[narrator]
Former NYPD pilot
and flight instructor Thomas Preziose
departs from Mobile Downtown Airport,
piloting a single engine Cessna
with the call sign Night Ship 282.
The story of Night Ship 282
is quite alarming.
A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't come up with this one.
[William]
very experienced flight instructor,
hauling documents from Mobile, Alabama,
up north to Montgomery.
Routine flight.
[narrator]
Preziose was flying by his instruments.
Just one minute into the flight,
he spotted something in the distance...
and immediately radioed air traffic control.
[indistinct radio chatter]
[Mike]
another plane in the sky,
and was just confirming...
that there was another plane up there.
And then all of a sudden, he's alarmed, he's panicked.
Something is coming at him.
This pilot sees an object in front of him
on a collision course with his plane.
What does he do?
He radios a request for a permission to deviate.
"I must deviate, I must deviate."
He says over the radio.
He deviates.
Silence.
The transmission goes dead.
[narrator]
Night Ship 282 crashes into Big Bateau Bay.
Tragically, Thomas Preziose is killed on impact.
When investigators
from the National Transportation Safety Board
or NTSP, arrive at the scene,
they discover parts of the Cessna
scattered over an area of nearly 200 yards.
The plane is not just demolished.
It's almost vaporized.
Something obviously hit the plane.
The props are damaged. The wings are damaged.
The fuselage is damaged.
Wholesale damage
inside the mechanics of the airplane.
[William]
with something in mid-air.
[narrator]
would naturally send two wrecks spiraling to the ground.
But an extensive search of the area
produced only one aircraft.
No other wreckage was ever found.
No other craft.
Which would have presumably done this.
The most bizarre thing about this,
is that there are these strange red markings
all over parts of the aircraft.
These red markings have not been identified
as far as I can tell.
And they are in a variety of places of the aircraft.
The NTSP suggested
that whatever it hit was this color red,
or had this red coating on it.
And when he hit, it rubbed off on this guy's craft.
They also found pieces of metal
in the wings that didn't belong to the plane.
Various pieces of metal
were embedded in the crashed plane
that weren't part of that plane.
So, something metal, something red.
But at the end of the day, a mystery.
[Gary]
where it was a collision that obliterated a plane
and killed the pilot.
And the FAA,
the aviation authorities
and the investigations that followed
could not explain it.
And to this day, cannot explain it.
[David]
which caused the death of the pilot
wasn't also some extraterrestrial incident
where, perhaps a flying saucer or other craft
hit this plane,
or the plane itself hit the craft.
[plane engine droning]