Tel Nof F-15 encounter

On a cloudless summer day in 1998, during an exercise involving the whole Israeli Air Force, the F-15 pilot Dror Gorlik was returning to Tel Nof Air Base as number two in a pair when he noticed a strong yellow light low ahead of his leader. At first he took it for an aircraft entering the landing circuit the wrong way. It passed between the two jets and some 300–400 metres to his left, and he saw, he says, a metallic silver object shaped like a mushroom or a muffin, with a dome on top, a row of yellow lights around its rim, a flat underside and no trail or visible propulsion, before it disappeared to the north.

At the debrief, he says, the navigator of the lead aircraft reported a strong yellow light passing under their wing; the tower and air control had seen nothing, and his gunsight camera only records after the landing gear is lowered. A senior officer he asked whether Israel had anything like it answered that they had asked for it but there was no budget. Gorlik told the story privately for years and went public, by name, in September 2026. The account rests on his testimony; no record of the event has been released.

Sources: Anomaly interview (2026), in Hebrew; the archive's translation