. He frowned at the waste of precious cartridges- no Southern armory could easily duplicate them. He frowned once more, this time in puzzlement, when silence fell. He had automatically kept track of the number of rounds fired. No Northern rifle he knew was a thirty-shooter. He turned his mind back to the letter to President Davis. -Valley, he wrote. Then gunfire rang out again, an unbelievably rapid stutter of shots, altogether too quick to count and altogether unlike anything he had ever heard. He took off his glasses and set down the pen. Then he put on a hat and got up to see what was going on.

I suddenly picked up the gun on the table. And then he was quiet.

… well, right here we’ve seen something, I’ve seen something, hundreds of pilots have seen something … in the skies. We have dutifully reported these things. And we have to have 15 million witnesses before anybody is going to look into the problem … seriously? Well this is utterly fantastic. This is more fantastic than flying saucers or people from Venus or anything as far as I am concerned.

Two airline pilots, Adams and Anderson, were flying their D.C.3 the 130 miles from Memphis to Little Rock on the night of 31 March 1950 when a huge glowing flying saucer zoomed down at terrific speed to investigate them. On the central cupola there was a bright blue-white flashing light—either a signal or part of the propelling mechanism. And on the lower side, the airline pilots observed a row of eight or ten brilliantly lighted portholes. They thought they were portholes, but admitted that they could have been vents through which some kind of powerful energy was flowing.

...the American's upper yards and punctured sails rose above the fog of gunfire like a cliff.

And then, startling in its crisp transatlantic tones, a voice said: “Stick ’em up.” They swerved around. Schwartz, dressed in a peculiarly vivid set of striped pyjamas stood in the doorway. In his hand he held an automatic. “Stick ’em up, guys. I’m pretty good at shooting.” He pressed the trigger — and a bullet sang past the big man's ear and buried itself in the woodwork of the window. Three pairs of hands were raised rapidly.

He was caught red-handed,’ some were saying.
‘Imagine, bullets in his hands. In broad daylight.’
Everybody, even we children, knew that for an African to be caught with bullets or empty shells was treason; he would be dubbed a terrorist, and his hanging by the rope was the only outcome.
‘We could hear gunfire,’ some were saying.
‘I saw them shoot at him with my own eyes.’
‘But he didn’t die!’
‘Die? Hmm! Bullets flew at those who were shooting.’
‘No, he flew into the sky and disappeared into the clouds.’”

When I first went on deck I entered the captain’s room adjoining the pilot-house, and threw myself on a sofa. I did not keep that position a moment, but rose to go out on the deck to observe what was going on. I had scarcely left when a musket ball entered the room, struck the head of the sofa, passed through it and lodged in the foot.

In Highland New Guinea, now Popua New Guinea, a British district officer named James Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor's airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from.

This is the guy I'll be thinking about when I put a gun to My head.