California Highway Patrol Officer Chris Bol may be pretty accustomed to the way his radar setup works while he’s on the hunt for speeders, but it had him befuddled a few days ago when the gear in his vehicle started “going crazy” without a car in sight.
The patrolman eventually decided to get out of his Ford Explorer and have a look around the deserted stretch of territory, intent on finding what his radar gun was getting a return from — and then it suddenly became very, very apparent.
It turns out the speeder Officer Bol’s radar gun kept alerting him to wasn’t on the road at all, but was flying low overhead and coming around on another pass: an F-16 Fighting Falcon.
Bol quickly pulled out his camera phone to capture the footage above, which shows the same F-16 coming in low over the parked police vehicle before banking left and continuing on to the horizon. Because of the video quality, you can’t quite make out the tail code on the F-16 to determine what base it could be from, but Popular Mechanics posits it hails from either the Arizona National Guard or Hill Air Force Base in Utah, based on the officer’s location.
The video was later uploaded to the California Highway Patrol’s Bishop Station account, where it quickly garnered over 100,000 views. Based on how low the F-16 flew over the officer, and the fact he likely took more than one pass to make the patrol vehicle’s radar react the way it did, suggests the pilot knew exactly what they were doing as he or she looped around for a low flyby. Maybe the pilot was hoping to make the officer’s day. Or maybe they were hoping to make the cop checking for speeders along their commute home crap his pants.
California Highway Patrol Officer Chris Bol may be pretty accustomed to the way his radar setup works while he’s on the hunt for speeders, but it had him befuddled a few days ago when the gear in his vehicle started “going crazy” without a car in sight.
The patrolman eventually decided to get out of his Ford Explorer and have a look around the deserted stretch of territory, intent on finding what his radar gun was getting a return from — and then it suddenly became very, very apparent.
It turns out the speeder Officer Bol’s radar gun kept alerting him to wasn’t on the road at all, but was flying low overhead and coming around on another pass: an F-16 Fighting Falcon.
Bol quickly pulled out his camera phone to capture the footage above, which shows the same F-16 coming in low over the parked police vehicle before banking left and continuing on to the horizon. Because of the video quality, you can’t quite make out the tail code on the F-16 to determine what base it could be from, but Popular Mechanics posits it hails from either the Arizona National Guard or Hill Air Force Base in Utah, based on the officer’s location.
The video was later uploaded to the California Highway Patrol’s Bishop Station account, where it quickly garnered over 100,000 views. Based on how low the F-16 flew over the officer, and the fact he likely took more than one pass to make the patrol vehicle’s radar react the way it did, suggests the pilot knew exactly what they were doing as he or she looped around for a low flyby. Maybe the pilot was hoping to make the officer’s day. Or maybe they were hoping to make the cop checking for speeders along their commute home crap his pants.
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