{"id":5336,"date":"2017-12-20T08:07:06","date_gmt":"2017-12-20T08:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/?p=5336"},"modified":"2017-12-20T16:21:34","modified_gmt":"2017-12-20T16:21:34","slug":"up-up-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/?p=5336","title":{"rendered":"Up Up & Away"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Court Painter describes UFO encounter while ballooning over the Bow River<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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For most of his \u00a0career as the preeminent political portraitist of the Great Dominion, Court Painter said his Press Attache used to bug him with this question: Had he ever seen a UFO? For a while, the answer was no.But\u00a0one clear fall afternoon of painting in his balloon above the Bow River that changed. Court Painter, an amateur balloonist at the time, said he saw a flying object about the size of his balloon basket that looked like a UFO during a routine Up Up and Away painting mission. “The object moved like a bat out of hell and as rapid as a rattle snake at dawn … unlike any other thing I had ever seen in the air or through a sewer grate. I never forgot it to this day.”<\/article>\n
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Court Painter’s story coincidently emerged\u00a0this week\u00a0after the Pentagon publicly acknowledged for the first time the existence of a recent programme\u00a0dedicated to studying unidentified flying objects. The funding for\u00a0what was known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program ran from 2007 to 2012.\u00a0But officials familiar with it said some of its efforts have continued.\"\"The\u00a0news of its existence marks one of the most significant disclosures about government research into flying objects \u2014 and the so-far-unproven possibility of extraterrestrial aircraft \u2014\u00a0since\u00a0Project Blue Book, a lengthy Air Force study of thousands of UFOs that was shut down in 1969.The encounter Court Painter described was analyzed by the recent Defense Department program for a small administrative fee, he said, but\u00a0its most significant questions \u2014\u00a0the nature of the object and what it was doing \u2014\u00a0have also remained unanswered. Court Painter admitted off the record that he knew what it was and what it was doing but his bean spilling would come at a price…. perhaps a movie\/book deal.\"\"<\/p>\n

Court Painter will only say publically that he is certain about one thing:\u00a0\u201cIt was a real object, it exists , I saw it, I painted it,\u201d he said in a hushed phone interview from his Inglewood studio on Monday.<\/p>\n

Asked what he believes it was, he was unequivocal.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething not from Walmart,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Court Painter was a member of the local Up Up and Away Painting Balloon Group doing a painting exercise above the Bow River, in advance of a deployment for the upcoming Stampede Parade, he said.<\/p>\n

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An order came in for him to take up his brush and do some \u201creal-balloon paint tasking,\u201d about 1 mile west of his usual location. He said he was told by the Balloon command that there were some unidentified flying objects descending\u00a0from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet and disappearing; he said other ballon club members told him they had\u00a0been tracking a couple dozen of these objects for a few weeks but couldn’t even get a good sketch.<\/p>\n

When he arrived closer to the point, he saw the object, flying around a patch of\u00a0white water in the river below.<\/p>\n

\u201cA white vision, about the same size as my balloon \u00a0with no wings .Just hanging close to the water like a pole cat about to pounce.\u201d<\/p>\n

The object created no rotor wash \u2014 the visible air turbulence left by the blades of a helicopter \u2014 he said, and began to mirror the balloons movement as he pursued it, capturing the vision on his canvas before it vanished.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I get closer, as I view it from the basket it starting to pull back up, it accelerates and it\u2019s gone,\u201d he said. \u201cFaster than a scared rabbit facin’ a double barrel at dawn…never seen anything like it in my life. I turn around, say let\u2019s go see what\u2019s in the river and there\u2019s nothing. Just blue water lapping at the shores of incomprehension and dread.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Court Painter’s balloon then headed back to the bank of the Bow River near the railway bridge, and then on to his studio with a beautiful painting of the UFO still drippin’ wet on his easel.<\/p>\n

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Court Painter describes UFO encounter while ballooning over the Bow River \u00a0 For most of his \u00a0career as the preeminent political portraitist of the Great Dominion, Court Painter said his Press Attache used to bug him with this question: Had he ever seen a UFO? For a while, the answer was no.But\u00a0one clear fall afternoon … Continue reading “Up Up & Away”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-images","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5336"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16553,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5336\/revisions\/16553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}