Aloha Tide Riders and welcome to the last leg of our Anomalous Airports saga. I've saved the strangest for last.
Chicago O’Hare might look like just another airport on the surface—crowded gates, endless terminals, and flight delays that test your patience—but if you hang around long enough, you start to notice something weird humming under the surface. O’Hare isn’t just a hub for planes, it’s a magnet for high strangeness.
Inside the terminals, people talk about cold spots, shadowy figures, and echoes that don’t match the living traffic of travelers. Then there’s Flight 191—the deadliest plane crash in U.S. history—whose tragedy still lingers in stories of ghostly passengers seen around the old crash site. The most chilling part? A man named David Booth claimed he dreamed about the disaster for ten straight nights before it happened, warning authorities who dismissed it… until the day his visions came true.
And it doesn’t stop there. O’Hare has also made headlines for UFO sightings, most famously in 2006 when a disc-shaped object hovered over a gate before blasting through the clouds, leaving a gaping hole in the overcast sky. Pilots, mechanics, ground crew—they all saw it, and the story leaked despite official denials.
If that wasn’t enough, the airport has become a hotspot for Mothman sightings. Winged humanoids with glowing red eyes have been reported around the runways and nearby highways, adding yet another layer of “what the heck is going on here?”
In this episode of Strange Tides, we’re unpacking all of it—ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, predictions, and the uneasy vibe that seems to cling to O’Hare. We’ll dig into eyewitness accounts, official reports, and some of the folklore surrounding this mega travel hub. Then, when we enter the Tinfoil Teepee, we cover some theories on everything that range from the grounded to the truly fringe. So grab your boarding pass, because we’re heading into the weird turbulence.
Links:
https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=182209 - July 4th 2024 Sighting
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/s/b5m61W58VB - Bellevue, WA “S” craft sighting
https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=146492 - The Drive-By disk, May 29, 2019
https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=141552 - May 23, 2018 Sighting
https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=134118 - Green Fireball Sighting
https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=131847 - Boxing Day Fireball
They Filmed A UFO Over Chicago O'Hare Airport, Then This Happened - YouTube Video
https://phantomsandmonsters.com/ - Lon Strickler’s Awesome Database
Chicago & Regional Winged Humanoid / Flying Entity Sightings & Encounters Interactive Map. - Map of Encounters around Chicago
UFO Clearinghouse - O’Hare Security Response to Mothman Sighting
https://www.singularfortean.com/news/2017/6/10/a-timeline-of-the-chicago-flying-humanoid-sightings-so-far - Timeline of Sightings